#barnados

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Joel Chant/Co-op news]

Open organisations and trustable data

Barnado’s have an open intranet, which is smart because you see how the organisation thinks of itself and its people. Maybe you learn they’re a bigger, more interesting organisation than you’d thought, and then you might find yourself imagining working there. (See also: Co-op’s colleagues site.) Open is powerful and helps make an organisation trustable.

The Co-op digital data team on trust:

“a clear message is starting to emerge from regulatory bodies: the ethical use of data will become a growing priority and focus especially when considered with the perspective that ‘trust is the new currency’. Data ethics isn’t going to go away.”

More good reading: ODI’s The Week in Data newsletter.

Competing with sleep and Fortnite: streaming video and games

What does Netflix say it competes with? These are from Netflix’s shareholder letters, which are often a good read:

2016: coy about competitors, but Youtube is hiding on a chart.

2017: sleep is mentioned in an analyst call (for the Q1 results, not the full year), though not in the shareholder letter. So at this point Netflix says it competes with “non consumption”.

2017: Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Apple, satellite TV operators, BBC - and this is the first appearance of Youtube in the text of the shareholder letter.

2018: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Disney.

2019: "We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO. When YouTube went down globally for a few minutes in October, our viewing and signups spiked for that time." Very interesting that a game is the first competitor mentioned, and Netflix is quite casual about other streaming video on demand players.

In 2020: this newsletter expects Netflix to mention games again. Also Disney, which is preparing its own service. Possibly also Apple, which announced a Netflix-clone yesterday, but perhaps not the planned BBC/ITV Britbox service, which feels like it could be too little, too late.

Meanwhile, Fortnite now has 250m players and is trying to encourage players on different platforms to stop avoiding each other (which might increase loyalty to the Fortnite brand at the cost of the device).

PS: Apple also announced a games service, a news service, a secure credit card, though not a grocery service :)

Facebook passwords

Facebook stored 100m+ user passwords in plain text for years. It sounds like the audit logs were hoovering up(!) and saving(!) plaintext pwds, which somewhat undid FB’s hard work making sure that the passwords were hashed and salted in its main product storage. However, there was no evidence that passwords were accessed improperly by employees or third parties. “We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users”, says FB.

Lost in the post

Post Office held back information about Horizon IT system errors. The Post Office didn’t tell sub-postmaster staff about problems with a new IT system because it didn’t want them to blame the IT for any and all problems. The sub-postmasters are not at all happy - they feel they were unfairly blamed (and in some cases prosecuted!) for IT problems.

Brexit

B minus three days B minus 15 or 58 days, depending. The process lurches on like a rollercoaster with rusty rails. A flexi-delay has been put in place by the EU27, and “all options remain open”. A round of indicative votes this week. A petition urging the House of Commons to debate the revocation Article 50 has 5+m signatures and keeping the site running has been a herculean task (Imagine if the petition managed 17.5m!) A flowchart of the choices in front of Parliament, but by the time you read this the situation will probably have changed again. Hold on tight everyone.

Other news

Unboxing videos on Youtube are changing toys. The logical conclusion might be toys that consist *solely* of an unboxing experience. Today’s equivalent of that is a Kinder egg, a dopamine hit rendered into chocolate and discardable plastic.

Google is moving machine learning-powered speech-to-text from the cloud to mobile devices at the same time as it is trying to move gaming from the edge to the cloud. It’s not clear yet where some services should sit.

You won’t need to leave Instagram to buy products - it’s becoming more of a walled garden.

Microsoft Teams overtook Slack in Dec 18 - the power of the bundle. Both lag (Microsoft’s) Skype, which the survey said was highest rated for usability, a finding that is, er, surprising.

1m electric bicycles sold in Germany.

A list of former Google products and why they died - Newsletterbot is still sad about Reader.

Co-op news

Co-op Group launches online food delivery service - deliveries will be by electric cargo bike, with the rollout starting in London.

Together we’ve changed 1.9 million lives thanks to Co-op water.

Events

HI future: Homeless Employment and Educating Businesses - Tue 26 Mar 9.30am at Federation House.

CMO CRM show & tell - Tue 26 Mar 2pm at Angel Square 13th floor.

Line managers' drop-in clinic - Tue 26 Mar 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Data Insights at Scale + Machine Learning - Tue 26 Mar 6.30pm at Federation House.

OpenData Manchester: I Can't Believe It's Not Data - Tue 26 Mar 6.30pm at Federation House.

data horror stories, including: “in 2003, Manchester City Council received a £7,500,000 budget cut due to an error with the census data, which essentially lost 25,000 people”

Tech for good live - Thu 28 Mar 6.30pm at Federation House.

Membership show & tell - Fri 29 Mar 3pm at Federation House 6th floor.

Manchester Service Jam - Sat 30 and Sun 31 Mar 9am at Federation House.

Delivery community of practice meetup - Mon 1 Apr 1.30pm at Federation House.

Code first: girls - beginners community course - Mon 1 Apr 6.30pm at Federation House.

Prototyping kit show & tell - Tue 2 Apr 11am at Federation House 6th floor.

What has the web team been up to playback - Tue 2 Apr 1pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Line managers' drop-in clinic - Tue 2 Apr 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Health team show & tell - Tue 2 Apr 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Food ecommerce show & tell - Tue 2 Apr 2.30pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 3 Apr 10am at Federation House 6th floor.

Data ecosystem show & tell - Wed 3 Apr 3pm at Angel Square 13th floor.

Rise, Voice, Vote #PowerUp Launch - Thu 4 Apr 5pm at Federation House.

Membership show & tell - Fri 5 Apr 3pm at Federation House 6th floor.

More events at Federation House. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved and thoughtful readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s flunky @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading please consider telling a friend about it!

Children’s charity Barnado’s have released archived photographs in honour of Black History Month this year

October is Black History Month in the UK, and Barnado’s have published photographs of some of the children they have helped over 150 years.

Featured in the Daily Mail, a series of photos depicting children of mixed and black heritage can be seen who were taken in by the charity. Not only do the photographs create a poignant narrative about orphaned or abandoned Black kids, but this also defeats the notion of a purely White Britain pre-Windrush and Afro-Carribean/Asian migration in the 1950s and 60s.

Amongst the photos is John Lewis who is recognised to be the first black child on Barnado’s records:

Born in the heart of East London, John was born to an English mother and a father from the West Indies. He was one of thirteen children, only six of whom survived. John was deserted by his birth father and rejected by his mother. His mother was married to another man, who was not John's father and he refused to accept John as his own. John’s older sister Meredith, who was also mixed race, let him stay at her flat when her husband was away. Otherwise, John was left homeless on the streets of London for most of the time from a very young age. He tried to get by working as a ‘shoeblack’, cleaning and shining shoes. John was spotted by the Hon. J. Pulham, who referred him to Barnardo’s. John was admitted to the boy’s home on 30 April 1874, when he was fifteen years old. One year later, John was offered a job by a Mr Butler. Sadly, John’s siblings also struggled to get the care they needed. In 1878 John contacted Barnardo's boys home asking the charity to take in his half-brother. Our records indicate all of his siblings went on to live separate lives away from each other.

Elizabeth and her two younger siblings Sarah and John grew up in Liverpool.

Their father John Snr who was only described as a “coloured man”, left the family when he was offered a job as a cook on a ship called the Glengarry. He never returned, leaving their mother to raise three children on her own.

Sisters Dolly (bottom photo) and Frances Broadhurst were born in Freetown Sierra Leone in 1887 and 1890. They were of mixed background and called ‘octoroons’ on their personal records - an outdated term used to describe a person who is one-eighth black by descent.

The girls lived with their mother, who had no choice but to leave them with a group of elderly women described as ‘grandmas’, when she traded goods to earn a living. The ‘grandmas’ kept the girls in dirty living conditions and left them vulnerable to abuse. Their Barnardo’s admission report stated that one of the ‘grandmas’ made no secret of her plans to use the girls for prostitution.

To protect Dolly and Frances, their mother handed them over to a friend who promised to bring them to England and find them a good home.

The sisters were admitted to Barnardo’s on 13th November 1899. Both couldn’t read or write and only spoke ‘pidgin English’.

The girls left Barnardo’s care in 1904 and 1907 after they found work in domestic service.

Dolly met a man from Portugal and they married in Cardiff in 1918. Two years later they welcomed a baby boy.

Photos courtesy of the Daily Mail via the Barnado website.

Made In Chelsea star Binky Felstead hit the headlines this week when it was reported she was paid £20k to front children’s charity Barnardo’s.

However, it was later claimed the star was offered £3,000, a fee she allegedly never intended to keep.

The reality TV regular said she was “horrified” at the “sick” allegations and she had not in fact received any money from them.

She tweeted: “Just wanted…

OOTD – How to dress like Clueless (when you’re not going to a costume party)

Obviously I love Clueless (as every self respecting fashionista does), and have always been inspired by the outfits in it. Charity shops are full of nineties throwbacks so it should be easy to dress like Cher every day, but it often comes across costume-y. So, I was thrilled with this outfit as I felt super cute and preppy, but also still modern, and was definitely channeling Ms Horowitz.

I sol…