That's so cool! What was your handle? Mine was andresmh. I worked on the community part during grad school :-) Scratch on!

The online community was the focus of my dissertation, so it's really great to hear your daughter has benefited from it. We worked really hard to keep the community a friendly space for everyone. It was, and continues to be, a lot of work for the team. I no longer work on Scratch, but I try to donate when I can. I encourage folks to do so as well: https://www.scratchfoundation.org/

What is your Scratch handle? I worked on the online community for my dissertation and it's always great to know how the social aspect of Scratch has helped people in their journey.

Glad the community and remixing got you engaged with Scratch! Those two things were the focus of my PhD dissertation at the Media Lab. Do you mind sharing what you do now? What was your Scratch handle? Scratch on!

I'm a dev now, of course! I'd rather not link this account to my really young usernames, out of embarrassment...

Thank you so much for the work you and the Scratch Team did! The Scratch online community was a big part of my childhood and opened so many doors in my life by keeping me engaged and leading me to the world of software. Y'all really made the world a better place with the project.

Somewhat related story: During the Mexican presidential election mentioned in the article, a PhD student at one of the top Computer Science departments in the U.S. got in touch with me (through a shared friend) because he saw I was doing research on Mexican civic tech.

He mentioned that while he was teaching a workshop at his university, two of the workshop participants, who were employees of a powerful Mexican TV network, asked him to help them discredit or deflect the student movement described in the article (the movement was called the "Mexican spring" at the time for their use of social media).

This sounded shady to the student, and he wanted to tell someone, but didn't know who. Ultimately he just avoided the TV folks for the rest of the workshop.

Weeks later, The Guardian published some leaked documents that showed nefarious ties between said TV network and the then candidate.

The student connected with the press then, but the story never came out. Perhaps he got cold feet, or maybe the journalists didn't think it was interesting enough.

I think a medallion represents a group of taxis cabs. Each cab has its own hack license.

One medallion per cab. One license per cab driver.

Shit Reddit Says

I kinda gave up, and simply create an email filter that deletes any email from the domain name of the sender.

Possibly relevant. I wrote this few months ago regarding some of the challenges with crowdsourcing crime reporting in the Mexican Drug War: http://readwrite.com/2012/08/14/the-problem-with-crowdsourci...

How is this different from, say, a coffee shop saying "sorry, we're closed because the electricity went out"?

I guess the difference would be that there is usually only one electric company that can supply you with power.

A coffee shop has very little equipment, and what they have tends to be isolated from other utilities (such as gas): they could easily run their shop off a generator (mate even a battery for a short time).