Bookmarked Untangling the IndieWeb by David Yates
Frank Meeuwsen pointed me to this article by David Yates, which contains explanations of IndieWeb components and their purposes, for less tech-oriented people. It concludes that, yes IndieWeb has a wide range of cool features, that let you use the Web itself as social medium, but that implementing them requires tech skills. It works very well for online interaction, “but the only people you interact with are other programmers who’ve also managed to implement all this stuff.”
Which is a good reminder to self. I’m not one of those ‘other programmers’, though I can keep up with tech oriented conversation. Which makes me a bit of a boundary spanner, between the techies and the less tech oriented. Given Peter’s notion of having an obligation to explain, I already had half baked plans to start writing a few explainers. While reading this blogpost by David Yates I had some additional ideas of what that should/shouldn’t look like. And that it should be in both Dutch and English. So thank you David for the nudge.
Meanwhile, I have E as an in-house ‘tester’ to see if my explanations work, and if I understand things correctly myself, while we are indiewebyfying her websites.
Like you, I’ve had an itch to write up some guides and explainers around getting started with the indieweb. Mostly aimed at those I converse with in niche hobby communities. Lots of them have a blog of some sort already, but they rarely use them in favour of Twitter and/or Instagram. I’d love to help change that, and get more of them to post on their own domain. The sticking point I’ve had is how to pitch it at an appropriate level.
Maybe one solution is less about adding more documentation, and instead engaging in a process of inspiring an interest in how existing indieweb-enabled sites work, then giving 1-to-1 coaching to get them setup and teach the principles? It’s a slower process, but it’s less reliant on people being able to find and follow technical guides. As the number of “converts” grows and learns more, they are in a position to do the same for others. Maybe it’s a pie in the sky idea, but it’s one I think I’m going to explore a bit.
Yes; it does require lots of tech skills that are constantly changing so you have to be in the field basically to keep up. A person w/ a day job in education? Not gonna happen 🙂 Worth following along, though!
Let me know how I can help. This is a worthwhile project.