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Fandom OCs
I'm about to share my boy with you. He's very special to me and he really carried me through rough times, I loved writing him and rping him and he means a lot to me. So I hope you like him too. ^^
Marvel: Milan Egbert Oomen AKA Projekt Akela
Milan Oomen is born in Antwerpen, Belgium on the evening of July 4th, 1918. Right at the end of the first world war. His mother Arianne had an affair with a man named Victor Creed. Something her husband Sander never found out about. Milan doesn’t know of his true heritage. Milan moved to the countryside one year after his birth and grew up there. His childhood was relatively uneventful and normal until he turned 15.
When Milan was 15 his mutation kicked in for the first time when Milan fell out of a tree and broke his arm. The arm set itself in minutes at an odd angle and a crying Milan was transported to the nearest hospital to re-break and reset his arm. After that his parents kept Milan hidden away on the countryside until he turned 20. At that age he immigrated to the United States.
When he arrived in the United States Milan couldn’t speak English and because of it he had to scrape by to even get food. Eventually he got better at it and he managed to land a job at the warf. He could afford a small apartment and food from that point on.
In 1941 Pearl Harbor was attacked and it made Milan sign up for the US Army. He asked to be deployed in the pacific as opposed to Europe, he didn’t want to witness the devastation to his country and family. But what he saw in the pacific wasn’t much better. He still has nightmares about the horrors he witnessed. From villagers being used as suicide bombers to American soldiers using Japanese corpses for entertainment.
In 1945 he traveled to Hiroshima and stayed there for a month, he witnessed little boy fall down from the sky and scrambled for cover. Due to his healing factor he survived the atomic bombing and recovered after a few weeks of regenerating. The US Army pulled him back and kept him on a secret base for most of the time. He served in the cold army in an espionage division in St. Petersburg Russia, he was eventually caught and executed with his fellow soldiers. Milan was the only one that survived and he was imprisoned by the Russians. During an American mission Milan was rescued and brought back to the states.
In 1972 he met Sarah Brown during a leave in Hawaii and after ten years of dating her he married her. Not long after their marriage Sarah was expecting their first child. When she was 8 months pregnant Milan was called away to base and she was attacked in their apartment building by a heroine addict who had gotten in and pushed down the stairs. The fall killed her instantly, she broke her back. Milan heard of the incident over the radio in his truck and rushed back home. Her baby was retrieved through a C-section but after a fifteen minute trip to the nearest hospital the baby died in Milan’s arms.
To say it left a mark on him is an understatement, a part of him died that day. Broken and with no will to live Milan tried to kill himself by placing a gun against his head and pulling the trigger. He woke up two days later in a hospital bed. Many years went by, in which Milan attempted many more times to take his own life. All failed and the mentally broken man became a ghost. He lived, breathed and did his job but that’s all he did.
In 1985 Milan was recruited for a special Army devision called NEST, a team that specializes in counter terrorism. He worked hard till he took over the leadership position in 2000. Due to most of the team being older then allowed a new team was recruited.
Not long after taking command of the NEST Team in Kansas, Milan met Kuga. The feral was on leave at the time and he spend a couple of weeks camping in the woods just one mile from Kuga’s home. Kuga came back to Milan every single day and a father/daughter bond slowly developed. Kuga’s little brother James came along with her after a couple of days and he too, took to Milan quite easily. Milan found himself fathering the two young children of 10 and 7 and decided to adopt them as his own after he heard of possible abuse towards Kuga. His request was denied by the court as there was no physical evidence of abuse going on. Milan couldn’t return for James and kuga and instead was kept on acitve duty to train for a new mission.
In 2003 Milan and his team served in the Iraq war where he dealt with his nightmares all over again. He’s directly responsible for the death of several civilians because he led them into a building that was later bombed. He blames himself for that.
In 2008 Milan took the mutant cure that became available, the cure wasn’t permanent however and Milan was forced to live on.
From 2008 till 2010 Milan gets on SHIELD’s radar and several security checks and evaluations are done to determine if he’s possible agent material. He passes and in 2010 he joins the ranks of SHIELD. He’s currently a level 4 agent working for SHIELD’s undercover department. SHIELD has a contract for him with the Army, it states that as long as he’s on active field duty he’s working for SHIELD. If events were to force him to go off active duty he’d have to return to the army.
Milan is currently on probation after the events of the Galoyan rescue mission and the army is about to pull him out of SHIELD. That doesn’t stop him from trying to get along with the other agents though. He’ll try anything to keep his job at SHIELD, even if it means quitting the army.
Milan was pulled off active duty and he was forced to return to the Army. He worked closely with SHIELD agents of the undercover department. Mostly doing their paperwork.
And then, SHIELD fell.
After the fall of SHIELD Milan was picked up and rescued by HYDRA. The organisation captured and imprisoned him, performing multiple experiments on him. They extracted parts of his DNA in order to study his healing factor and replicate it for their next line of super soldiers. They also extracted his ability to see, smell and hear at phenomenal levels. His strength and agility markers were also copied and stored for future use. HYDRA wiped Milan’s memory after they collected all they needed and activated the implants in his brain. He stood under their full control and obeyed every command they gave him. Milan assassinated several SHIELD agents under their command.
After several test runs the implants failed, now only working at 30% capacity. With the failing of his implants, his memory returned to him. Not much, only about 10% but it’s something. He remembers three names of his past, Kuga, James and Bryce. He has no idea who these people are, just that they are somehow important to him.
Milan escaped the compound and ended up in Lebanon, Kansas.
And My current two projects: The Barnes/Brock twins (I am aware this is very self indulgent and it's probably not any good, but I'm having fun. And that's what matters.)
Ben Barnes & Jacen Barnes (Both 17 post SM: Homecoming, timeline ignores IW)
Benjamin Edward Brock-Barnes, born as Ellie Barnes and his brother Jacen Barnes were born to Lauren Barnes and Edward Brock Jr in Queens, NYC. Ben and Jace's father was already out of the picture at their time of birth and both boys were raised by their mother. They are the great grandchildren of Rebecca Barnes, sister to James Buchanan Barnes, and the best friends of Peter Parker and Ned Leeds (Ben) and Michelle "MJ" Jones (Jacen).
Ben wants to be an investigative Journalist and when he's not out scouting for the latest scoop in NYC, he's bugging Peter and Ned on how they can set up their own News network. Where Peter can do their photography and Ned can run the newspaper, of course.
Jacen is more interested in his blogging activities where he calls out the injustice of the world and posts about the protests he joins whenever there's no school going on. He's often joined by Michelle in this.
Ben struggles with his trans identity and being recognized for it while Jacen is more comfortable in his gay and queer identity.
When a field trip to San Fransisco goes haywire the twins are introduced to a slimier set of twins named Sleeper and Hybrid. Shenanigans ensue with the help of Spiderman, the man in the chair and justicegirl101 and before they know it, the twins are bonded to their own symbiote siblings and they're thrown into the fight of their lives.
Venom and Eddie suddenly have a lot of parenting work to do.
And that's what I got on them so far. ha, this was fun. But it also got waay to long. So that's all I'll share today. I've got way more though.
Larissa notes:
Oh my god these are amazing , the top one is my favourite though by far!! So well thoughtout and planned i am in awe! Im in love with Milan :3
Thankyou so much for sharing them with me!
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Writing Sample: MDIA417
MDIA417: Creative Industries and Cultural Labour. Final Research Project.
Precarity and Sexual Harassment in the Creative Workplace
Precarity drives sexism and sexual assault towards women in the workforce, particularly women starting out in their fields. This occurs in most industries, but is particularly acute in creative industries. This research essay seeks to prove this thesis, through a critical analysis of both scholarly literature and popular media coverage incorporating conceptions of how and why precarity occurs and its impact and feminist theory of gendered power structures, with a special focus on how precarity particularly affects women. It will also make use of a case study of the #MeToo/Times Up movement, to display how precarity in the workforce and in individual’s private lives drives womens experiences of gendered relations of power and sexual harassment in the workplace, and explore how it may be negated in the future.
Workplace sexual harassment: an overview
The reported incidences of workplace sexual harassment by gender vary from study to study, but most conclude that women experience it in greater numbers. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) contends that between 25% and 85% of American women will experience workplace sexual harassment (Feldblum & Lipnic). It is difficult to more precisely gauge how many women experience sexual harassment in the workplace as many victims do not report instances of harassment, and my paper seeks to expand on the driving forces behind this. Women in precarious employment are more likely to be subject to a specific form of exploitation: sexual harassment by their colleagues, employers or more senior figures in their industry. This is neither wholly due to the gender or economic hierarchies present in the workplace, but a complex interplay between the two (Crain). As we have seen from the explosion of the #MeToo movement, many women in the creative industries who have been subject to sexual harassment earlier in their careers do not feel comfortable speaking out about it until they were firmly established in their fields. The Times Up legal fund for victims of sexual harassment in the workplace has indicated that the greatest represented industry in applications to the fund is the arts industry, from which 9% of the total applications are sourced (Corkery).
Literature Review
Precarity in the workforce
The creative industries are situated within the service and knowledge industry, and can most broadly be defined as including the arts and culture, entertainment and copyright, and information services industries (Flew). Workers in the creative industries exemplify precarity in the modern work force. Creative work is highly insecure, often low paid, and very competitive, with workers engaging in multiple consecutive and concurrent contract and temporary gigs, rather than permanent employment (Gill & Pratt). Working multiple jobs may mean longer working hours, but actual paid labour is not the only drain on creative workers time. Depending on which part of the creative industries one works in, staying up to date with industry advances and networking is crucial and often takes place out of hours, leading to more of the creative workers time being eaten up without financial recompense. Such insecure working conditions drive exploitation of workers who are then less likely to speak out against their exploitation for myriad reasons. Autonomous workers in temporary or contract work are used to constantly managing themselves and the jobs they may work in the future on top of their current jobs. This self management may lead workers to feel it is not worth risking their long term work prospects for only a short period of potentially better working conditions, fearing ruining their chances of having their contracts renewed in a competitive industry. Workers who have yet to establish themselves in the industry and ‘precogs’ -cognitive workers engaged in precarious labour conditions- (de Peuter) are willing to put up with highly exploitative working conditions, even working for free, rationalising their undervalued labour through the belief that it is a prerequisite to better working opportunities in the future.
Precarity at home
The precariat does not only experience precarity in their job (or jobs) but in their home life too. The chronic income instability that leads on from employment insecurity has several ill effects on an individual’s personal life, such as unstable living situations, food insecurity, and the associated health issues brought on by these conditions (Cochrane et al.) Insecure employment may affect the precariat’s ability to pay for housing, which is compounded in the creative industry whose workers are often concentrated in cities such as Los Angeles, San Fransisco, New York, and London (or Wellington!), cities that trend towards higher than average house prices and rental costs. This concentration is largely driven by local policy and the rise of the ‘creative city’ as regions look towards the creative industries as the logical next step after industrial and managerial capitalism to drive economic growth and competitiveness. (Florida, in Flew, Oakley). Much of the work in the creative industries can be highly transitory in nature (Screen Women’s Action Group, Anonymous in Curtin & Sanson), which leads workers to ‘follow the money’ rather than establishing a complete life in any one place. Following productions in this way may also erode worker’s work-life balance further, as not having a defined ‘home base’ of sorts means there is less of a distinction between work and home.
Precarity crossover and the social factory
Other autonomist Marxist scholars contest that precarity is not defined by its structuring of the worker’s work life or personal life, but as a mechanism of control that causes the two to bleed together, “requiring workers not to work all the time but to be constantly available for work” (Hardt & Negri, p. 146). Labour is no longer organised around a central factory, but dispersed out into society (Hardt & Negri, in Gill & Pratt). In the creative industries, informal networking outside of ‘standard’ working hours (if such a thing can exist in the social factory) may be perceived as necessary by precarious workers to survive in their chosen career path (Gill & Pratt). In relation to sexual harassment, the perceived compulsivity of informal networking meetings that often take place in settings traditionally not associated as work settings, such as restaurants and bars, by precarious female workers may make them feel obligated to put themselves in unsafe situations for the hopeful benefit of their careers. From the testimonies of Harvey Weinstein’s victims, this seemed to be his modus operandi (Farrow). New Zealand’s Screen Women’s Action Group identified “[t]he fluidity and merging of social events with work” (Screen Women’s Action Group, p. 2) as contributing factors to the prevalence of sexual harassment unique to the screen industry, listing events such as wrap parties, publicity tours, film festivals, and development work happening in private homes as examples.
Precarity and reporting of sexual harassment
The #MeToo movement has somewhat been characterised in popular media by well known and established actresses speaking out about sexual harassment and even assault they had experienced several years or decades ago, largely because the individuals whose stories are most heard are those with the platforms and agency to ensure they are heard. The challenge for #MeToo as it continues to grow is how the movement will enable the voices of those without access to the media, and protect those in precarious situations for whom speaking out bears greater consequences and potential sanctions (Zarkov & Davis). Because of this, I hypothesise that the actresses concerned’s precarious working situations were a driving force behind their choice to stay silent at the time. The period of time between alleged harassments and those who experienced them’s speaking out has led many outside of academia to question why these celebrities waited so long to talk about their harassment, especially in the case of Harvey Weinstein, whose behaviour has been outed as being an open secret in Hollywood for two decades. Indeed, a good deal of popular media coverage has focused on trying to answer that question (Towle, Williams, Farrow), most of which can be reduced down to one concept: power, and powerlessness. Feminist theory posits that workplace sexual harassment is driven more by an underlying desire to reinforce traditional gendered power structures than sexual gratification, which explains why women are dogged by workplace harassment even as they move up the ladder in their organisations (McLaughlin, Uggen & Blackstone). Thus, even women in management positions still experience precarity at work.
#MeToo as a case study emphasises workplace sexual harassment’s grounding in power dynamics, as those who feel they have little power (the precariat) remain silent until those they perceive to have power speak out and provide them with a platform to stand on. For example, the Screen Women’s Action Group reports that while hosting forums for women in the industry, a question they heard constantly was “how can we do anything when they are so all-powerful?” (Screen Women’s Action Group, p. 2). Reporting harassment also takes time and labour many in precarious living and working situations simply do not have, whether they are working multiple jobs or undertaking all the excess labour that comes with income insecurity, such as applying for assistance programs, or looking for/applying for new work (Cochrane et al).
Glamorisation of Creative Labour
Something that sets the creative industries apart from other industries is the glamorisation of its work. Creative industry work is reified as “‘cool’ jobs in ‘hot’ industries” (Neff, Wissinger, & Zukin). Because the work is perceived as providing more than just a wage to the worker, such as social currency and other ‘soft benefits’, like promises of future work, flexibility of labor, or self-actualisation and fulfilment, it can be construed as ‘lifestyle labour’, wherein the social and lifestyle benefits afforded by ‘cool’ work are accepted as supplements to reduced monetary compensation (Zendel). In addition, workers are made to feel as though they should be grateful for the opportunity to work in such ‘cool’ industries, and therefore can and should put up with bad working conditions, whether they be crushingly long hours, undervalued/under-compensated labour, or coworkers/bosses sexually harassing them. Workers in many industries are also increasingly being required by their employers to engage in more labour outside of normal working hours training themselves in new skills to keep up in their fields (Kotamraju, in Neff, Wissinger, & Zukin), which falls within the new category of labour posited by Neff, Wissinger, and Zukin: entrepreneurial labour. So not only is the work itself glorified, but also how it is conducted. The glorification of creative work is encouraged by local government institutions who seek to attract creative workers and grow their economies alongside their creative industries, supporting the image makeover of the starving artist “whose long-abiding vulnerability to occupational neglect is now magically transformed, under the new order of creativity, into a model of enterprising, risk-tolerant pluck” (Ross, p. 15). Meanwhile, the hordes of exploited digital labourers whose work is ‘freely given’ (Terranova) serve as a reminder to creative workers not to charge too much or ask too much of their employers (such as a fair wage or reasonable hours), as there are always more ‘passionate’ workers ready to take their place once their contract expires or their current gig is complete.
Another form of glorification of specifically creative work is the ‘do what you love’ (DWYL) ethos. DWYL suggests that only doing work that a worker loves and is passionate about doing can provide them with self-actualisation, which creates a necessary division between loveable and non-loveable work. The ethos is simply not applicable to workers in fields such as cleaning, whose labour is devalued in the process (Tokumitsu). Not only this, but for the myth of doing-what-you-love to remain plausible to the masses of creative workers who may be swayed by it, labour patterns that do not fit in with the reified image of flexible, enjoyable, and fulfilling creative work must be varnished over and neutralised, which is only too convenient for the elites seeking to minimise such labour anyway. As said by Tokumitsu, “the rise of DWYL demands active refusal to acknowledge work that doesn’t legitimize the ways in which the world’s political, business, and social leaders justify their own power” (Tokumitsu, p. 29). So, non-creative labour is devalued, and simultaneously the inglorious aspects of creative work are minimised; is it any wonder that precarious workers in the creative industries feel they have more to lose when they engage in actions that may threaten their jobs, and are willing to put up with worse working conditions?
Precarity and Women’s Labour
Women have been under-compensated for their labour since time immemorial, being traditionally expected to take on the role of nurturer of children and the family for little recompense. This has unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, followed women into the workplace. One quantitative measure for this is the gender pay gap, which is particularly acute in the creative industries. In Australia (as of 2015), the gender pay gap across the board was 17.3% (Workplace Gender Equality Agency), compared with 32% for professional artists (Throsby & Petetskaya). In the US, the overall gender pay gap was 22% in 2017 (PayScale), compared with 32% in creative industries. Though that figure varies greatly amongst professions, from 54% for DJs/Musicians to 12% for cinematographers, across almost all factors and industries, male creatives are compensated better than their female counterparts (HoneyBook). Even higher education is insufficient for women in the creative industries to guarantee a fair income, as 24% of woman creatives earn under $5USD per hour (in other words, less than minimum wage) despite 73% holding bachelor degrees (ibid). In the United Kingdom, women employed in the cultural and creative industries earned on average £5800GBP less per year as of 2014 than otherwise-similar men net all controls (O'Brien, et al.). Other descriptors for the ‘ideal’ worker in the creative industries —flexible, grateful, obedient— are terms that coincide with a traditional conception of womanhood. Historically, two thirds of the casual, contingent, and part time labour force was filled by women, and presently women are almost twice as likely to work part time as men. Women also fill three quarters of unpaid internship positions, and industries that rely heavily on internships, such as fashion, media, and arts, tend to be highly feminised (Schwartz). Unpaid internships also tend to drive worker precarity as they replace paid positions and allow companies to skirt minimum wage and labour laws, a situation that is particularly acute in the creative industries (Shade & Jacobson).
As of yet, there is no study focusing particularly on how precarity in its various forms drives sexual harassment of women in the creative industries, and my paper seeks to fill this gap, making use of the large increase in creative women coming forward to tell their stories in the last year as a result of the #MeToo movement.
Methodology
My paper uses a comparative analysis of relevant scholarly texts, explicating on their core concepts and contrasting them with each other, and an analysis of popular/news media articles either written by or featuring interviews with women who have experienced sexual harassment while working in the creative industries, applying the theoretical concepts I have identified in the literature. I use the #MeToo/Times Up movements as a case study to prove the real world consequences of precarity on women’s lived experiences, focusing particularly on the statements made by women in the creative industries as part of the movement. This is because many of their statements speak to precarity as the driving force behind either their experiences of workplace harassment or their initial decision to stay silent about it. As literature on the #MeToo movement is currently scarce and currently predominantly focused on the American creative industries, I will predominantly be focussing on sexual harassment in an American context, while my discussion on precarity will be informed by more global literature.
Coverage in Popular Media
In the wake of #MeToo, numerous media outlets have released articles whose content predominantly consists of interviews with employees in the creative industries (Domanick, Farrow, King). Popular media coverage does not often identify the scholarly concepts present in academic literature, but it does provide a wealth of ‘real life’ examples through which such concepts can be further explicate and problematise them. The interviewee’s stories speak to industries driven by intense competition and financial pressures, staffed by freelance and casual workers operating in the gaps of labour protection laws, and compulsory attendance at alcohol heavy events and the subsequent consequences of alcohol driven lapses in inhibitions (Domanick). Even in the midst of #MeToo, when publicly coming forward about one’s harassment (particularly at the hands of a large industry figure) is arguably less risky than ever before, many who agreed to be interviewed about their experiences in the creative industries still did not want to be identified and spoke only on the condition of anonymity, fearing backlash could harm or even end their careers. One such woman is ‘Eve’, who works in the recording industry (at the time as an A&R scout), and dealt with sexual harassment from an executive of a large organisation in her industry —an organisation that she did not even work at at the time, but hoped to in her future.
“There was an innate feeling that if I were to tell him that I was offended, or set a boundary, that he would never call me again and just disappear back into the ether of the inner circle, and I would never see it again…He had big power in that job to change my life. I don't even know if I'd be where I am right now if I didn't have what he showed me.”
(‘Eve’, in Domanick)
Others stay silent because their harassers control resources they perceive as vital they have access to for the continued viability of their work providing means enough to survive, such as ‘Alice’ (pseudonym), at the time a freelance worker for an ‘up and coming’ podcast network:
"I was absolutely afraid that if I tried to do something in response to [the harassment] that my show would be dropped from the network, effectively killing off most of our listenership…I was also afraid of being alienated by the owner.”
(‘Alice’, in King)
‘Kate’ (pseudonym) a former freelance music writer blamed the precariousness of freelance writing as the main reason she did not inform her editor after being sexually assaulted before an interview with a well known artist, and said the job was “the reason I was able to meet people and get assignments” (in Domanick).
Actresses and victims of sexual harassment at the hands of Harvey Weinstein, Emily Nestor and Gabrielle Moss, spoke to the precarity of their positions and place within the film industry when explaining why they did not come forward about their experiences earlier.
“I was mostly just scared that no one would believe me, or that I would end up out of a job if I tried to prove it” —Gabrielle Moss
“I was very afraid of him. And I knew how well connected he was. And how if I pissed him off then I could never have a career in that industry.” —Emily Nestor
(Both in Farrow)
Many others said that their experiences of harassment made them reconsider their career path in the creative industries, such as freelance writer Natalie, who said her experience of sexual harassment at the hands of a senior writer at her first writing gig left her feeling “minimised”:
"I looked at this gig as affirmation that I was on the right track and could make it as a writer, and as soon as that first DM came in, I immediately felt objectified and disrespected.”
(Natalie, in King)
One difficulty in attempting to report sexual harassment is the lack of codes and regulations surrounding sexual harassment that actually cover many creative workers in their daily work life. Freelance and contract workers are often not covered by anti-harassment laws, and many do not have a sexual harassment clause in their contracts (Honeybook). The other major barrier to reporting sexual harassment is identifying what behaviour actually constitutes sexual harassment, which can be particularly difficult in the creative industry, where networking events are perceived as compulsory to sustaining and growing ones career, and often take place in informal settings where the appropriateness of behaviour can be hard to judge:
“When your business is relationships, there are so many grey areas…We know what the obvious things are, but what are the not obvious things? When does flirtation become harassment? There is no road map.”
(Anonymous former label publicist, in Domanick)
Findings and Analysis
The occurrence of sexual harassment in the creative industries is driven by multiple factors. While many women’s experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace are influenced by the precariousness of their employment, not all women who experience harassment are in precarious working situations. Thus it is important to also analyse the multi-faceted concept of power, who has and does not have it, and to incorporate feminist theory such as notions of gendered power structures in the workplace when investigating women’s experiences of workplace sexual harassment. Both scholarly and popular media literature on sexual harassment tend to fixate on power, but each has a slightly different conception of what power constitutes and how it is driven. The conceptions of power imbalances certainly seem to play a role in how workplace sexual harassment is enabled to both occur and perpetuate, as victims perceive their harassers as being too powerful for their actions to have any effect, as is the case for numerous victims of Harvey Weinstein and the women employed in the screen industry surveyed by the Screen Women’s Action Group. The women whose interviews I read felt the precarity of their situations acutely in the separation they felt from their harassers, describing them as belonging to an ‘inner circle’ or being untouchable, in direct contrast to their own situation within their industry, which they felt was easily erodible.
Work in the creative industries is heavily glorified, so workers are willing to put up with working conditions and labour compensation they would not accept in other, less ‘cool’ industries. This can mean that fringe benefits such as social currency are accepted in place of financial recompense, which feeds into the precarity experienced by low-waged workers in their home lives, such as unstable living situations and food instability. This glorification is closely tied to the ‘do what you love’ phenomenon, whose precursor was a conception of work as something that entirely subordinated pleasure (Sandoval). Of course by comparison work that can be marketed as ‘doing what you love’ appears to be a better choice of labour to engage in, as through the self-fulfilment ones labour produces they may state that their labour is also working for them. I would argue that the glorification of creative work is one of the main reasons why sexual harassment is such a major issue in the creative industries compared to other industries. Creative workers feel that they have more to lose risking their creative job or future in their industry than they would in other, less glamorous jobs, and industry elites are aware of this and able use it to their advantage, knowing that the combination of that and the precarious situations of their victims will protect them by minimising the chances that their victims will report them.
Creative work also often entails a good deal of self marketing. Because of this creatives are highly conscious of their image and seek to preserve it, making them less likely to engage in activities that may tarnish their reputation, such as coming forward about their sexual harassment and being branded ‘difficult’. Their image of their labour may also become highly personal, causing the lines between their labour and their personal identity to blur a great deal. The eradication of the divisions between work life and home life of the past has led workers —particularly workers ‘doing what they love’— to feel that their work is their life. This ideology can be seen in a quote from an anonymous victim of sexual harassment at the hands of Harvey Weinstein, on why they had not come forward about their experience: “If Harvey were to discover my identity, I’m worried that he could ruin my life” (Anonymous, in Farrow). The use of ‘life’ rather than ‘career’ was likely not intentional, but it exemplifies how great an impact they perceive their job having on their life.
One survey focused on women in the creative industries’s experiences of workplace sexual harassment found that 54% of self-employed and freelance women (a common employment situation in the creative industries) reported being sexually harassed at least once in their careers, and 83% did not report their harassment to anyone. Perhaps more troublingly, of those that did choose to make a formal complaint, 51% reported having their complaints ignored (Honeybook). This echoes the sentiments of the women whose statements I found, as one of the reasons many who remained silent about the harassment they experienced gave for not speaking out was a feeling of hopelessness, as they did not believe that their harassers would face any consequences due to their coming forward. Even if they did want to come forward, for workers in many creative industries (such as the music industry) there is no formal governing body to set or uphold industry standards (Domanick). Numerous other creatives are not protected by workplace sexual harassment laws as their working arrangements do not demarcate them to be in a formal employer-employee relationship. This category includes a diverse grouping across the creative industries, including many freelance and contract workers like publicists, makeup artists, or digital artists, and interns. Some creative industries have unions with sexual harassment codes of conduct, but these can either be difficult to join, like the Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild of the IATSE, which has three methods for entry, each of which has conditions that are nigh impossible to satisfy (Anonymous in Curtin & Sanson); not very powerful, as is the case in New Zealand following the introduction of the Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill in 2010 (Cowlishaw), or hesitant to discipline their own members, particularly in cases of co-worker sexual harassment (Crain).
Earlier on in this essay I identified networking as being one of the clearest examples of labour disseminating out from traditional ‘work’ spaces to society at large (as discussed by Gill & Pratt). The precise nature of networking in informal spaces that lends it to being easily manipulated to perpetuate sexual harassment is that appropriate behaviour in such situations sits in a grey area, meaning that inappropriate behaviour that would be more clearly defined as harassment in an office setting with behavioural codes of conduct is more difficult to assert as being inappropriate. This makes it difficult for creative workers to assess whether their experiences actually constitute sexual harassment. The introduction of alcohol into the equation makes it even more difficult for creative workers to identify their experience as deliberate sexual harassment, or feel confident that they will be taken seriously or believed by their peers should they come forward. Unfortunately this is common as many networking events either take place in bars and restaurants where drinking is expected, and even industry events that do not take place in such venues generally still feature alcohol.
Conclusion
My research confirmed my hypothesis that precarity is a major factor in women’s experiences of workplace harassment. This is particularly acute in the creative industries, due to the extreme imbalances of power present, and because of the glamorisation of creative work, which is driven by concepts such as the ‘do what you love’ ethos, and the informal situations many aspects of creative work are conducted in, such as networking. Some of the limitations of the study included the quotes analysed being pulled from various existing interviews with workers in the creative industries rather than one homogenous study, so the responses I gathered were not in response to the same questions or from interviews conducted in a consistent manner, and may have some discrepancies because of this. However, I believe that this study provides a case for the hypothesis being accurate, so further, more in depth research over a greater period of time into women workers experiences of precarity in the creative industries is justified, in order to identify new ways of combating workplace sexual harassment in the creative industries in the hopes of reducing the high levels at which it is currently occurring.Works Cited
Anonymous. Anonymous, Makeup Artist. In Curtin, M. and Sanson, K. (Eds.) Voices of labor: creativity, craft, and conflict in global Hollywood. University of California Press: Oakland, 2017.
Cochrane, W. et al. A statistical portrait of the NZ precariat. Precarity : Uncertain, insecure and unequal lives in Aotearoa New Zealand. Eds. S. Groot, C. van Ommen, B. Masters-Awatere & N. Tassell-Matamua. 2017. 27-36.
Corkery, M. “Low-Paid Women Get Hollywood Money to File Harassment Suits.” The New York Times [New York]. 22 May 2018: Web.
Cowlishaw, S. “‘The Hobbit law’ - there and back again.” Newsroom. 30 Jan. 2018: Web.
Crain, M. Sex Discrimination as Collective Harm. The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor. Ed. Dorothy Sue Cobble. New York: Cornell University Press, 2007. 99-116.
Creating Culture Change Around Sexual Harassment in the Screen Industry. Screen Women’s Action Group, 2018.
De Peuter, G. (2011). Creative Economy and Labor Precarity: A Contested Convergence. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 35(4), 417–425.
Domanick, A. “The Dollars and Desperation Silencing #MeToo in Music.” Noisey, 22 Mar. 2018.
Feldblum, C. & Lipnic, V. Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2016.
Farrow, R. "From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories.” The New Yorker [New York]. 23 Oct. 2017: Web.
Flew, T. International models of creative industries policy. Creative Industries. London: Sage, 2012. 33-52.
Gill, R., & Pratt, A. In the Social Factory? Theory, Culture & Society, 25.7-8 (2008): 1-30.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.
HoneyBook. 2017 Gender Pay Gap: Creative Economy Report. HoneyBook & Rising Tide, 2017.
HoneyBook. Sexual Harassment Report. HoneyBook & Rising Tide, 2018.
King, E. “How Freelancers Are Forced to Fend for Themselves Against Sexual Harassment” Broadly. 3 Nov. 2016: Web.
McLaughlin, H., Uggen, C., & Blackstone, A. Sexual Harassment, Workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power. American Sociological Review, 77.4 (2012): 625–647.
Neff, G., Wissinger, E., & Zukin, S. Entrepreneurial Labor among Cultural Producers: “Cool” Jobs in “Hot” Industries, Social Semiotics, 15:3 (2005): 307-334.
Oakley, K. Include Us Out: Economic Development and Social Policy in the Creative Industries. Cultural Trends, 15.4, (2006): 255-273.
O’Brien, D., et al. “Are the Creative Industries Meritocratic? An Analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey.” Cultural Trends, 25.2, (2016): 1–16.
PayScale. THE STATE OF THE Gender Pay Gap in 2018. Payscale.com, 2018.
Ross, A. Nice work if you can get it: the mercurial career of creative industries policy. Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 1.1, (Winter 2006-7): 13-30.
Sandoval, M. From passionate labour to compassionate work: Cultural co-ops, do what you love and social change. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21.2, (2017): 113 - 129
Schwartz, M. “Opportunity Costs: The True Price of Internships.” Dissent, 60.1, (Winter 2013): 41-45.
Shade, L., and Jacobson, J. Hungry for the job: gender, unpaid internships, and the creative industries. The Sociological Review, 63:S1, (2015): 188–205.
Throsby, D., and Petetskaya, K. Making Art Work: An economic study of professional artists in Australia. Australia Council for the Arts, 2017.
Tokumitsu, M. “In the Name of Love.” Slate. 16 Jan. 2014: Web.
Tokumitsu, M. Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness. New York: Reagan Arts, 2015.
Towle, M. “Why did no one speak out about Harvey Weinstein?” The Wireless [Wellington]. 11 Oct. 2017: Web.
Williams, Z. “Why did no one speak out about Harvey Weinstein?” The Guardian [Manchester]. 10 Oct. 2017: Web.
Workplace Gender Equality Agency. Gender pay gap statistics. Australian Government, 2016.
Zarkov, D., and Davis, K. Ambiguities and dilemmas around #MeToo: #ForHow Long and #WhereTo? European Journal of Women’s Studies, 25.1 (2018): 3-9.
Zendel, A. LIVING THE DREAM: PRECARIOUS LABOUR IN THE LIVE MUSIC INDUSTRY. MA thesis, University of Toronto, 2014.
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Pieter Wuille on Building Bitcoin - WBD132
'œMy priorities are driven by what is cool to work on.''" Pieter Wuille
Location: San Fransisco
Date: Monday 22nd July
Company: Blockstream
Role: Co-founder
Pieter Wuille is one of the most influential, respected and prolific Bitcoin developers. While his career began at Google, the appeal of working on Bitcoin's open-source protocol was too tempting and led him to co-found Blockstream.
Pieter has had a significant influence on the Bitcoin project and has the third most commits on the codebase. He has helped to implement some of the most significant changes to the protocol, including Segregated Witness, one of the most contentious hard forks in Bitcoin's history.
As others debate the Bitcoin roadmap, Pieter has managed to remove himself from the infighting; instead, focusing his time on improving Bitcoin. As such, he's now working on implementing Taproot, Schnorr Signatures and MAST.
In this interview, we hear how Pieter first heard about Bitcoin in 2010, entering the world of mining and selling thousands of Bitcoin for $0.20. I also find out what he thinks of Bitcoin in 2019 and what he argues is the threat to its future.
Bonus: we also hear from a Blockstream intern at the end about his experience working at Blockstream and supporting Pieter in developing Bitcoin.
This episode is also on:
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TuneIn
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API management with Kong
Utilising APIs to foster innovation and to create new business opportunities is not a new concept. A lot of success stories from eBay, Netflix, Expedia, mobile.de, and many others show the growing trend of API-driven business models. Most of the vendors for API management solutions are well-known players, such as IBM, Oracle, or MuleSoft, that try to provide a solution coupled to their existing ecosystem of enterprise products. One of the few exceptions is Kong Inc (formerly known as Mashape Inc), a San-Fransisco-based startup that became popular in the last two years by open-sourcing their core business product: Kong API gateway. In this article, I will briefly introduce the topic of API management and show how to bootstrap and use Kong API gateway.
Why does API management matter?
Adaptation and speed have become the key success factors in the software industry. We can see the results of this trend in the emergence of microservices architectures, continuous delivery, DevOps culture, agile software development, and cloud computing. In order to be fast, you have to split a system into encapsulated services and be able to change each part of the system in an instant. This trend also results in high demand for integration solutions between different applications and services. API management plays an important role in this integration by providing clear boundaries and abstractions between systems. Today we generate value by combining different services instead of building our own solutions. This is why cloud computing and SaaS applications are very popular. With the growing trend of APIs, many companies adjusted their business model, and some even moved to an API-centric business approach completely. Expedia Inc generates 90% of the revenue through Expedia Affiliate Network, an API platform. Netflix has built an ecosystem of over 1000 APIs to support multiple devices for their streaming platform. Salesforce, one of the fastest growing CRM vendors generates over 50% of their revenue with APIs. Other common uses cases for APIs are:
reach users or acquire content
generate traffic
expand partner network
find new business opportunities
create new revenue streams
support multiple devices
create flexibility for internal projects
provide integration capabilities with other systems
But utilising APIs is not easy and it comes with a price. The cost for the mentioned benefits is an increasing technical and organisational complexity. In this blog post we will explore ways to tackle the technical complexity and how Kong API gateway can help deal with it.
Kong Architecture
Kong is an open source API gateway to manage RESTful APIs. It is part of Kong Enterprise, a bundle of Kong API gateway, a developer portal called Gelato and an analytics platform by the name of Galileo. It is aimed for enterprise customers that run thousands of APIs and require dedicated 24/7 support. For small to medium-sized companies, Kong API gateway (community edition) will suffice to make first steps in API management.
Kong Architecture with five core components.
The five components of Kong architecture are: nginx, OpenResty, Datastore, plugins and a RESTful admin API. The core low-level component is nginx, a well-known and rocksolid web server. By 2017 35.5% of all known and 54.2% of top 100,000 websites worldwide use nginx. It can handle up to 10,000 simultaneous connections on one node with low memory footprint and is often used as a reverse proxy in microservice architectures, a load balancer, SSL termination proxy, or a static content web server. Apart from these use cases, nginx has many more features which deserve their own blog posts. OpenResty is a web platform that glues nginx core, LuaJIT, Lua libraries and third-party nginx modules to provide a web server for scalable web applications and web services. It was originally built by taobao.com, the biggest online auction platform in Asia with 369 million active users (2017) and donated in 2011. After that, Cloudflare Inc. supported and developed the platform until 2016. Since then, the OpenResty Software Foundation has ensured the future development of the platform. The datastore component uses Apache Cassandra or PostgreSQL to handle the storage of the configuration data, consumers, and plugins of all APIs. The API configuration is also cached within nginx, so the database traffic should be low. Plugins are Lua modules that are executed during a request/response lifecycle. They enrich the API gateway with functionalities for different use cases. For instance, if you want to secure your API, you would use a security plugin dedicated to providing only this functionality during the request. The Kong plugin system is open and you can write your own custom plugins. Finally, there is a RESTful admin API to manage the APIs. It may feel strange at the beginning to have no user interface. From a developer perspective, this is actually nice, because it provides a necessary tool to automate your workflows, for example with Postman, httpie or curl. Working with Kong for several months now, I have never felt the need to have a user interface because I could access all information in a fast and reliable way. But if you want to have a nice dashboard for your APIs you can use Konga or kong-dashboard, both free and open source community projects.
Now let’s see how to manage APIs with Kong and which plugins provide basic security features.
Kong API gateway in action
This part will be more technical than the previous. First, I will show you how to create a minimal infrastructure for Kong API gateway. Then I will add an API and a security plugin to restrict the access to a specific user.
To start the infrastructure, I will use docker-compose with this service definition:
version: '2.1' services: kong-database: container_name: kong-database image: postgres:9.4 environment: - POSTGRES_USER=kong - POSTGRES_DB=kong healthcheck: test: ["CMD", "pg_isready", "-U", "postgres"] interval: 10s timeout: 5s retries: 5 kong-migration: image: kong depends_on: kong-database: condition: service_healthy environment: - KONG_DATABASE_postgres - KONG_PG_HOST=kong-database command: kong migrations up kong: container_name: kong image: kong:0.11.0 depends_on: kong-database: condition: service_healthy kong-migration: condition: service_started environment: - KONG_DATABASE=postgres - KONG_PG_HOST=kong-database - KONG_PG_DATABASE=kong expose: - 8000 - 8001 - 8443 - 8444 ports: - "8000-8001:8000-8001" healthcheck: test: ["CMD-SHELL", "curl -I -s -L http://127.0.0.1:8000 || exit 1"] interval: 5s retries: 10
You can also install Kong on many different platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, DC/OS and many others. In my docker-compose definition, there are three services: kong-database, kong and kong-migration. I use the PostgreSQL Docker image for the Datastore component that was mentioned in the architecture overview, but you can use Cassandra as well. The kong-service exposes four different ports for two functionalities:
8000, 8443: HTTP & HTTPS access to the managed APIs (consumer endpoint)
8001, 8444: HTTP & HTTPS access to the admin API (administration endpoint)
The kong-migration service is used to create the database user and tables in kong-database. This bootstrap functionality is not provided by the kong-service, so you need to run kong migrations up within the container only once. With docker-compose up the services will be up and running. Your docker ps command should output something like this:
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES 87eea678728f kong:0.11.0 "/docker-entrypoin..." Less than a second ago Up 2 seconds (health: starting) 0.0.0.0:8000-8001->8000-8001/tcp, 0.0.0.0:8443-8444->8443-8444/tcp kong 4e2bf871f0c7 postgres:9.4 "docker-entrypoint..." 3 hours ago Up 4 minutes (healthy) 5432/tcp kong-database
Now check the status by sending a GET request to the admin API. I use the tool HTTPie for this, but you can run curl command or use Postman as an alternative.
$ http localhost:8001/apis/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 14:59:25 GMT Server: kong/0.11.0 Transfer-Encoding: chunked { "data": [], "total": 0 }
The Kong admin API is working, but there are no APIs configured. Let’s add an example:
$ http post localhost:8001/apis/ name=example_api upstream_url=https://example.com uris=/my_api HTTP/1.1 201 Created Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 15:03:55 GMT Server: kong/0.11.0 Transfer-Encoding: chunked { "created_at": 1507907036000, "http_if_terminated": false, "https_only": false, "id": "59d9749b-694a-4645-adad-d2c974b3df76", "name": "example_api", "preserve_host": false, "retries": 5, "strip_uri": true, "upstream_connect_timeout": 60000, "upstream_read_timeout": 60000, "upstream_send_timeout": 60000, "upstream_url": "https://example.com", "uris": [ "/my_api" ] }
Simply make a POST request to localhost:8001/apis/ with three mandatory parameters in the http body:
name: the API name
upstream_url: the target URL that points to your API server
uris: URIs prefixes that point to your API
There are of course more parameters for ssl, timeouts, http methods, and others. You will find them in the documentation if you want to tinker with them. Now call the API:
$ http localhost:8000/my_api HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: max-age=604800 Connection: keep-alive Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 606 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 09:02:26 GMT Etag: "359670651+gzip" Expires: Tue, 24 Oct 2017 09:02:26 GMT Last-Modified: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 23:54:35 GMT Server: ECS (dca/249F) Vary: Accept-Encoding Via: kong/0.11.0 X-Cache: HIT X-Kong-Proxy-Latency: 592 X-Kong-Upstream-Latency: 395 Example Domain ...
In many cases you want to protect your API and give access only to dedicated users, so let’s see how Kong consumers and plugins work.
Consumers and Plugins
Consumers are objects that are (technical) users that consume an API. The data structure is rather simple with just three fields: id, username and custom_id. To create a consumer, send a POST request to localhost:8001/consumers/
$ http post localhost:8001/consumers/ username=John HTTP/1.1 201 Created Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 10:06:19 GMT Server: kong/0.11.0 Transfer-Encoding: chunked { "created_at": 1508234780000, "id": "bdbba9d1-5948-4e1a-94bd-55979b7117a3", "username": "John" }
You have to provide either a username or a custom_id or both in the request body. Additionally you can set a custom_id for a mapping between a consumer and a user of your internal system, for example an ID in your CRM system. Use it to maintain consistency between Kong consumers and your source of truth for user data. I will now add a security plugin to my API and link the consumer to it. This will ensure that only this consumer can access the API with a specific key. A Kong plugin is a set of Lua modules that are executed during a request-response lifecycle of an API. You can add a plugin to all APIs, restrict it only for a specific API or a specific consumer. In my case I will add the key authentication plugin:
$ http post localhost:8001/apis/example_api/plugins name=key-auth Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 11:59:16 GMT Server: kong/0.11.0 Transfer-Encoding: chunked { "api_id": "36d04e5d-436d-4132-abdc-e4d42dc67068", "config": { "anonymous": "", "hide_credentials": false, "key_in_body": false, "key_names": [ "apikey" ] }, "created_at": 1508241556000, "enabled": true, "id": "8eecbe27-af95-49d2-9a0a-5c71b9d5d9bd", "name": "key-auth" }
The API name examlpe_api in the request URL restricts the plugin execution only to this API. Now if I try to use the API, the response will be:
$ http localhost:8000/my_api HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 12:03:24 GMT Server: kong/0.11.0 Transfer-Encoding: chunked WWW-Authenticate: Key realm="kong" { "message": "No API key found in request" }
Now I need to create a key for my consumer:
$ http POST localhost:8001/consumers/John/key-auth key=secret_key HTTP/1.1 201 Created Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 12:35:11 GMT Server: kong/0.11.0 Transfer-Encoding: chunked { "consumer_id": "bdbba9d1-5948-4e1a-94bd-55979b7117a3", "created_at": 1508243712000, "id": "02d2afd6-1fb6-4713-860f-704c52355780", "key": "secret_key" }
If you omit the key field, Kong will generate a random key for you. Now call the API with the created key:
$ http localhost:8000/my_api apikey=='secret_key' HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: max-age=604800 Connection: keep-alive Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 606 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 12:40:46 GMT Etag: "359670651+gzip" Expires: Tue, 24 Oct 2017 12:40:46 GMT Last-Modified: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 23:54:35 GMT Server: ECS (dca/249B) Vary: Accept-Encoding Via: kong/0.11.0 X-Cache: HIT X-Kong-Proxy-Latency: 25 X-Kong-Upstream-Latency: 374 Example Domain ...
Pass the apikey as a query parameter or as a header in your API call. The plugin also has configurations to hide the key after the request has been processed or to look it up in a list of keys. It is also possible to configure plugins on the consumer level, so each consumer will have their own settings. For example, you can create different rate limits for your consumers, so some of them can access your API more frequently than the others.
Summary
In this blogpost I’ve introduced the topic of APIs and why it could matter for your business. Kong API gateway is a great open-source project that can help you manage APIs for free. With just few http requests, we have created and secured our first API. The RESTful admin API of Kong is clean and simple, which allows for fast integration into most continuous delivery pipelines. In the upcoming blog post I will show you how to build your own plugin and use the OpenID provider to manage API access.
The post API management with Kong appeared first on codecentric AG Blog.
API management with Kong published first on http://ift.tt/2vCN0WJ
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API management with Kong
Utilising APIs to foster innovation and to create new business opportunities is not a new concept. A lot of success stories from eBay, Netflix, Expedia, mobile.de, and many others show the growing trend of API-driven business models. Most of the vendors for API management solutions are well-known players, such as IBM, Oracle, or MuleSoft, that try to provide a solution coupled to their existing ecosystem of enterprise products. One of the few exceptions is Kong Inc (formerly known as Mashape Inc), a San-Fransisco-based startup that became popular in the last two years by open-sourcing their core business product: Kong API gateway. In this article, I will briefly introduce the topic of API management and show how to bootstrap and use Kong API gateway.
Why does API management matter?
Adaptation and speed have become the key success factors in the software industry. We can see the results of this trend in the emergence of microservices architectures, continuous delivery, DevOps culture, agile software development, and cloud computing. In order to be fast, you have to split a system into encapsulated services and be able to change each part of the system in an instant. This trend also results in high demand for integration solutions between different applications and services. API management plays an important role in this integration by providing clear boundaries and abstractions between systems. Today we generate value by combining different services instead of building our own solutions. This is why cloud computing and SaaS applications are very popular. With the growing trend of APIs, many companies adjusted their business model, and some even moved to an API-centric business approach completely. Expedia Inc generates 90% of the revenue through Expedia Affiliate Network, an API platform. Netflix has built an ecosystem of over 1000 APIs to support multiple devices for their streaming platform. Salesforce, one of the fastest growing CRM vendors generates over 50% of their revenue with APIs. Other common uses cases for APIs are:
reach users or acquire content
generate traffic
expand partner network
find new business opportunities
create new revenue streams
support multiple devices
create flexibility for internal projects
provide integration capabilities with other systems
But utilising APIs is not easy and it comes with a price. The cost for the mentioned benefits is an increasing technical and organisational complexity. In this blog post we will explore ways to tackle the technical complexity and how Kong API gateway can help deal with it.
Kong Architecture
Kong is an open source API gateway to manage RESTful APIs. It is part of Kong Enterprise, a bundle of Kong API gateway, a developer portal called Gelato and an analytics platform by the name of Galileo. It is aimed for enterprise customers that run thousands of APIs and require dedicated 24/7 support. For small to medium-sized companies, Kong API gateway (community edition) will suffice to make first steps in API management.
Kong Architecture with five core components.
The five components of Kong architecture are: nginx, OpenResty, Datastore, plugins and a RESTful admin API. The core low-level component is nginx, a well-known and rocksolid web server. By 2017 35.5% of all known and 54.2% of top 100,000 websites worldwide use nginx. It can handle up to 10,000 simultaneous connections on one node with low memory footprint and is often used as a reverse proxy in microservice architectures, a load balancer, SSL termination proxy, or a static content web server. Apart from these use cases, nginx has many more features which deserve their own blog posts. OpenResty is a web platform that glues nginx core, LuaJIT, Lua libraries and third-party nginx modules to provide a web server for scalable web applications and web services. It was originally built by taobao.com, the biggest online auction platform in Asia with 369 million active users (2017) and donated in 2011. After that, Cloudflare Inc. supported and developed the platform until 2016. Since then, the OpenResty Software Foundation has ensured the future development of the platform. The datastore component uses Apache Cassandra or PostgreSQL to handle the storage of the configuration data, consumers, and plugins of all APIs. The API configuration is also cached within nginx, so the database traffic should be low. Plugins are Lua modules that are executed during a request/response lifecycle. They enrich the API gateway with functionalities for different use cases. For instance, if you want to secure your API, you would use a security plugin dedicated to providing only this functionality during the request. The Kong plugin system is open and you can write your own custom plugins. Finally, there is a RESTful admin API to manage the APIs. It may feel strange at the beginning to have no user interface. From a developer perspective, this is actually nice, because it provides a necessary tool to automate your workflows, for example with Postman, httpie or curl. Working with Kong for several months now, I have never felt the need to have a user interface because I could access all information in a fast and reliable way. But if you want to have a nice dashboard for your APIs you can use Konga or kong-dashboard, both free and open source community projects.
Now let’s see how to manage APIs with Kong and which plugins provide basic security features.
Kong API gateway in action
This part will be more technical than the previous. First, I will show you how to create a minimal infrastructure for Kong API gateway. Then I will add an API and a security plugin to restrict the access to a specific user.
To start the infrastructure, I will use docker-compose with this service definition:
version: '2.1' services: kong-database: container_name: kong-database image: postgres:9.4 environment: - POSTGRES_USER=kong - POSTGRES_DB=kong healthcheck: test: ["CMD", "pg_isready", "-U", "postgres"] interval: 10s timeout: 5s retries: 5 kong-migration: image: kong depends_on: kong-database: condition: service_healthy environment: - KONG_DATABASE_postgres - KONG_PG_HOST=kong-database command: kong migrations up kong: container_name: kong image: kong:0.11.0 depends_on: kong-database: condition: service_healthy kong-migration: condition: service_started environment: - KONG_DATABASE=postgres - KONG_PG_HOST=kong-database - KONG_PG_DATABASE=kong expose: - 8000 - 8001 - 8443 - 8444 ports: - "8000-8001:8000-8001" healthcheck: test: ["CMD-SHELL", "curl -I -s -L http://127.0.0.1:8000 || exit 1"] interval: 5s retries: 10
You can also install Kong on many different platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, DC/OS and many others. In my docker-compose definition, there are three services: kong-database, kong and kong-migration. I use the PostgreSQL Docker image for the Datastore component that was mentioned in the architecture overview, but you can use Cassandra as well. The kong-service exposes four different ports for two functionalities:
8000, 8443: HTTP & HTTPS access to the managed APIs (consumer endpoint)
8001, 8444: HTTP & HTTPS access to the admin API (administration endpoint)
The kong-migration service is used to create the database user and tables in kong-database. This bootstrap functionality is not provided by the kong-service, so you need to run kong migrations up within the container only once. With docker-compose up the services will be up and running. Your docker ps command should output something like this:
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES 87eea678728f kong:0.11.0 "/docker-entrypoin..." Less than a second ago Up 2 seconds (health: starting) 0.0.0.0:8000-8001->8000-8001/tcp, 0.0.0.0:8443-8444->8443-8444/tcp kong 4e2bf871f0c7 postgres:9.4 "docker-entrypoint..." 3 hours ago Up 4 minutes (healthy) 5432/tcp kong-database
Now check the status by sending a GET request to the admin API. I use the tool HTTPie for this, but you can run curl command or use Postman as an alternative.
$ http localhost:8001/apis/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 14:59:25 GMT Server: kong/0.11.0 Transfer-Encoding: chunked { "data": [], "total": 0 }
The Kong admin API is working, but there are no APIs configured. Let’s add an example:
$ http post localhost:8001/apis/ name=example_api upstream_url=https://example.com uris=/my_api HTTP/1.1 201 Created Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 15:03:55 GMT Server: kong/0.11.0 Transfer-Encoding: chunked { "created_at": 1507907036000, "http_if_terminated": false, "https_only": false, "id": "59d9749b-694a-4645-adad-d2c974b3df76", "name": "example_api", "preserve_host": false, "retries": 5, "strip_uri": true, "upstream_connect_timeout": 60000, "upstream_read_timeout": 60000, "upstream_send_timeout": 60000, "upstream_url": "https://example.com", "uris": [ "/my_api" ] }
Simply make a POST request to localhost:8001/apis/ with three mandatory parameters in the http body:
name: the API name
upstream_url: the target URL that points to your API server
uris: URIs prefixes that point to your API
There are of course more parameters for ssl, timeouts, http methods, and others. You will find them in the documentation if you want to tinker with them. Now call the API:
$ http localhost:8000/my_api HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: max-age=604800 Connection: keep-alive Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 606 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 09:02:26 GMT Etag: "359670651+gzip" Expires: Tue, 24 Oct 2017 09:02:26 GMT Last-Modified: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 23:54:35 GMT Server: ECS (dca/249F) Vary: Accept-Encoding Via: kong/0.11.0 X-Cache: HIT X-Kong-Proxy-Latency: 592 X-Kong-Upstream-Latency: 395 Example Domain ...
In many cases you want to protect your API and give access only to dedicated users, so let’s see how Kong consumers and plugins work.
Consumers and Plugins
Consumers are objects that are (technical) users that consume an API. The data structure is rather simple with just three fields: id, username and custom_id. To create a consumer, send a POST request to localhost:8001/consumers/
$ http post localhost:8001/consumers/ username=John HTTP/1.1 201 Created Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 10:06:19 GMT Server: kong/0.11.0 Transfer-Encoding: chunked { "created_at": 1508234780000, "id": "bdbba9d1-5948-4e1a-94bd-55979b7117a3", "username": "John" }
You have to provide either a username or a custom_id or both in the request body. Additionally you can set a custom_id for a mapping between a consumer and a user of your internal system, for example an ID in your CRM system. Use it to maintain consistency between Kong consumers and your source of truth for user data. I will now add a security plugin to my API and link the consumer to it. This will ensure that only this consumer can access the API with a specific key. A Kong plugin is a set of Lua modules that are executed during a request-response lifecycle of an API. You can add a plugin to all APIs, restrict it only for a specific API or a specific consumer. In my case I will add the key authentication plugin:
$ http post localhost:8001/apis/example_api/plugins name=key-auth Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 11:59:16 GMT Server: kong/0.11.0 Transfer-Encoding: chunked { "api_id": "36d04e5d-436d-4132-abdc-e4d42dc67068", "config": { "anonymous": "", "hide_credentials": false, "key_in_body": false, "key_names": [ "apikey" ] }, "created_at": 1508241556000, "enabled": true, "id": "8eecbe27-af95-49d2-9a0a-5c71b9d5d9bd", "name": "key-auth" }
The API name examlpe_api in the request URL restricts the plugin execution only to this API. Now if I try to use the API, the response will be:
$ http localhost:8000/my_api HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 12:03:24 GMT Server: kong/0.11.0 Transfer-Encoding: chunked WWW-Authenticate: Key realm="kong" { "message": "No API key found in request" }
Now I need to create a key for my consumer:
$ http POST localhost:8001/consumers/John/key-auth key=secret_key HTTP/1.1 201 Created Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 12:35:11 GMT Server: kong/0.11.0 Transfer-Encoding: chunked { "consumer_id": "bdbba9d1-5948-4e1a-94bd-55979b7117a3", "created_at": 1508243712000, "id": "02d2afd6-1fb6-4713-860f-704c52355780", "key": "secret_key" }
If you omit the key field, Kong will generate a random key for you. Now call the API with the created key:
$ http localhost:8000/my_api apikey=='secret_key' HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: max-age=604800 Connection: keep-alive Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 606 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 12:40:46 GMT Etag: "359670651+gzip" Expires: Tue, 24 Oct 2017 12:40:46 GMT Last-Modified: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 23:54:35 GMT Server: ECS (dca/249B) Vary: Accept-Encoding Via: kong/0.11.0 X-Cache: HIT X-Kong-Proxy-Latency: 25 X-Kong-Upstream-Latency: 374 Example Domain ...
Pass the apikey as a query parameter or as a header in your API call. The plugin also has configurations to hide the key after the request has been processed or to look it up in a list of keys. It is also possible to configure plugins on the consumer level, so each consumer will have their own settings. For example, you can create different rate limits for your consumers, so some of them can access your API more frequently than the others.
Summary
In this blogpost I’ve introduced the topic of APIs and why it could matter for your business. Kong API gateway is a great open-source project that can help you manage APIs for free. With just few http requests, we have created and secured our first API. The RESTful admin API of Kong is clean and simple, which allows for fast integration into most continuous delivery pipelines. In the upcoming blog post I will show you how to build your own plugin and use the OpenID provider to manage API access.
The post API management with Kong appeared first on codecentric AG Blog.
API management with Kong published first on http://ift.tt/2fA8nUr
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Project Manager job at East Ventures Indonesia
East Ventures aims to bring success to ventures by providing early stage seed capital to promising startups. With a total of 5 offices in Jakarta, Tokyo, and San Fransisco, our global team has invested in over 150 companies across Asia and the US. Our portfolio of companies focuses on commerce, social, game, SAAS, and mobile services. Our investment team consists of experienced professionals that allow us to provide a strong network across Asia. East Ventures actively involves in community development and capacity building via its coworking spaces called EV Hive in Jakarta and Tangerang (Indonesia), and Hive Shibuya in Tokyo (Japan).
Goals
Organize minimum 2 tour program in a month and create new partnership with other ecosystem builder to convert them as tour destination
Organize all business activity related to Indonesia Digital Tour, including finance and marketing
Responsibilities
Develop SOP for program (e.g. PDF that gets sent out to partner)
Plan and execute every event according to the strategy. This includes creating partnerships, finding sponsors and publishing events.
Manage and control event budget. Manage the book keeping and financial administration.
Responsible to manage the sales process to d-day logistical needs.
Degree from a reputable university
Great communication skills both verbally and written(English and Indonesian, Chinese is a plus)
Event organizing experience
Exceptional organizational and multitasking skills
Demonstrate integrity, dependability, responsibility, self-awareness, work ethic, and empathy
Enthusiasm and understanding for East Ventures mission and values
Proficient in basic computer skills
Fresh graduates are welcome to apply
StartUp Jobs Asia - Startup Jobs in Singapore , Malaysia , HongKong ,Thailand from http://www.startupjobs.asia/job/33408-project-manager-marketing-job-at-east-ventures-indonesia
Startup Jobs Asia https://startupjobsasia.tumblr.com/post/165959327614
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Project Manager job at East Ventures Indonesia
East Ventures aims to bring success to ventures by providing early stage seed capital to promising startups. With a total of 5 offices in Jakarta, Tokyo, and San Fransisco, our global team has invested in over 150 companies across Asia and the US. Our portfolio of companies focuses on commerce, social, game, SAAS, and mobile services. Our investment team consists of experienced professionals that allow us to provide a strong network across Asia. East Ventures actively involves in community development and capacity building via its coworking spaces called EV Hive in Jakarta and Tangerang (Indonesia), and Hive Shibuya in Tokyo (Japan).
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Goals
Organize minimum 2 tour program in a month and create new partnership with other ecosystem builder to convert them as tour destination
Organize all business activity related to Indonesia Digital Tour, including finance and marketing
Responsibilities
Develop SOP for program (e.g. PDF that gets sent out to partner)
Plan and execute every event according to the strategy. This includes creating partnerships, finding sponsors and publishing events.
Manage and control event budget. Manage the book keeping and financial administration.
Responsible to manage the sales process to d-day logistical needs.
Degree from a reputable university
Great communication skills both verbally and written(English and Indonesian, Chinese is a plus)
Event organizing experience
Exceptional organizational and multitasking skills
Demonstrate integrity, dependability, responsibility, self-awareness, work ethic, and empathy
Enthusiasm and understanding for East Ventures mission and values
Proficient in basic computer skills
Fresh graduates are welcome to apply
From
http://www.startupjobs.asia/job/33408-project-manager-marketing-job-at-east-ventures-indonesia
from https://startupjobsasiablog.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/project-manager-job-at-east-ventures-indonesia/
0 notes
Project Manager job at East Ventures Indonesia
East Ventures aims to bring success to ventures by providing early stage seed capital to promising startups. With a total of 5 offices in Jakarta, Tokyo, and San Fransisco, our global team has invested in over 150 companies across Asia and the US. Our portfolio of companies focuses on commerce, social, game, SAAS, and mobile services. Our investment team consists of experienced professionals that allow us to provide a strong network across Asia. East Ventures actively involves in community development and capacity building via its coworking spaces called EV Hive in Jakarta and Tangerang (Indonesia), and Hive Shibuya in Tokyo (Japan).
Goals
Organize minimum 2 tour program in a month and create new partnership with other ecosystem builder to convert them as tour destination
Organize all business activity related to Indonesia Digital Tour, including finance and marketing
Responsibilities
Develop SOP for program (e.g. PDF that gets sent out to partner)
Plan and execute every event according to the strategy. This includes creating partnerships, finding sponsors and publishing events.
Manage and control event budget. Manage the book keeping and financial administration.
Responsible to manage the sales process to d-day logistical needs.
Degree from a reputable university
Great communication skills both verbally and written(English and Indonesian, Chinese is a plus)
Event organizing experience
Exceptional organizational and multitasking skills
Demonstrate integrity, dependability, responsibility, self-awareness, work ethic, and empathy
Enthusiasm and understanding for East Ventures mission and values
Proficient in basic computer skills
Fresh graduates are welcome to apply
StartUp Jobs Asia - Startup Jobs in Singapore , Malaysia , HongKong ,Thailand from http://www.startupjobs.asia/job/33408-project-manager-marketing-job-at-east-ventures-indonesia
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Rolando Gapud is a Filipino businessman and current Executive Chairman of your Board of Del Monte Pacific Limited (DMPL).
DMPL owns and operates a group of companies that accommodates today’s consumer needs for high quality, healthy food and beverage products. In February 2014, DMPL acquired the individual food business of Del Monte Corporation in the states, which was renamed Del Monte Foods, Inc.
In 1961, Rolando Gapud graduated with honors from Ateneo University in Manila, Philippines, where he received his B.A. in Mathematics. In 1964, he received a Master of Science degree in Industrial Management in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Throughout his studies, he researched management theory thorough and went on to publish a book titled “A Way of measuring Information System Efficiency”.
Since the early 1970’s, Rolando Gapud has served as CEO and sat in the board of various companies active in areas including pharmaceuticals to banking, operating from diverse geographical locations including Manila, Hong Kong, New Delhi or San Fransisco.
Rolando Gapud is also involved in several community development projects, either on his very own personal time, or through Del Monte’s corporate social responsibility initiatives. His contributions add the promotion of higher education through donations towards the Sloan School of MIT, where he is a member of the Asian Executive Board, as well as community development initiatives within the Philippines, where DMPL operates the biggest integrated pineapple plantation in the world. There are actually more info about these activities around the Community Engagement page.
MIT Sloan School of Management - Asian Executive Board
As part of the global MIT Sloan network, the Asian Executive Board was established to “inform and support meaningful engagement” in between the School and also the region, to promote the innovative new ideas developed on campus around the world. The Executive Board’s mission is “to develop principled innovative leaders who enhance the world as well as generate ideas that advance management practice”.
MIT Sloan celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2014. The institution has exploded within the last century in becoming among the world’s leading management schools, producing iconic business figures, 20% that earn the title of President or CEO in the course of their careers.
Del Monte Foundation - Corporate Social Responsibility
Del Monte Pacific Limited (DMPL), which received the Runner-up Award for the majority of Transparent Company underneath the Foreign Listings category of the Singapore Investor’s Choice Award, has strong persistence for ethics guided by clear core values; Customer Focus, Integrity and Trust, Respect for your Individual, Team Work, Dedication to Society and Environment and Desire for Winning.
In order to uphold these values and establish the greatest possible CSR standards, DMPL came up with Del Monte Foundation (DMF) in 1996. DMF is really a non-profit foundation that coordinates the CSR and community development programs for Del Monte. The company’s pineapple operations from the Philippines will be the world’s largest integrated pineapple plantation, encompassing 23,000 hectares. Through the foundation, the company provides housing, schooling and medical services to all 5’000 employees and their families.
Canned fruit and veggies, an ever evolving business
They have been an important culinary element of many households worldwide for many years. However, the world is evolving and so are eating habits. So will cans go how from the dinosaurs or are they going to manage in which to stay cupboards and continue feeding the planet?
Many studies, such as a 2009 US congressional report prepared with the US Department of Agriculture, demonstrate that younger people prefer fresh foods to processed and packaged goods, which could lead us to infer that canned foods will be affected from your steady decline. On the other hand, there are other social and demographic changes, dependant upon the market, that counterbalance this trend. In the united states, for instance, the average era of the populace is placed to increase steadily for several years into the future.
Canned foods producers have to face changing ways of eating, they also need to face competing packaging options that happen to be offering viable alternatives.
Culture also plays an incredibly important role later on of canned foods. In britain, baked beans have never been most popular and represent an outstanding 31% of total canned sales. It is quite unlikely that baked beans can become unpopular sooner, seeing since they are so deeply rooted in British culture.
After a while, rising commodity charges are also likely to favor canned foods that happen to be generally less than their fresh alternatives.
Another important factor to bear in mind is the fact that behind the cans, there often lies ingenious business people like Rolando Gapud who attempt to adapt their offering on the evolving market habits.
The growing trend of sensible food ensures that we are likely to see new offerings along with a wider selection of canned fruits and vegetables with less salt, sugar and conservatives.
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4 Important Things to consider When Designing Streets for People, Not Just Cars
Go to any medieval European city and you wll see what streets looked like it before the advent of the car: lovely, small narrow lanes, intimate, and unidisputedly human-scale. We have very few cities in the US where you can find streets like this. For the most part what you see is streets that have been designed with the car in mind.- at a large scale for a fast speed. In San Fransisco, we are making the streets safer for walking and biking bby widening sidewalks, turning car lanes into bike lanes, and slowing down the cars.
We are working with the streets we have; a typical San Fransisco street is anywhere from 60-80 feet (18 to 24 meters) wide, as compared with a meideval, pre-car street which is more like 10-20 feet (3 to 6 metres) wide.
As an urban designer, I work on lots of projects where we take large parcels of land and subdivide them into blocks by introducing new streets. These new streets are a rare opportunity to take a fresh look at the kinds of car-oriented roads that we are used to, and instead try to design streets that prioritize the safety and comfort of pedestrians. these projects give us a chance to design streets that might not ever see a single car, we find that the modern street desgn has become so much more than just a places for walking and driving. There are therefore number of things for socially-minded designers to consider, beyond the commonly talked about pedestrian-car dichotomy.
1. The street is where utilities go
Ask any civil engineer, and they will tell you a street is a highly engineered easement filled with variety of pipes, connectors, backflow peventers, and othe feats of modern science bringing us water, energy, and communication. Streets provide a linear system for organizing this network of utilities both horizontally (there are required distances between different kind of utilities) and vertically (water-in all its-forms- need to flow downhill, even is seemingly flat streets). What is more, there are established, well-tested convections for how to design these systems so that they operate every day without us even noticing. Our reimagined, car-less street, in whatever form it takes, needs to manage the way we are connected into the vascuar, subterranean system.
With new technologies, we are finding efficient ways to manage some of these utilities with less reliance on the grid. For example, there are now a handful of buildings that treat and reuse their own sewage This “blackwater” is treated and the liquids are used for flushing and irrigation. while the solids are used by bio-digesters energy to help power buildings. We can go even further and connect a few these high performing buildings together into eco-districts, and find the amount of utilities that we need to accomodate in the streets might eventually decrease.
2. The street is a drainage system
Get you civil engineer together with your landscape architect and you will begin to understand the demands on streets for handling stormwater. In fact, you will learn that from their perspective, the principle purpose of a curb is noto to separate pedestrians safely from cars, but to control flooding. Curb heights are set relative to the slope of a street and the size og the storm drain to prevent flooded sidewalks and buildings.
However, in some ways this is a self-made challenge. An impermeable street and gutter actually stops water from soaking into the ground and forces it to move faster and at greater volumes across the surface. We know the permeable paving works better to alleviate flooding, and reducing areas of paved surfaces and increasing planted areas is even more effective, Many cities are retrofitting their streets with both peremeable surfaces and raingardens to help alleviate the problem. By designing our streets to handle water in a more holistic ways, with natural drainage and infiltration, we can start to peel away the curbs and see signs of plant life moving back into our new street section.
3. A Street as ecosystem
In a city with an urban grid, streets take up as much as 30 percent of the total area of the city, which represents a significant amount of land in public realm. So it should be no surprise that streets end up being where we find much of the biomass that is found in cities, in the form of street trees and sidewalk plantngs, beautiful old streets mostly have one thing i common: beautiful old trees, large, healthy, mature trees can make for amazingly lovable streets, even if the roads and sidewalks are nothing special. Case in point: Saint Charles Avenuer in Mew Orlenad has some of the most impressive potholes and impassable sidewalks n the city, but it’s arching canopy of century-old oak and fig trees firmly cements it into visitors memories as one of the most beautiful streets in the city.
But trees can also perform in ways beyond aesthetics, to act as habitat for wildlife in the city. two great exampkes of this are the Pollinator Pathway in Seattle and the tiger swallowtail butterfly rookery along San Fransisco’ Market Street. Landscape architects typically select street trees for ther durability, height, and canopy size. but increasingly they are selecting for their contribution to a larger ecosystem. Given that street trees follow the connected network of streets, by default they van create a rich, connected network fot the fans that rely on them as well , linking form park to park across a cit.
The good news is that street trees are usually selected, installed, and maintaine by a single city agency, which means that addng ecological performance to the species selection criteria could be an effective wa to implement uch wildlife corridors on a larger scale, and converting streets into ecological corridors benefitting all critters,,, human included.
Finally, of course, a street is a public right of way
In other words, a street is publicly owned land, which the public has the right to occupy. In a democratic country, the streets are a place where people come together to be seen as a group, to stand up and be counted. We are seeing the importance of this fact in cities all over the country (indeed, the world) where people are once more taking to the streets to find their voice; New York Mayor Bill De Blasio recently said that protest is one of the important functions of New York City’s streets. Even though at times this may conflict with other functions, such as moving traffic easily, it remains a critical and fundamental purpose of a city’s streets.
What is more, in every country, everywhere, the streets are the place where public life is lived every day. From Algiers to Zurich, streets are filled with people doing everyday things like chatting with their neighbors, hanging laundry, watering flowers, buying food, and socializing their children. If we are to rethink the idea of the street, we would need to find a way to ensure this vitality of public life has space, in all its forms, and in all its public-ness.
When drawing a street on a plan, you start with a centerline and offset it on two sides. It is quite literally a line connecting two places with a certain width. This width is almost always determined by an engineer who is trying to match an algorithm for how many lanes are needed for the cars that will drive down this street, and how many utilities will need to comfortably fit here. Instead, we should think about streets and all their various uses—as places for gathering, finding our way, living more healthfully, with nature, and with each other... and build from there.
Kristen Hall is a senior urban designer and planner at Perkins+Will in San Francisco. She specializes in complex urban infill projects.
artikel asli:
http://www.archdaily.com/867390/4-important-things-to-consider-when-designing-streets-for-people-not-just-cars
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