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i love this! especially for product design and development. it has its own lifecycle and iteration patterns, and it’s even more important to embed empathy and humanity there, before code and pull requests. UX/UI mocks and flows in tools like Indesign and Sketch may be the first places to look, before GitHub etc.

also, i definitely get the idea behind “In the wrong hands, who could this harm?”, and it’s tempting, but a bit dangerous. it’s basically the Precautionary Principle, which says you shouldn’t adopt any new tool or technology until you can prove it won’t cause any harm. in practice, that kind of proof is basically impossible. you can definitely plan for a lot, and add useful safeguards, but there will always be at least some surprises that you couldn’t have predicted. this is why iterating won out over waterfall.

a better approach is to experiment carefully in sandboxes, watch the results, and gradually expand. this isn’t always easy with technology or policy, but it’s definitely more realistic, and at least allows for some progress over time. (i wrote a bit more about this in https://snarfed.org/2013-04-13_the-no-network-effect#Precautionary ).

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