THAT Conference WI 2023
Day: Tuesday, July 25
Time: 10:30 AM
Prepare your digital life for the day that you hope never comes.
This talk exists to help you get your digital life in order, in case the unexpected comes up, and you are no longer able to access technology in general.
There will be a helpful worksheet that you can use to make your own digital legacy plan!
This talk is going to focus on the “life” part of your digital life, so topics are going to be:
- Describing the “Bus Factor”, focusing on your personal life.
- Overview of items that need attention
- Practical stuff
- Social media
- Digital files
- Code and repositories
- Digitizing and converting the analog and offline
- Creating conversations and asking good questions to create memories
Goals: At the end of this session, here are some key takeaways:
- Learn about your digital footprint.
- Tidy up your digital life
- Think about your future
Useful links:
- My digital legacy: A Worksheet - I created this worksheet for the session
- Technology memories: Conversation questions - I also created this list of conversation questions
- The Digital Legacy Association - A UK organization concerned with helping people create and protect their digital legacy
- A Social Media Will - from Digital Legacy Association
- StoryCorps - Great questions - Questions that help you get deep, meaningful conversations. Check out their app, as well!
- Collect, Organize, Protect: Building Your Family’s Digital Legacy - This is a presentation done by Richard Harrington of Mylio about preserving your family’s digital legacy. I found it informative and useful when putting my presentation together.
- GitHub: Naming a successor - A way to create a successor for your source code projects and organizations.
- Gickup - A tool to help you back up source code repositories from service to service.
- Andrea Dekker’s printable password worksheet - Don’t fill out the password section, but keeping track of utilities and subscriptions is a good idea.
- The mind map that I created when creating this talk, using Coggle.it
More abstract links that are less useful, but I found interesting and tangentially related:
- Can you inherit digital assets? Who will inherit your digital legacy? - video cable going over the concept of digital assets.
- Google will delete your account if you don’t log in for two years - Deleted accounts would wipe out data across Gmail, Google Drive and Docs, Google Photos, Google Calendar and YouTube.
- Don’t lose your data like a dummy - A video giving an overview of the 3-2-1 backup method
- A Misguided Guide To Finishing Your Gaming Backlog - A video going over the effort to finish a gaming backlog, along with a discussion of clutter, making plans, and the psychological effects of leaving things undone.
- The Zeigarnik Effect - A link to a wiki page about the Zeigarnik effect (which is mentioned in the Gaming Backlog video above). The actual study that was referenced is here. In general, if you make a plan, you free up cognitive resources to do other stuff. There’s less paralysis and pressure from the remaining work or tasks.
- Who Will Carry On My PlayStation 2 Adventures After I’m Gone? - An Onion article from 2003 about a guy and his digital legacy of game saves for the PlayStation 2.
- The Verge: How to arrange for your digital legacy - Some step-by-step directions on how to handle legacy/succession on some big walled gardens and social media sites. It’s from 2021, so the Twitter info is probably outdated.
- A Pharaoh to Remember - This is the Futurama Episode where Bender becomes a Pharaoh.
- Ozymandias - A poem about our futile attempts to be the masters of our legacy.
- XKCD: Dependency explained - A discussion and explanation of the XKCD “Dependency” comic I included in my session.
