A very brief post to start the new year. I’m not inclined to make elaborate resolutions for the new year other than being very firm that I will stop writing “2018” in dates by the end of March… or maybe April.
But seriously, I do want to write and engage more this year and more actively try new things. As I’m doing, right now, by trying WordPress’s new Gutenberg editor. Beyond that? We’ll see.
A brief digression on Gutenberg: I will bet a bag of coffee that the rollout of Gutenberg will become a standard case study in software management course syllabi. It encapsulates so many points of conflict: open source governance and the role of commercial entities in open source communities; accessibility and the politics of serving (or not) all potential users; technical change management and the balance between backwards compatibility and keeping up to date with modern technology (or, more cynically, modern fashions in technology); and managing major changes to the conceptual model required to use a piece of software. (And an idea for a future post, either by me or anybody who wants to run with it: can the transition of WordPress’s editor from a document-based model to a block-based modal be usefully compared with the transition from AACR2/ISBD to RDA/LRM/LOD/etc.?) Of course, the situation with Gutenberg is evolving, so while initial analyses exist, obviously no definitive post mortems have been written.
But before I let this digression run away from me… onwards to 2019. May everybody reading this have a happy new year, or at least better one than 2018.
Entering 2019 by Galen Charlton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.