Anyways, this has perhaps my favorite characteristics of a tech solution: it's simple, transparent, and does one small thing well.

We love to see it. Other things are possible.

Sure, tracking doesn't stop the CO2 from building up. But that information is empowering. Which panels do you maybe want to stream from your room instead of attending irl? Where would you prioritize using limited air filters? Is there somewhere I can unmask and sip my coffee? 😭

Putting together a real-time, room-by-room carbon dioxide monitoring system might sound super expensive and hard. But it doesn't have to be. Here's the tutorial for one sensor display—the parts are easy to get, you don't even need to solder!
https://learn.adafruit.com/matrix-portal-room-co2-monitor/overview

This is not a six-figure building upgrade, it's not bundled with opaque surveillance tech. Like, some enterprising high schoolers with a small budget could outfit a school with these as a senior project.

Cut to New Zealand's Kawaiicon cybersecurity convention. The conference organizers built out a panel where you can track the CO2 levels in every room of the convention.

Brilliant on the organizers' part: if you want people to feel energized and alert, and want to help people avoid the post-convention nightmare of "oops everyone is sick", monitoring CO2 levels is a great way to influence behavior and create transparency.

Clean air is a game-changer if you want to avoid spreading disease— when you're not steeped in people's "air backwash", you're way less likely to get sick from them. This is easy to approximate using CO2 levels that build up in a room (from all the exhaling).

Not to mention, if the CO2 levels are super high in a space, you can start to notice cognitive effects, like feeling foggy-headed. Ever left a stuffy room and felt immediately more awake and alert? That might be why.

Today in "other things are possible": a story about some hackers and CO2 monitoring! 🧵

If you've met me irl, you know that I mask indoors. I do this for a variety of reasons, but they mostly come down to the fact that I do not know how clean the air around me is, so I filter the air I breathe. (There are other reasons masking is praxis, but that's for another thread)

It's why I'm coming to see these kinds of imagination exercises as foundational— I'm finding that removing ourselves from everyday constraints makes our common ground so much easier to see.

Thank you to everyone who attended this weekend ✂️🎨✨

Stay tuned for the final zine soon!

This isn't to say that every difference is navigable, or every conflict should lead to a stronger relationship.

But when you can find alignment with someone on *anything*— even if it's just "we both care about the wellbeing of others"— it gives you a place to start. It's somewhere to build from.

This is essential!!

When we share values and a vision of the future with others, conflict and tension and difference can be generative. They strengthen us.

But ask any mediator: without a sense of shared goals or values, those same conflicts and tensions can decimate a relationship (or movement).

The Possible Futures workshops are so centering for me. They always bring me back to what any of this is for.

People approach this from so many angles, and still the same themes emerge: we want connection, belonging, healing, purpose, safety. 🧵

So, another evergreen reminder: other things are possible! People are building alternatives now!

FMI, check out their website: https://www.steamconnection.org/skobots

Finally, and most importantly, I appreciate the scope: nowhere do they claim to want to churn out a million and sell them to the whole planet. They partnered specifically with Tribal schools and Indigenous educational institutions to get students the robots for free.

Speaking of data collection, a detail I always look for in projects like this is the data: where does it come from? Who benefits from it? Who decides how it's used? I can't find specific info on their methods, but I think their stated principles are spot-on:

"We will never own recordings, we will never publish them, we will never profit off of them. It will always be up to the discretion of the communities we work with and we always defer to them."

In the same vein: They don't use synthetic speech. The first version was voiced by the creator's grandmother. The latest version is voiced by Ashinaabe children!

This design choice, to me, reads as centering the intrinsic humanity of spoken language. This feels important, especially when you're gearing tech towards children.

Building on that, it isn't trying to make interactions with the bot "feel real" through simulating complex conversations or trying to mimic speech— it translates words. This design choice is not only simpler, but it contributes to their stated goal: don't try and replace human interaction!

First, this looks like a stellar example of "classic" ML— the creator emphasizes that they don't use LLMs and runs offline, so (I assume) everything happens locally. This is categorically different from the monster of "AI" we are now dealing with, and it's the kind of tech solution I frequently advocate for.

For some context: Launched in 2021, the SkoBot is "a personal, wearable, and interactive Indigenous language revitalization robot". It responds to English words with recordings in the endangered Indigenous language Anishinaabemowin. The team is small, and is youth- and Indigenous-led.

Normally "here's an AI robot that talks to kids to teach them a language" would be a hard no from me. But I found one that I think is great, and I want to talk about why.

The SkoBot is a language revitalization robot, led by the Ashinaabe engineer Danielle Boyer.

Here's why I like this project:

I'm really inspired seeing @alex's vision for DAIR's research come through here. It shows what it can look like to turn activists into researchers, and researchers into activists. 🔥

I can't tell you how many papers— how many entire research labs and companies!— focus on "building tech for X problem" where absolutely nobody involved has direct, lived experience with X problem (see: the Disability Dongle phenomenon).