Relic? Edge of new millenium?

Morning housekeeping

RantWoman is




1. Still doing mental housekeeping from last week's Digital Inclusion Summit #disummit13



2. Trying to get to today's groaning to-do list.



Shower? Not yet. There is still hot water in the tap but building management promises outage shortly. May have to live without. Cope.



Boot computer: aging laptop running Windows XP with a nice visually clean SIMPLE Windows Classic desktop. JAWS 10, with a JAWS 13 demo. Can you say relic? Can you say no darn help for RantMom who has Windows 2000? Can you say perfect excuse to have RantMom call tech support, either the official phone version or the computer hero closer to her age from her church? Thank heaven neither of us is trying Windows 8.



Skip a morning Facebook fix. Sigh. RantWoman enjoys feeling connected with lots of people she would never drag into her workplace. RantWoman enjoys fomenting lively discussion in comments fields among people who are really different and never likely to meet. And RantWoman needs to FOCUS.



Conduct daily territory negotiation with The Queen of Spades about hands, keyboard, a perch for pigeon vigilance. Cat always loses; human has to hiss to establish boundaries. Continual renegotiation tiresome. Silly RantWoman for forgetting who is in charge though.



Useful demographics: working age adult with disability, eldercare concerns, extended family including sister, brother in law from another country, nephew, and a large menagerie of small pets.



Object of the game: how much can RantWoman get done without going anywhere?

--Civic engagement this time transportation issues, multiple venues



--Civic engagement: up on the house top. How many different flavors of rental building have roofs being rented out for cellular / communications infrastructure? When does that translate to actual improved service, range of service options, and price competition for residents of the buildings? RantWoman needs to stick close to home on this topic, but the question arises in a generalized context.



--Economic activity: would be nice. Try for simple goal like update LinkedIn Profile. Maybe some actual job networking. Try to be more on-point than "Dear World, RantWoman is intelligent, articulate, housebroken. Hire her !" RantWoman has LOTS of ideas. RantWoman would consider having enough income not to have to interact with all of her idea streams a good problem to have. And RantWoman is still a self-promotion challenge!



Review yesterday's in-person info exchanges:

--Update on a shared bus ride from Irrepressible Nephew about school activities. Nephew is coping with school the way his Auntie did, with a lot of extra reading in school and outside ties, in Nephew's case, computer research about pets at home. RantWoman finds the number of pets in Little Sister's household dizzying. RantWoman notes with delight that pet care is also a domain of considerable and solidly increasing bilingualism for nephew and his father.



--in-person conversation about something unexpected from the Digital Inclusion Summit. Topic is not ready for the blogosphere, but RantWoman is glad maybe to be in a position to help make some connections. Outcome of conversation: name of next person to contact.



Review phone exchange: A key RantMom relevance test is "how does it work for the prayer chain?" A prayer chain is known to many political activist types in RantWoman's orbit as a phone tree except it comes with requests for prayer about medical issues, family emergencies, occasionally other concerns. RantMom is one of the younger and newer senior citizen members of her church so there is a lot needing to be prayed about.

Don't tell anyone. RantMom has a hearing loss. "What'd you say?" Don't tell anyone. Apparently several other links on the phone prayer chain also have a hearing loss. Last week RantMom was talking about changing places in the phone prayer chain order because someone ahead of her is not confident about getting all the info correctly. Um... There is a phone prayer chain and an email prayer chain. Enough said for now?



Tirade about digital inclusion: LOTS of people drive without for example knowing how to build cars. Expecting every digital user to generate content is unreasonable. In fact, the economic value of the whole venture comes from people doing what they want and need more efficiently or from tackling big costly problems nimbly. Big takeaway from summit for RantWoman: what does digital inclusion mean for different demographics of working age adults?

Note to big players in this arena: RantWoman is not opposed to profits; RantWoman also points out that SOME public benefit will arise from being able to address big costly public problems nimbly. RantWoman is happy enough to be around conversations about "new paradigms." RantWoman wholeheartedly agrees that conversations about race and other characteristics are important when thinking about digital inclusion and literacy. What does it mean for instance if one really needs digital literacy to be able to parent effectively or to do basic jobs that formerly did not involve anything to do with computers?



Thank you to sponsors and...

--RantWoman apologizes in advance for violating one of the un-conference rules: Who was there were the best people to be there or the event got the best it could out of the people who came. It was a GREAT event and RantWoman offers heartfelt thanks to the organizers. And RantWoman feels obliged to say more.



-- RantWoman thanks Comcast, Edlab, Metrocenter YMCA and various public institution sponsors. RantWoman does not remember whether she also needs to thank Springwire; RantWoman thinks, based on the market they talk about it would be good to need to thank Springwire. In fact, RantWoman thinks for all kinds of reasons that it would be really good also to need to thank other big players: Century Link, Wave, Amazon, a bunch of other organizations. RantWoman assumes some of these organizations have marketing staff and marketing strategies that might get to some of what is on RantWoman's mind, but to RantWoman part of the point of sponsoring the Digital Inclusion Summit would be expressing willingness to engage about "public interest" and to be open to opportunities and ideas that might come out of reaching out.



--RantWoman needs to point out a digital inclusion issue as far as speed of organizing. The summit was on Thursday. RantWoman meant to check the proposed sessions sooner than she did, but it did not happen until the Monday or Tuesday before. Sigh. Some of the people RantWoman might want to encourage to try to come, take note Springwire, read email once a day. In a lot of cases, these people themselves are "infomediaries," people who "curate" and pass along many kinds of information from digital info streams so they are just busy. On top of that, in many cases these people need more time than the Twitter generation to organize all that needs to happen for them to get an event paid for, deal with transportation. RantWoman also still thinks it would be awesome to have a space people could call into if there were a really big draw for one session but not for a whole day. RantWoman herself had a registration holdup and her session ideas did not get posted until after she registered.



--RantWoman specifically was sorry to miss Comcast's presentation about its big digital inclusion efforts around discount service and laptops to use the internet. RantWoman is especially interested in school districts where there has been considerable adoption because RantWoman thinks those districts, like Seattle public schools have pretty high percentages of students eligible for the program because of being eligible for free and reduced price lunches, as well as pretty high percentages of students from households with limited English. RantWoman is interested to hear how Comcast addresses these points, but RantWoman felt obliged to show up at a session that wound up conflicting.

RantWoman notes that families who already have access to the internet are not eligible even though the internet discount would likely free family resources for other necessities. RantWoman thinks the numbers who have adopted / accepted Comcast's packages should be higher and would be interested to hear Comcast's thoughts about why they are not.



Start tirade that needs to be multilingual parent guidance about the concept of "infomediary."

--It's one thing if Mom knows how to look up bus schedule / trip planner routing for grandma but asks kid to do it because kid finds it easy and Mom is too busy. It's a different thing if 10-year-old is making grandma's buying decisions family cannot afford because he wants to play video games on the family device. Or a school's efforts to convey academic and disciplinary issues gets filtered by the very kid affected by the policies they apply to.

Look, Irrepressible Nephew is a great kid, but he's 12. He does not have life experience. He thinks an economy where everyone gets free cookies would be a great idea. Oh Dear. Wait a minute. He is going to fit in really well with all the "let someone else pay for it" grownups making up tax policy. RantWoman, CHILL. Stay somewhere close to on-topic. Save the tax policy rants for....



--There is TONS of research about the value of bilingualism as aid to brain development not to mention economic possibilities and demand. In households where there is a heritage language other than English, what would it look like for digital inclusion to help support language learning across generations? RantWoman has to explain all the time that el espanol de la escuela no es el mismo que el espanol de la abuela. (For instance, RantWoman knows there should be some diacritics, but..)



--Which generation in the average US household knows how to program the VCR / DVR / name that gizmo?



Transportation inclusion as data feed: RantWoman was at a meeting recently where the PSRC's T2040 transit planning models came up. The important thing from RantWoman's perspective: the T2040 models ONLY look at commuting, not at transportation needs and realities for people who depend entirely on public transportation.

For just one example, consider the number of buses a person rides each day. Lucky commuters might ride one bus each way. Some commuters might have to make a connection each way and therefore ride 4 buses / day. Thursday, the day of the Digital Inclusion Summit, because of an eldercare RantWoman was needed in person concern before the event, RantWoman was on at least 5 buses.

Yesterday, a Sunday, rode one bus each way to and from her house of worship. RantWoman did no shopping or the bus count would be higher. Note to self: write a more expansive "how many buses" post about this subject.



RantWoman A LITTLE BIT took a holiday from explicitly talking about disabilitity and accessibility. Turns out, pretty much something about disability came up organically in a large percentage of the conversations RantWoman had. No rest for...



Now, get on to the rest of the to-do list.

Check time: Little Sister is having radiation treatments and RantWoman has been sending a daily text message in solidarity. Little Sister says they make her laugh.



Type some minutes and...