Bulgaria Web Summit 2016 : The Web – What it Has, What it Lacks and Where it Must Go

Conference Notes

Robert Nyman from Google covered a number of topics but the one which interested me the most was about SLICE.  The idea behind SLICE is that there are some times when you just don’t need your own mobile app – 16% of people will use an app twice and 90% of the apps on your phone you nearly never use.  So why develop an app when you can harness the power of the web?

So that,s the background – what does SLICE stand for?

  • Secure – All domains are sand-boxed from each other and sites are sand-boxed away from the users machine. The user can go to any site and know they are safe.
  • Linkable – You can point to any page or piece of content just by sharing a URL
  • Indexable – Because you can link to anything, if public it can be discovered by any person or machine that can index it to make it universally discoverable to everyone.
  • Composable – IFrames and JavaScript allow us to quickly compose and embed new sites, apps and services just by dropping in some JS and hooking things together.
  • Ephemeral – There is nothing to install, you go to the page and interact with it, leave the page and when you do it stops taking up resources.

The ultimate aim of this appears to be that anything a native app can do a SLICE can do – such as interact with devices over Bluetooth etc.  Also because its the web its always up to date and no need for the app to be deployed etc.

Details on SLICE on the web are a little tricky to find, there are some details here and you can see the slide which Robert presented here.

 

Living medical donations while working

Campaign

This post is related to my motivation for raising a petition with the UK Government – the petition can be found here.

The issue of organ donation is of vital importance. With 7,000 people currently waiting for a donation and the number of donors falling, we should be doing everything possible to encourage donations.  Despite five years of progress and a 50% increase in the number of deceased organ donors since 2008, the UK still faces a shortage of donated organs and people waiting for a transplant are still dying due to lack of available donors – the NHS put this number at about 1,000 people per year, around 1 in 7 of the people waiting for a donation.

When donors make a living donation many employers see this as an employee optionally making themselves ill, and as such the individual is required to take any time off from their holiday entitlement or take time off unpaid.  This seems fundamentally wrong for the danger they are putting themselves in to save the life of another person, someone they might not even know.

Living donor transplantation is an established practice in the UK and represents currently 25% of overall organ transplant activity.  However with employees getting little support it is no wonder that the actual number of living donations has been decreasing over the last two years.

Having seen first hand both the impact a bone marrow donation can have on the recipient, going from being extremely ill to being healthier and happier than they were in a long time.  I have also seen the pressures an anonymous donor gets from his employer while giving bone marrow and I feel disgusted that the active living anonymous donor can be treated so poorly.  As a minimum the employee should be treated equally as if the employee had become ill themselves, as such they should be entitled to statutory sick pay and an employee should be required to provide them with their standard sickness benefits.  Ideally an employer should provide any other support they need to be able to give their donation, such as time and flexibility for blood tests etc.

Anyone who is brave enough to step up and volunteer to save the life of a complete stranger and putting their own lives at risk should be given all the support they need, not penalised for doing so.

What is the point in this?

Uncategorized

This is mainly motivated by my new job where I’ll be spending more time in easter europe – a part of the world which is both similar and different to the UK.

The aim is mainly for me to make some notes.  These notes will probably be about one of three things – places I’ve visited, things I’ve learned and experienced and things which interest me.  Who knows where this will lead but sometimes 140 characters are not enough.

It is through the receiving and sharing of knowledge from learning and experiences which drives innovation and change.

Management 3.0 - Cogs of Innovation
Management 3.0 – 5 Cogs of Innovation