I spoke at Citizen Beta this week. It was lots of fun and I wanted to highlight a few things.

(I really love this photo)

 

The topic of the talk was AAC in general and the AzuleJoe (Now called The Open Voice Factory) project in particular.   I wanted to make sure that I was giving the audience something to think about (rather than it being a recruitment drive) so we included some of the privacy and free speech issues that  turned up here.    There is also a lot of heavyweight civic tech in the room so we also talked about the use of freedom of information request in the process:

To be entirely transparent, much of my motivation for going was to recapture a mindset.  I’ve been effectively working in the third-sector for two years and I have relatively few conversations with people who think like me. Citizen Beta is full of people who do and it was lots of fun to simply hang out and find out about the cool things that people were doing.   I spoke to people who were verifying news, making digital payments easier, a guy who was organising a strike of renters, someone writing a book about digital revolutions and a wide range of people who where doing That Sort of Thing.

I want to do a suitably big shoutout to Mevan for putting me in the room, and to everybody else I met on the day.