48 posts tagged with "AI-Sovereignty-Governance"

Talofa reader,

Last week was the tenth consecutive week of writing this damn newsletter, lol. I’m not going to say every week it landed on time, but every week, for the last ten weeks, I sat down, wrote some things, read some things, and then edited my writing until it made some kind of sense, and then out it went. Sometimes late on a Monday night, but more often than not, at 3 am on Wednesday mornings.

Sure, ten newsletters in a row are not a lot to write home about, but I think this is a good time to step back and review what the actual hell I’m doing and whether I’m headed in the right direction or need to make an adjustment before carrying on.

I started this newsletter as a mechanism for consolidating my thoughts across the many things I would think about on any given week. Anything I had learned that week, experiences I had that taught me something, I would draw on them and write it out in a weekly newsletter. I wouldn’t be short of content, surely? Now, writing is a great tool for organizing your thoughts. A lot of the great thinkers of our time were writers - Plato, Marcus Aurelius (I’m sure there were others), and that’s something I wanted for myself too. That’s the whole point of this newsletter - to write regularly, using it as a weekly opportunity to corral and organize my thoughts and develop the art of writing.

So, how well am I doing?

I’m a pretty harsh critic, especially of myself, but I also like to think I’m fair.

*Me to me: “Hey, your writing sucks. But it’s okay. You’re just not talented in that way.”*😂

But seriously, on reviewing these last ten weeks of writing a newsletter, I can think of two key areas where changes can be made for the better.

Talofa reader,

I’m hitting the late Wednesday publishing mark so often I might as well make it official. Apologies to myself, and you the reader for missing our Tuesday slot.

This week I think I may actually write a non essay-length edition and just speak on what was top of mind for me this last week. As you’re probably aware Amazon have been going through their latest round oflayoffsthis past couple weeks, so it’s been a tough space for folks at work.

I was one of the lucky ones.

Talofa reader,

Over the last few weeks, I've had things either in my periphery or right in front of me that all looked like different things, but I could thread the same theme through each of them.

I've read stories of layoffs in Silicon Valley and Big Tech, newsletters analysing these events, motivations of these companies, and the historical events that preceded them. I've seen local companies decimate whole teams and watched green "opentowork" rings popping up frequently on social media. In the last week, I've had friends made redundant from their remote U.S. roles, and other friends' roles disestablished in big insurance companies in the current economic climate.

The theme I would thread through all these events, zoomed right out, could be described as*"how the world works."*None of what is happening is necessarily shocking or surprising to people who see the world, and the things in it, a particular way and expect these kinds of outcomes.

In this weeks newsletter, I'm not quite digging into the bigger picture of*"how the world works", but into the smaller"how companies work"*and how I think about them, in this or any other economic climate, and what has served me in navigating my professional career.

Talofa reader,

This week, I have been thinking about communities, specifically online communities, and the concept of "community building." I had never heard of this term until 2017 when I heard it on the Indie Hackers Podcast. They used the term to describe a group of people who would engage and congregate around a product. They talked about it as a type of growth "hack" or other product-growing exercise.

Initially, this seemed strange to me, as it made sense in terms of manipulating and using human behavior to your advantage, i.e., for profit. However, I understood what they were trying to do. I found it peculiar that it included the word "community" and treated it as something that you actively worked on (which I read as "manipulated," because I'm jaded, lol).

To me, community was always something that just "was." They were naturally occurring things in the wild and usually formed around shared culture, a sport, or a common interest. This was obviously naive of me because "community" is something that takes deliberate work and effort to build, grow, and maintain.

Now that I'm building a couple of communities with my charity team and a few helping hands, I have learned a few things, about myself mostly, but also a lot about what it takes to do this work of building communities (especially online) in the community.

These are some of the things I have learned...

Talofa reader,

This last week, I haven't read anything super interesting. My newsletter and RSS feeds provided the usual tech industry topics, such as systems design, big data, and more ChatGPT. However, the most interesting topic that stood out this week for me was from the Pasifika Tech Network Discord, and it wasn't me asking the questions this time!

One of our members asked a simple question:"What is your why? And what are you passionate about?"

I thought on it for a bit - I have different why's for different things - but the “why” I chose to respond to was “why I use my free time to help Pasifika learn more about and see themselves in Big Tech”?

Note: this week’s edition is a lot less “reading astutely” and more shooting from the hip 😂.

Talofa reader,

There's been a lot more AI activity this past week after the announcement ofGPT4by OpenAI. There's been a lot of discussion and activity in my Pasifika Tech Network discord as well as the developers have been playing with creating slack and discord bots that use the OpenAI API.

But there's one topic that I can't recall how it came to my attention this week; it crossed my mind early one morning after studying for my AWS certification - Data Sovereignty. It's a topic I frequently deal with, given that I work at AWS and my job involves discussing cloud technology with all sovereign nations in the Pacific. Since it's a pretty important topic in the Pacific, I wondered what my network's understanding of it was, so I asked in the channel.

"Morning team- this is always an interesting question when I come across it at work (in NZ and in the Islands) so keen to hear everyone's thoughts - What do you know/understand about Data Sovereignty? And what do you think about the issue of where our (Pasifika/Indigenous) data is stored?"

I got back some really thoughtful answers, and interesting to note was that the people that responded were all senior level technical folks. They mentioned things like physical location of the data and the governance and applicable laws of that location i.e. country. It was interesting to also see talk about trust between allied countries and data residency agreements and what they mean for NZ for people working specifically with NZ data.

Now, no surprises here - I’m not an expert on this topic by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve just done some reading, and combined that knowledge with my experience and understanding of the topic gained over the last 8 months of working in the field.

I will leave links to all readings and resources I read to understand any of this, below.

Disclaimer​

Obviously, I'm going to have some bias on this subject. I work at Amazon Web Services as a Solution Architect, and most of the data relevant to the work I do resides on AWS infrastructure. However, I believe the crux of this entire topic is that the geographical location of the data and the ownership of the infrastructure are only the beginning of what this subject is effectively about. For the record, I do not speak for or on behalf of my employer. All opinions expressed here are my own.

Talofa reader,

Allow me to provide a bit of background for all future tech rants...

Well, I think we're all aware by this point, I'm Ron. A NZ born Samoan, Tuvalu and Chinese guy who works in tech (in a nutshell). And I think it's relevant because it helps to know who the person is saying a bunch of stuff in a newsletter and get an idea and some context around why they might look at the world a certain way, and say the things they might say.

I'm the second eldest in a family of five boys (no biological sisters). Both my parents immigrated from Samoa in the 70's. Dad worked as a land surveyor and Mum worked at the Post Office. Dad eventually went on to study to become a Presbyterian Minister at Knox College and dragged us down to Otago until he graduated after which we then headed off to Pleasant Point, South Canterbury for his first church assignment. We were the only Samoan family in a small farming town of about 1500 people, pretty much all palagi's (Pākehā). We spent 5 years behind enemy lines.. kidding, we all got along (eventually), and I actually look back fondly at that period in my life. After Pleasant Point, Dad accepted a new assignment in Glen Eden, West Auckland and we were off again. We went from an all palagi environment, to an almost all Pasifika one in a matter of months transitioning from the South Island to Auckland.

“TheCoconet TV” did ashort documentaryabout my family on their series about Pastor’s kids.

And Auckland is where we stayed until the end of high school.

Talofa reader,

Let’s start at the beginning...​

This isn’t my first rodeo, or newsletter. I started a newsletter back in 2018 and ran it for several editions before it got lost somewhere and came to it’s inevitable end.

It’s always hard starting something back up again, but if experience has taught me anything, it’s that once it’s up and running it’s not that bad.

Like going to the gym. The first few weeks are probably going to be painful, but if you stick at it, eventually it sucks a little less each time.

Why am I starting a newsletter?​

Believe it or not, it’s not to be a writer.