Disqus - Latest Comments for jedsundwall

Re: New Logo for Suncorp

Jed Sundwall — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 14:13:31 -0000

Same. There’s something really metal about their approach here. So stark and confident. I find it really appealing, and I’m skeptical of banks that try to appear too “friendly.”

I also love seeing how they’ve taken advantage of transparent PNGs for the sun gradient. Someone over there really knows what they’re doing.

Re: IRS Unleashes Flood of Searchable Charity Data

Jed Sundwall — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 11:34:43 -0000

Canhelp, no AWS account is required to access the data. All electronic 990 XML files are available to download over plain HTTP. E.g. https://s3.amazonaws.com/ir...

We'll update the documentation to make this clearer.

Re: IRS Unleashes Flood of Searchable Charity Data

Jed Sundwall — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 11:34:18 -0000

John, no AWS account is required to access the data. All electronic 990 XML files are available to download over plain HTTP. E.g. https://s3.amazonaws.com/ir...

We'll update the documentation to make this clearer.

Re: Adam Laiacano

Jed Sundwall — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 19:19:38 -0000

This has sent us down a rabbit hole. We've figured out how to do this (it's easy to copy the math) and it works REALLY well, but we're trying to understand why. I might bug you for some tips at some point!

Re: SkyMall's SkyFall — Priceonomics Blog

Jed Sundwall — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:52:36 -0000

anyone have a Twityap invite? Asking for a friend.

Re: The Best Magazine Articles Ever

Jed Sundwall — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 10:48:24 -0000

How are there no David Grann stories on here? The Chameleon is one of the greatest stories I've ever read: http://m.newyorker.com/repo...

As is A Murder Foretold: http://m.newyorker.com/repo...

Re: How To Fix Procurement 2: Up The API Game | Department of Better Technology

Jed Sundwall — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:22:08 -0000

This is excellent and in line with some reading* I've been doing on organizational theory and contracting costs. Any discussion of "burden hours" or "paperwork reduction" is a discussion of contracting costs and – as you've articulated well here – APIs are a great mechanism to destroy contracting costs. I wrote some thoughts on this here: http://manso.jed.co/post/49...

*FYI, Chris Holmes from OpenGeo and I are doing a book club that some of you dobtco'ers might be interested in: https://groups.google.com/f...

Re: How Would You Save Journalism?

Jed Sundwall — Sat, 04 May 2013 14:36:41 -0000

Voice of San Diego provides an interesting model. They're non-profit and funded through donations, grants, ads, and user membership dues. They also charge small fees for events around town.

They're a great model for local journalism because, as an operation, they ONLY focus on local investigation. They leave everything that's better distributed by the Internet alone: e.g. national news, sports, horoscopes, syndicated columnists. By ignoring a lot of the operations that local newspapers have needed to pad their pages to deliver more advertising, they can provide excellent hard-hitting coverage as a non-profit.

Re: Hey, Open Government: Planning for the Future is Great, But Deal With the Present First

Jed Sundwall — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 18:56:59 -0000

This is excellent. The "not enough peers" problem needs to be talked about more often. It is very difficult to identify the latent groups of citizens interested around issues – let along draw them together. Too many projects assume that these latent groups are going to be easy to find. They aren't.

FWIW, a few thoughts on Groupon's ability to draw out latent groups: http://manso.jed.co/post/16...

Re: First Fridays Product Testing Program

Jed Sundwall — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:44:16 -0000

Hey Concerned Citizen,

First of all, why are you posting this anonymously?

Second of all, I don't see the problem that you're seeing. Why shouldn't the government develop its own capacity to perform user testing? There are all sorts of services that GSA provides to other agencies that vendors could theoretically provide.

Allowing agencies to receive this kind of testing from experts within GSA seems like a very efficient way to spend taxpayer dollars.

Re: Open Data Has Little Value If People Can't Use It

Jed Sundwall — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:07:23 -0000

This is excellent. We can learn a lot from librarians on how to go about this. Librarians are devoted to democratizing access to information and their insights on how to teach people to find and understand information can certainly be applied to make sense of the massive amounts of data we're creating today.

Full disclosure: I'm on the board of the San Diego Regional Data Library, so I'm a bit biased. ;)

Thanks for writing this.

Re: Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0

Jed Sundwall — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 19:55:55 -0000

Doctorow is such a great writer. Yeah, I don't think the approach should be to eke out payments from every bit of value created by users, but instead to give people stock that they can sell or get dividends from. The issue here is securities law, which needfully protects people from buying bogus securities.

REI does something similar with its dividend program, but I'm not quite sure how it works (I think it's some kind of cooperative) or if it has helped REI do anything that a "normal" merchant does.

Re: Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0

Jed Sundwall — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 16:59:24 -0000

Precisely. Every time people freak out about exploitative ToS, I start thinking about this idea again. Can we create user-owned services? Essentially cooperatives? Why not?

Re: Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0

Jed Sundwall — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 15:50:42 -0000

Also, relevant to what you've written here: I'm curious about two other issues:

1. What happens when these networks DON'T scale, but multiply? I'm fascinated by a world of many smaller organizations, loosely joined, which is something that I think the Internet is more likely to support over the long term (biomimicry suggests this).

2. What happens when people start owning equity in these networks? I'm really excited about the idea of something like Kickstarter that allows funders to buy some kind of equity in the projects they're funding. Clearly, securities law still presents a huge hurdle here. I really have no idea how to make this happen in a sustainable way, but I think that enabling more people to own equity in organizations could be huge.

Re: Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0

Jed Sundwall — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 15:45:50 -0000

Nick, would you be interested in joining this book club with me and the CEO of OpenGeo? https://groups.google.com/f...

We're currently reading The Ownership of Enterprise by Henry Hansmann, and I think it could inform what you're studying.

Re: See. Click. Fund.

Jed Sundwall — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 13:34:33 -0000

"I’m also a believer that compelling projects in less wealthy neighborhoods can, and will, attract dollars from those outside of their own zip codes."

I admire your optimism, and I see value in holding this belief, but I'm curious to know if you've encountered evidence to support it. In San Diego, it's a given that the affluent suburbs will always gripe about funding any improvements around to core of the city. I'd love to be able to show them that such griping isn't necessarily normal.

Re: http://www.usabilitypost.com/2012/11/15/visual-transiency/

Jed Sundwall — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 16:07:57 -0000

No. I don't. A oceanic border of white space is still a container. The line drawn (white or not) around a blog post, or just a simple thought, is an essential part of its content. A book's chapters, and a sentence's period are just as essential.

Re: Bureaucracy and Trust

Jed Sundwall — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 00:50:27 -0000

Personally, I'd favor "results" or "effectiveness" over innovation. Innovation's great, but it's not the goal per se. The problem with the bureaucratic model is that it ends up obviating the need for results in many instances. All that matters is that protocol was followed. Meanwhile, many basic, non-innovative, services could be provided more effectively along with transparency and accountability.

Anyway, this is excellent and I love where you're going with it.

Re: Predictive Analytics and Cities

Jed Sundwall — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 18:17:10 -0000

While it's harder to quantify and analyze, I wish California would get smarter about using data to inform policy decisions rather than relying on costly and blunt ballot propositions every election cycle.

The fantastic accuracy of polling data in this week's election makes me think we could be polling/surveying/otherwise taking people's pulse on issues to inform policy priorities and decisions.

Re: The Island of Lost Apple Products

Jed Sundwall — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 17:51:33 -0000

Cards is a fantastic app. I've used it a bunch.

Re: What If We Give It Away: Lessons from TED

Jed Sundwall — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 18:07:42 -0000

We're building a new system that @measuredvoice will use to handle all of its interactions with Facebook and Twitter. It's, by far, the most vexing and complicated part of our product. We're going to open source it.

We're giving it away because we know other people have the same problems interacting w/ social media APIs. We'd rather collaborate on it than constantly reinvent the wheel by ourselves. Our bet is that opening it will enable us to keep it up to date more easily so we can focus on the things that really distinguish us: UX and customer service.

Re: The Real Problem With Toasters

Jed Sundwall — Wed, 23 May 2012 12:59:32 -0000

Thanks @Mark Birch ! It's good to know that people haven't stopped dreaming the impossible dream. It's worth noting that the toaster you mention is a premium item – about 3.5 times as expensive as Amazon's most popular toaster and about as much as a toaster oven.

We're not opposed to sophisticated engineering, but because we build software for humans, we try to take advantage of their judgement as much as possible. It helps us build a better – higher-value – product.

Re: The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs

Jed Sundwall — Sat, 19 May 2012 13:35:52 -0000

I love this metaphor. It's a lot like this quote from Steve Jobs's 1985 Playboy interview: "Little by little, people started breaking off and forming competitive companies, like those flowers or weeds that scatter seeds in hundreds of directions when you blow on them."

Biomimicry is important to understand. I'm certain that Qualcomm (mobile) and Intuit (big data) is going to produce many many seeds around San Diego that will sprout into amazing companies.

Re: Everyday I'm Bubbling, with Media Queries and LESS | Always Twisted | Front-End Design & Development

Jed Sundwall — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:24:12 -0000

It'll take care of bandwidth overhead, but what about rendering? I'm asking honestly. I have no idea if this would be harder or easier for browsers to render.

Re: http://bryce.vc/post/23129059011

Jed Sundwall — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:37:24 -0000

Sure, but in a future world we might pay a few bucks a year to Tumblr and Disqus to keep things going for us for us. We'd learn over time that paying such fees is the safest way to ensure our data is taken care of.
Another possibility would be for us to give our data to services that share the profits generated by our data with us. I'm particularly interested in cooperative structures similar to credit unions for things like this. We share our data because it's valuable when pooled and we all benefit as a result. Of course, this means that the service we're joining is (significantly if not completely) user-owned and much less likely to be acquired or make anyone rich.

I should grow a neck beard.