Week 491 - Interesting links

Goodnight Disruption: a Tech Week party by CoTech

We’re proud to be financially supporting this party as an antidote to the more corporate London Tech Week events with the idea of promoting CoTech, the co-operatives within it, and the Space4 co-working space.

Meet, hear from and party with the people creating a new kind of tech industry, through tech companies owned and controlled by the people who do the work.

A contingent from Go Free Range will be attending, so if you’ve got a project you’d like to talk to us about, please come along! — JM

Mithering about the unmodellable

This is a fascinating post about the challenges of modelling the internal workings of the UK parliament.

There’s something slightly sad about defining these things in quite so deterministic a way, Parliament has functioned perfectly well without pinning these definitions down. It’s a fairly minor example, but still we worry a little that we’re taking a system that’s open and adaptive and evolutionary, and trying to make it more amenable to computers. Which aren’t any of those things.

This is an interesting issue which I hadn’t really considered before. — JM

The Slow Death of Internet Explorer and the Future of Progressive Enhancement

All the way back in 2001, A List Apart stopped delivering a visual design to Netscape 4. Readership among users of that browser went up.

Note to self: remember that serving un-styled HTML to older browsers can give a “good enough” user experience. — JM

TOSBack | The Terms-Of-Service Tracker

Terms of Service; Didn’t Read” (short: ToS;DR) is a young project started in June 2012 to help fix the “biggest lie on the web”: almost no one really reads the terms of service we agree to all the time.

I particularly like the way they track changes using git/GitHub! — JM

Let’s Robot - User Created Robotic Telepresence Network

This is a crazy, but fun, project that allows you to make your robot available on the internet for random punters to control using their browser! — JM