Human with love and curiosity for humanity.
Originally from the Pacific Northwest shores of Anacortes, Washington. Currently living on the banks of the Anacostia in Washington D.C.
Public servant for the American people supporting civic infrastructure, open data, open government, and human centered service design.
| Personal Website | https://phil.ashlock.us/ |
| https://twitter.com/philipashlock | |
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipashlock | |
| Threads | https://www.threads.net/@philipashlock |
The past decade working on data, customer service, and computer science in the civil service I've got to:
- Work with the Interagency Council on Statistical Policy and the Interagency Committee on Standards Policy
- Transition a secretariat for our action plan for open gov under the Open Government Partnership to be under our Office of Governmentwide Policy
- Support a Digital Analytics Program in our Data & Analytics Portfolio
Naming things is hard. Renaming them is too
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A wise Karl once taught me,
"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and namespace collision"
— a clever quippet from a wise Phil that's been seen as a bit of a truism — and maybe also some key concepts for contemporary malicious spoophishing.
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New year, same question: why is the tech press whiffing the app store story of the decade?
Under regulatory pressure, mobile OSes are opening up and adding features that will allow PWAs to disrupt app stores ... Yet with shockingly few exceptions, coverage accepts that the solution to crummy, extractive native app stores will be other native app stores. ... The press fails to mention the web as a sustitute for native apps, and fail to inform readers of its disruptive potential. Why?
On the same day, the White House released their new accessibility guidance which happens to be the first time they've published formal new policy natively as HTML rather than PDF.
We've come a long way, but what more can we do to improve accessibility for the public good without waiting 30 years for another small victory?
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View or download as a PDF. December 21, 2023 M-24-08 MEMORANDUM FOR HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES FROM: Shalanda D. Young, Director SUBJECT: Strengthening Digital Accessibility and the Management of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act On this page: I. INTRODUCTION This memorandum provides guidance to help agencies advance digital accessibility by maintaining an…
Today, 30 years after HTML and the web were invented to support collaborative access for research and academia the arXiv open access repository now supports HTML publications, modernizing accessibility and continuing to mature from humble beginnings as a Los Alamos National Laboratory hosted mail server
https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/12/21/accessibility-update-arxiv-now-offers-papers-in-html-format/
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Open gov public engagement session "Improving Access to Government Data, Research, and Information" with the White House and agencies is live now...
https://open.usa.gov/national-action-plan/5/schedule-of-2023-engagement-sessions/
@davidthewid
Common sense views of "well regulated" suggest we don't all have the right to bear our own thermonuclear arms, but maybe it's more ambiguous if you 3D print small armaments or run a CRISPR lab in your basement.
Things get more complicated with our widespread interconnected digital social infrastructure that both enables and imperils us with the power and harm of new compounding machine learning capabilities and which is less impeded by the cost and friction of tangible materials
This succinct big picture of the "AI Dilemma" by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin is a really useful frame of reference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ
And pairs well with dissecting the ethical considerations of openness in AI development by @davidthewid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZP3kps9TsU
Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught i...
Tom Coates
Alex Russell