Werd I/O

The whole time I've been in the US, I've been using a Google Voice number to communicate.

Here it is: +1 (312) 488-9373.

The reasons are numerous: I can get phone calls on any of my connected devices, even when I'm out of the country. I can change phone service providers at any time. I can make calls in places with wifi but no cellphone reception. I get voicemails as text, so I don't have to listen through an endless series of recorded messages.

Phone numbers themselves are kind of an archaic technology, but it's not feasible to ditch them just yet. So I was disappointed to read that Google Voice is going to be rolled into Hangouts.

That's Google's prerogative. Any silo service provider could make a similar decision at any time. So the question becomes: how can I create my own Google Voice setup on my own infrastructure?

I want four things:

1. Phone calls that come to me wherever I am, on whatever device
2. The ability to change phone provider without hassle
3. Voicemails in my email
4. Cheap international calls

I also don't want to use Skype or another proprietary provider.

I'm really not sure what to look for here. I know about SIP and Asterisk, but setting up and maintaining them sounds like a pain to me. Is there something user-friendly I can use?

I'll be following up in a subsequent post with what I discover.

Here are some independent, non-military projects involving drones. These are projects that aren't selling drones in themselves, but rather are using drones as the backbone of the project. I've listed a single contact person for each one, which is usually the CEO but may also be the lead engineer:

Deliveries & Commerce

Tacocopter (Star Simpson)

QuiQui: Automated Drone Delivery of Pharmacy Items (Joshua Ziering)

Matternet, a kind of drone postal service (Martin Ling)

Flirtey, "the world's first autonomous aerial delivery company" (Francis Vierboom)

Skymail, "shipping things from door to door in 30 minutes or less" (Lukas Wrede)

Space Leap, robotic transportation (Erik Unger)

Personal Drones

Fleye: Your Personal Flying Camera (Laurent Eschenauer)

Lily, "the first personal autonomous camera in history" (Henry Bradlow)

Fotokite, a kind of flying steadicam (Sergei Lupashin)

AirDroids, which carry a GoPro, sold separately (Chance Roth)

Business Drones

Skycatch, programmable private drone surveillance (Christian Sanz)

Ceres Imaging, spectral data to optimize water and nitrogen for agriculture (Roberto Bunge)

Open Source Libraries

NodeCopter, which powers many of the above projects (Felix Geisendörfer)

Have I missed any? Let me know!

Obviously, the title to this post isn't my opinion. Instead, it's a paraphrase of something from a Dave Winer post today:

I don't know if there's any solution to this. I certainly don't advocate not hiring people Roy's age -- I'm now older than he was then. But every time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn't there to work, rather is there to scam you.

Dave's assertion is that young males (who are white, he later clarified in the comments) are a safer hiring bet, based in part on an anecdote about a poorly-performing employee he had in 1985. It's also very clearly meant to be analogous to Julie Ann Horvath's experience at GitHub, and not in a positive way.

This is bullshit, and it's important to call it out as such.

1. Whether intentional or not, the timing of this post demeans the experience of a woman reporting harassment in a major tech company. The implication that she might be a scammer is noxious, but also implied rather than clearly stated; if this is the intention of the post, why not clearly state it, and if it isn't, why was this post published now?
2. There is no evidence that young, white males are more productive, more trustworthy (!), or better hires in any way. They certainly dominate the industry, but there are all kinds of unmeritocratic reasons for this. Model View Culture is doing a great job of debunking some of these ideas. The solution is smarter hiring and a better culture, not very unsophisticated demographic judgments.
3. This harms all of us. A monoculture that empowers systemic harassment makes for worse software, a weaker market and a worse experience for our customers. If you're building products for sale, you want to draw on the best possible skills and experience for the job. Why on earth would you limit the kinds of people who can help you based on their gender or ethnicity?

White males like Dave Winer and myself have inherent privilege that must be acknowledged. It's our responsibility (at least partially) to make the tech industry a more welcoming, diverse place. Posts like today's throw all the good, brave work that's being done by vulnerable people directly back in their faces. It's not acceptable, and it must be called out.