Fabian came to visit me in Charlottesville for the first time in a while on Thursday 17 October. He came to me at school then we joined Eli and Daniel at the Newcomb cafeteria for lunch.
On Friday Fabian and I did a couples photo shoot with Gabriela. We talked about her photography hobby, and what life was like when she was at CHUVA, and how she liked Charlottesville now. We tried various poses in the Confederate Cemetery, at the Dell, and near the Rotunda. She went to the medical center for work after and Fabian and I met up with Felipe and Daniel for lunch at the O Hill cafeteria.
Felipe was excited about new interest in the concept of the data trust. I had heard this concept for the first time in April 2018 when I was at the Sage Bionetworks Conference. Felipe was saying that crowd interest and momentum for defining and protecting data trusts in the public commons is growing. Corporations already have closed trusts among themselves for monopolistic exploitation, but of course the kind of data sharing for public / private partnerships or for public benefit is lacking. We talked about the Charlottesville Open Data Portal. The portal is great for existing and many people put lots of work into establishing it. Now that it is established it can be a model for others to emulate and also a workshop for producing the infrastructure we need to resolve problems. For example, there are 2 local transportation apps to attempt to tell people when buses will be at bus stops, plus Google Maps has bus schedules. All three of these often tell different times for each bus, so the organizations presenting each of these have their own data sets and expectations. Right now, neither Google nor the official service are usually correct, and instead a third-party app is. In our School of Data Science we would like to facilitate local community amenities having access to public data but many social and bureaucratic barriers challenge the resolution of such issues.
Felipe recently had a birthday but could not schedule a celebration so instead we proposed to go on the weekend to an arcade. He said that in the town near where he grew up in Brazil there was an arcade, but to travel there, one had to pass through gang-controlled territory. He described that he would be excited to go to the arcade, but to get there, he had to take a long bus from his home in the suburban area, then walk through the gang territory, then enjoy the arcade, then go back through gang territory to catch a bus again. The gang was boys around his age and they would mug non-gang boys for whatever they had, typically money and shoes. If they stole money on the way in then there would be no option for the arcade or getting home, whereas if they stole money on the way out then there would be a problem paying the bus to get home. Felipe came from a social class which was closer to the middle than the class of the boys who needed to be in gangs on the street, so what he had was the typical experience for some boys who had a bit of money to visit arcades.
I asked Daniel what sort of street gangs he experienced when he was 15 and in East Germany. He said there was no gang interactions because he was not old enough, but I pressed him because age 15 was the right age for anyone to join or interact with gangs. He then said that he and some other boys would collect paper and glass bottles to sort and sell and recycling. I asked him if he did prowling, and he asked what that was. I explained that it was the crime of trespassing, and he said that since the state owned everything there was no concept of trespassing or having restrictions on where people could be and go, especially with regard to accessing waste to sort for recycling. Having a specialized word like “prowl” was even further removed, because if there is no trespass then there certainly are no specialized forms of trespass.
The University of Virginia has a surplus furniture warehouse which is open every other week on Friday for a few hours. They sell university supplies like desks, office chairs, big tables, and laboratory equipment. I asked Fabian to visit and try to get an office chair for me and a table for CHUVA. He did, and we got them home. I was thinking of remodeling the dining room and living room of my home to be a coffeehouse. The idea is that on Sunday mornings when I like to write and have coffee, then I could have it at home, and invite others in CHUVA to visit. It would be coffee club.