Tagged: community

At times I think "will anyone reads this, does anyone care?", but I always publish it anyway — and that's for two reasons. First it's a place for me to find stuff I may have forgotten how to do. Secondly, whilst some of this stuff is seemingly super-niche, if one person finds it helpful out there on the web, then that's good enough for me. After all I've lost count of how many times I've read similar posts that have helped me out.

Ethan was inspired by an Ursula Franklin lecture (I really have to read that book) to write a bit more about what we, as a community, can do about AMP. It looks a bit grim, as he points out.

And today, right now, I don’t think we need to look further than AMP to see an example of what Franklin’s talking about. As of this moment, the power dynamics are skewed pretty severely in favor of Google’s proprietary AMP standard, and against those of us who’d ask this question: What can I do about AMP?

But he goes on to point out that we can, and should, still speak up about our concerns and rally together:

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth speaking up, individually and collectively, and writing about our concerns. Quite the opposite. In fact, that’s why I signed an open letter on AMP, alongside twenty other concerned colleagues. (If you or your organization has a GitHub account, you can sign it, too.) Perhaps together, we can make the issue more visible, and make more people and organizations aware of our concerns. So while there might not be much I can do about AMP, maybe there’s something we can do.

Even in my tiny design practice, every decision I make is shaped by my biases; every decision I make is capable of harm. And it’s so, so easy to forget this: to focus on the layout challenge in front of me, to fulfil the client’s latest request, or to meet a business goal. When I do these things, I occasionally forget to ask myself who’ll be impacted by my work and, most importantly, to ask how I can mitigate that harm.