useability

FabRiders’ Network-Centric Resources project helps resource developers understand how to develop people-powered and participatory resources and establish assets for networks and communities that share ownership, enable contribution and support collaboration.  A ‘build it and they will come’ approach is likely to end up with unused and unloved content. Being deliberate […]

Designing EFF’s Security Education Companion, Online Discussion Notes

WE HAVE A NEW VERSION! In the last half of 2017, we ran several workshops in places like MozFest and Aspiration’s NPDev Summit to get better insights into the steps needed to develop Network-Centric Resources. Initially, we discussed it regarding ‘workflows’ but realised we needed a better metaphor to get […]

Network-Centric Resources LifeCycles Draft

The discipline of iteration and testing have been the most important processes to our work at FabRiders. A final product is never produced, whether it’s a how-to guide or a project plan, without distributing lots of drafts and incorporating lots of feedback. All our work is a prototype, as even […]

What We’ve Learned by Prototyping Workshops

From March 6th to 10th, over 1400 individuals will converge in Valencia, Spain for what is being billed as the ‘Global Unconference of the Internet Freedom Communities.’ In our humble opinion, we think calling a participatory event at this scale an ‘unconference’ is a huge disservice as the format is […]

Why We’re Excited About The Internet Freedom Festival

This article will help people working on social change efforts understand what they need to know before undertaking a technology project and how to communicate that to internal technology related staff or a potential external developer/consultant hire. This document was created with the input of several colleagues, including Tin Geber, […]

Tech Project Specifications and Social Change Efforts

Our learnings never happen in isolation and we are always grateful to those who have helped inform us along the way. We learned a hell of a lot from Misty Avila and Allen Gunn (Gunner) at Aspiration, who shared their methodologies to get tool developers to focus on users’ needs.  We […]

Hacking user centred design for social change efforts.

During a training session I recently did in Jakarta for SEATTI – the South East Asian Transparency and Technology Initiative, I had a lot of fun working with the participants on using a party metaphor to talk about open-data. Transparency and accountability advocates often struggle with how to engage citizens […]

Throw an Open-Data party!

Thanks to the Transparency and Accountability Initiative’s mentorship program, I was able to spend a week in Bratislava, being a mentor to Fair Play Alliance. The goal of the mentorship is to help Fair Play Alliance become more agile and flexible in its ability to manage projects and identify how […]

What I Learned working with Fair Play Alliance