I’m pleased to announce that I have been working with Michele Marius on a call for proposals from the Stanford Internet Observatory. Late last year, the SIO requested proposals titled Expanding Online Trust & Safety Research. Fairly quickly, I proposed to Michele to see if she would be interested in participating as a fellow researcher, which she graciously accepted.

We have written our proposal so far, and it is in its final stages before submission. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to start a blog dedicated to the research to provide insight into a project like this and serve as an open discussion on the research we’re hoping to do. This will either be a one-post blog —in the case that our proposal is rejected— or it will be an ongoing journal of the work we’re conducting over the coming year.

Deadline approaching

I had another week of lots of things running simultaneously. I spent several hours teaching during the week, but I think the highlight for me was presenting a quick overview of tech’s role in the Caribbean creative industry. I’ve become an advisor and member of a collective called the Caribbean Creative Alliance to help foster collaboration of specialisations in the orange economy through technology. I’m looking forward to providing more information over the coming months. Keep an eye out.

After umming and ahhing for a couple of years this summer, I decided to apply for the ARIN Fellowship Program. I’m so glad I did! And now, I’m pleased to be able to share my experience with the process and how the ARIN 52 meeting proceeded. A note about my personality to remember as you read on: I’m generally introverted and discreet, tending not to open discussions with people I meet until I feel comfortable with them.

January updates

I don’t know about you, but I feel like the first two weeks of 2024 have rolled off at such a pace that I don’t seem to have seen the time pass 😱

I’ve spent the week tweaking the new site and adding a few things here and there. One is a mini consulting CV to give people a clearer idea of what I do and what types of projects I can work on. The list isn’t exhaustive and leaves out a few confidential projects I cannot discuss. I’ll take the time to keep this as up-to-date as possible when relevant. Hopefully, it can be a resource people can use to see if I could be a good fit for a project.

We can argue whether it is fifty, one hundred and fifty or a thousand. But we can’t argue that modern wall-gardened social media is overwhelming and gets overwhelmed as it gets bigger. Facebook is a nest of anti-vax, QAnon, and other senseless conspiracies (amongst the decent stuff). Twitter is… er Twitter. Instagram was a nice swimming pool but now has too many turds floating in it to be attractive, and the new lovechild of Mark Zuckerberg, Threads, is a train wreck waiting to happen, as it already has with Bluesky.

Kicking off the new year with a new site and a renewed profile

The first week after the new year is always an odd one. Only a little going on, but a lot of preparation and thinking about what to do this year. That’s not quite how it turned out for me.

Following the debacle at Substack, I needed to migrate my newsletter (link) to a new platform. I spent far too much time researching options and tried out WordPress. To cut a long story short, that was a mistake as it quickly dawned on me that their idea of a newsletter differed slightly from mine. I didn’t choose it mindlessly, and I’d even exchanged it with support to try to understand the system. But despite this, it didn’t work out for me. I found that I fought more with the interface during the design than I was prepared to do. It’s not for me.

2023 came to a close, and I’m pretty glad to see the back of it

I’m pretty happy that the year ended, if I’m honest. I went through a bit of a rough time with a couple of health-related things that, although expected, hit me harder than I thought they would.

I’ve been busy thinking about the following stages of my online presence and how I can consolidate a bunch of things into one more coherent structure. If you come here, you’ll notice things are quite different, as I’ve migrated from a clunky WordPress site to a small independent site called micro.blog. I was on the site’s beta many years ago and never took advantage of it as I should have. Despite being pretty connected, in internet terms, I’ve always been a little reticent and late to the blogging game. This is another attempt to change that and develop my professional image online.