Money’s short, times are hard, here’s your Brexit Christmas card
Sometimes the medium is the message and the backstory is the story. Here is one.
Author: Heather Burns
Facts are stubborn things
You might think that privacy and accessibility are universally respected concepts and values. They are not.
Talking about the future of the open web and open source
Yesterday I had the absolute privilege of joining Dries Buytaert (Drupal), DB Hurley (Joomla! and Mautic), Barb Palser (Google), and Tim Lehnen (Drupal Association) for a panel discussion on the future of the open web and open source at Drupal Europe in Darmstadt, Germany.
On speaker travel expenses, or, why enough is enough
A couple of months ago my life fell apart in a morning. Being self-employed, I had two figures in the bank, which wasn’t enough to be able to afford a train ticket to safety; a kind soul bought me one. On that train to a safe place, still very much in shock, I put up a donation form and tweeted it. The funds that came in were literally the difference between having a roof over […]
Pulling the plug on legal compliance plugins
I've worked to amend the WordPress.org plugin guidelines so that plugins can no longer claim to make a site legally compliant in any regulatory requirement.
UX Podcast: GDPR and UX
I returned to the Swedish UX Mafia to talk about GDPR as a creative opportunity for interface design. Love talking to these guys.
Named Persons II: Scotland’s next mass civilian database
Last week I was chatting with some rather cracking professional digital rights activists. The conversation included my attempt to get them, from their London/English perspective, to understand the different cultural approach to mass data collection and databases that we live with here in Scotland. All too often, data collection projects which would be seen as violations of privacy, data protection, and the right to private life anywhere else are seen as “unquestionably legitimate and benign” […]
A woman’s place is in the House (of Commons)
Parliament carried on as usual today. Parliament carried on because the people of this country had questions that needed answers. In Parliament’s first hour of business on the morning after, I was one of them. Hansard records that my MP, Kirsten Oswald, put my question forward as this: T8. My constituent Heather Burns works in the digital economy. She has only ever known a borderless, connected world of work. Can the Secretary of State reassure […]
HeroPress: Going back to my roots
And that’s how I got here. https://heropress.com/essays/going-back-roots/
The Brexit white paper on digital: a very short post
And so we had the government’s Brexit white paper, a document so vapid that it inspired my MP to tweet that it reminded her of a high school student stretching out an essay to meet the required word count. Eagle-eyed readers spotted the date stamps on many pages of the PDF version indicating that the paper had been finished between 3 and 4 AM on the day it was due to be published. That stunt […]
A fresh round of government evasions on digital, Brexit, and the Digital Single Market
There were some intriguing developments announced regarding the UK’s Brexit negotiations and the Digital Single Market strategy on Friday the 20th of January. I can’t imagine why we all missed it. These developments came in a report published by the Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy Committee of the House of Commons. The full report is fourteen pages in pdf, also available in one page of six-point type. Keen readers will recall that the committee’s predecessor, […]
A plain English guide to the EU public sector accessibility directive
Web sites and apps of public sector bodies within Europe must come into compliance with these accessibility requirements.