I think an organization's governance structure being successful has more to do with how the people in the organization want to be governed than whether it's building an app or feeding the poor.
With full respect to your right to criticize, I don't understand what differentiates an organization trying to build a social networking app around biodiversity data from an organization feeding the poor, and those organizations' ability to experiment with their governance system. Can you expand that thought or is it rhetorical?
I've had similar thoughts. Any interest in sharing notes? Generally I've been thinking there should be a standard declarative format for data vis. This should be inspired by prior art like ggplot, Grammar of Graphics, Vega, VegaLite, etc.
From there it could be compiled to targets declarative or procedural (eg to generate VegaLite specs, echart specs or Observable Plot configs in JS).
How have you been thinking about this problem space?
iNaturalist was the final product of my Master's degree thesis team. I haven't contributed to it since school, about 11 years, so I don't deserve any credit for its success. The folks who have kept it alive are personal heros - they sacrificed a lot and invested so much to build the community that exists today. It's probably the project I'm still the proudest to have contributed to.
When we started, our goal was to encourage people to go outside and engage with the world around them. We dreamt that the data gathered by the community would be used in scientific research, but weren't confident it would ever reach enough of a critical mass. It has! More surprisingly, we had no idea how important iNat's image dataset would become for computer vision research.
Again, so proud of the folks who have helped to make iNaturalist thrive and so glad it still exists in the world.
In the context of a large client application, I often advise engineers that if we're optimizing things like the types of `for` loops we use, we've won the performance lottery. That is, I've never found a critical performance issue that is the result of using `forEach` instead of `for`.
For those curious, this is the law which allows you to sue the police: 42 U.S.C. § 1983
"Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress, except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer’s judicial capacity, injunctive relief shall not be granted unless a declaratory decree was violated or declaratory relief was unavailable. For the purposes of this section, any Act of Congress applicable exclusively to the District of Columbia shall be considered to be a statute of the District of Columbia."
@nnnnnick this looks great. I work with d3 on a daily basis and while I think that it's a great toolchain, the need for something small, fast and canvas based was absolutely needed. Well done.
What's old is always new, especially on the Internet. I'm constantly reminded of the "Simpsons' did it" South Park episode whenever I'm reading press briefs about new startups.
I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine.
I'm always shocked that this hasn't happened faster. I've expected Dropbox, Amazon, Google and Apple to move into this space more aggressively, but at best they've all only just scraped the surface of what's possible.
I actually think both of you are right. It's not about exclusively communicating with your friends or exclusively following celebs, it's about both. What you care about combined with a personal audience to discuss it with. The kid you found as an example subscribes to Paul Ryan's and Newt Gingrich's feeds along with his friends' feeds. Twitter can target Republican, right-leaning ads towards him. Maybe he discusses politics with his friends online and off.
This is great work and it's still early days. Looking forward to seeing the code clean up and having more extensible options for things like legends and fewer properties tightly coupled to chart instances.