Some links I thought worth reading the past few days

• CTO Francesca Bria says “We are reversing the smart city paradigm”, creating “a new social pact — a new deal on data”: Fighting back against surveillance capitalism in Barcelona (leading the ‘fearless cities’ network)
• I had to miss it at the time itself, but enjoyed watching it afterwards, part of my braintrust Bryan Alexander hosts a Future Trends Forum with Cory Doctorow on Walkaway: Talking education and technology, the Walkaway perspective.
• The first example I’ve come across that looks at using blockchain for a local exchange and trading system (LETS), a local currency. Not sure why fiat currency related fears like ‘managing supply and demand’ of coins are mentioned, when you tie creation to a transaction like they describe: Hullcoin: can blockchain unlock the hidden value in Hull’s economy?
• Dealing with asymmetries in power over transmission, gatekeeping, scoring: Nibbling away at The New Octopus
• Last month XML-RPC was 20 years old. I should not be surprised Dave Winer helped create it. Twenty years on my webhoster blocks it to prevent brute force attacks on my blog: Dave Winer looks back on 4 years of XML-RPC in 2002.
• Trolling Trump with the US Constitution: Twitter blocking violates First Amendment
• Once more a way how geo data is part of privacy discussions: Open Street Map preparing for GDPR