solving social with forced interoperability

The social networks we use are spaces where our interactions and their reach are very prone to manipulation. It's easy enough to rig a public feed to dampen certain messages and amplify others for profit or politics - and we would not be able to tell. 

The damping of a message wouldn't have to be applied for those in the 'bubble' that already agree with it .. but is very effective when applied to those outside that bubble.

So the people that share a certain idea would be mostly talking to themselves. Useful for organising around an idea, but with little to no spreading of the idea.

...

This potential subversion of our new public space(s) cannot easily be avoided or even detected while we use platforms whose source code isn't open for inspection.

An idea being called forced interoperability might offer a path to a possible solution. 

https://spectrum.ieee.org/doctorow-interoperability

Right now there are multiple social networking platforms available that adopt open standards that allow for a federated approach -like Mastodon and the Fediverse- so that different platforms running different software can access the same public space. Most are publicly owned (copyleft) and therefore have public feed algorithms that are open to inspection . 

All of these function quite well but suffer a seemingly insurmountable downside - public spaces work best when they are ubiquitous, and so there's a very very big disincentive to leave the platforms with the largest populations

Forced interoperability is the idea that we solve this knot of a problem by legislating to force the existing monopolies to adopt those open standards so that open platforms we chose can work seamlessly with the Facebooks, Twitters and Instagrams.

The EU is already doing this for messaging - https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/24/22995431/european-union-digital-markets-act-imessage-whatsapp-interoperable

China seems to have implemented some of it in their networks.

We need to push for legislation that forces interoperability for our social networks too.

Different communities choosing the platforms with the rules and ethics they want. And those separate platforms talking to everybody else.

This won't immediately solve that public feed manipulation problem. If everyone stayed on with the existing closed platforms - they still get manipulated. 

But if the idea of freedom from that manipulation grows... without any downsides..

We could see populations voting with their feet on the type of public space they want

hypothes.is

A sidebar annotating the web, like SideWiki should have been.

Social bookmarking, tagging, annotating and note sharing of the web in public or private groups, or just for yourself.

"Our efforts are based on the annotation standards for digital documents developed by the W3C Web Annotation Working Group. We are partnering broadly with developers, publishers, academic institutions, researchers, and individuals to develop a platform for the next generation of read-write web applications. You can follow our development progress on our roadmap. Many have contributed tools, plug-ins and integrations."

https://web.hypothes.is/
https://web.hypothes.is/about/

sourcecode and other projects at https://github.com/hypothesis

A Chrome extension. Firefox and other users will have to use the bookmarklet for now - which works very well
see web.hypothes.is/installing-the-bookmarklet/

run by a public foundation apparently. source code is open but not copyleft, alas.

our tools are broken

Regular Reminder - Our tools Are Broken: social networking tools and other information infrastructure that are not publicly owned (and by that I mean licensed under the General Public License or Copylefted -see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) are fundamentally broken. Because anything less than public ownership severely limits the extent to which we can use, fix, experiment, and grow these into useful universal assets .. This is especially true in the long term.
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The list of our broken tools include Facebook, Google search, Twitter, and the operating systems Windows, Mac-OSX, IOS, and bits of Android. Linux is completely ours. Most of Android and the software that serves up and browses the world wide web is also properly public property.

Distributed/Federated social software that could easily replace Facebook and Twitter already exists (see Diaspora and Identica). Publicly owned search engines won't have to start from scratch either.

Its just going to take us some time to realise that all the complaints that we have about our social software - about the abuses of power that extend from privacy violations to the manipulation of search results and manipulation of our social signalling - all of these cannot be fixed until we switch to Free (as in speech) Software.

growing pains

"The tribes and clans of early man never left us, they just expanded outward like ripples in a pond, becoming more intricate." - without losing too much of their easy use of violence and coercion.

We can reshape - build networks of decentralized public power using smart tools for communication and knowledge-sharing, decision-making and organisation.

But then again, we should never underestimate the potential  for things to get very much worse instead (or first?), as the priests and warlords - now corporations and politicians - steadily turn up the manipulation and violence to keep things running in their favour.

Are We Shifting to a New Post-Capitalist Value Regime?

RT @mbauwens (Michel Bauwens): Are We Shifting to a New Post-Capitalist Value Regime? https://t.co/l1tn1LEs0R (one of my best lectures)

"We will argue that there is consistent evidence that the structural crises of the dominant political economy is leading to responses that are prefigurative of a new value regime, of which the seed forms can be clearly discerned."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CltUp19s9lc - video lecture. 45mins. worth the watch.

... notes to follow

collaboration will out-compete competition

... especially if we document and share our work properly. Value public ownership via the general public license or CopyLeft and CopyFarLeft licenses on all our self documentation and outputs.

fork governance

Time to begin hacking on top of -and away from - these current primitive democracies. The governance systems in use globally carry way too many design features common to the royal courts they emerged/evolved from (strong hierarchical design, centralised opaque authority, personality based leadership, etc.).

[Distributed governance models. Decentralised technologies that might be used to underpin new forms of collective cooperation and decision-making.]

"I use the term “governance by design” to describe the process of online communities increasingly relying on technology in order to organize themselves through novel governance models (designed by the community and for the community), whose rules are embedded directly into the underlying technology of the platforms they use to operate"

http://commonstransition.org/commons-centric-law-and-governance-with-primavera-de-filippi/ (As part of a series on the 100 Women Who Are Co-Creating the P2P Society, Rachel O’Dwyer interviews Primavera De Filippi)

@historyinpics

"Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road for peace". Article from The Independent about Osama Bin Laden. 1993.

sipped from @HistoryInPics' stream -- https://twitter.com/HistoryInPics

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Liked this one from today's feed too:
Fidel Castro and Malcolm X meeting in Harlem, 1960 https://twitter.com/HistoryInPics/status/432340865483542528/photo/1 

 

our tools are broken

Regular Reminder: Social networking tools and other information infrastructure that is not owned by us (copylefted) is almost by definition, fundamentally broken - because anything less, severely limits the extent to which we can use, experiment, and grow these into useful universal assets .. esp true in the long term.

the list of our broken tools include facebook, google search, and the operating systems windows, mac-osx, ios, and bits of android. (linux is completely ours)

google+ public circles

It would be nice if google+ extended the circle metaphor to include public circles, that people can discover and join, giving us a way to easily make and follow channels with a narrow subject on Google+

What this would solve is the following basic problem:
I don't want to hear mumbles on random topics, from people I follow for one subject in particular. For example, if I follow you for your technology knowledge and opinion, I dont want to hear about the food you're eating on your latest visit to china.

I should be able to join your technology circle, provided you've made it public, and by so doing I should be able to see only the posts you send to your technology circle.

universal folksonomy

This is probably not entirely new. Maybe even not new at all. In fact I've probably just joined legions of people out there who are wondering why ..

There isn't yet a simple plain-text standard for meta-data, that can be applied universally across all services and objects - from web pages and web resources, to documents and files, from books and articles to audio and video files - applied basically, to all digital resources.

Then building on top of all this tagging - all this human-computation and folksonomy - building flexible tools that mine and collate the meta-data from across all possible services, communities, spaces and contexts. Making these tools expandable, so adding another service/context/data-source is as simple as possible.

So, how is this different?

1. we use it in the same way, but consistently across all services/contexts/collections


2. we use it even when no provision is made for it - wherever we find space for plain text that can be co-opted to meta-data - like in comment fields, sidewiki entries, bookmark notes, mp3 id3 comment fields, etc


3. then we build software to collect them from both the formalised meta-data services and the informal - and shape flexible plugins to collect them from wherever the standard can be recognised

what sort of meta-data?

1. First, the simplest forms of meta-data - tags/labels - flat, informal ontologies - collections of keywords - like those used within services across the so called web2.0.
   And when using services that aren't designed to use tags/labels - co-opting plain-text fields by, say, the following:
   tags = blog, tagging, ideas, software, socialSoftware


2. Second, simple key value pairs, like author=JaysenNaidoo; date=20101113; license=gpl3


3. Keeping the set of standards as open as possible - but defining them properly in public. Adding any other std that can be represented in plain-text and gains enough ground - depicting hierarchies, semantics, etc.

.. possibly more on this later.

some almost related links:
Actually some of these suggest practical tagging standards as well:

• http://lifehacker.com/software/tags/metadata-as-a-filing-system-169971.php
• http://armchairtheorist.com/2008/05/22/top-10-tagging-best-practices-for-anything-web-20/
• http://blog.simslearningconnections.com/?p=152

google sidewiki as a real wiki.. or maybe a host of other real sidewikis to choose from

@google: give us a truly wiki-like public entry on SideWiki, with wiki functions like revision and restore and spam-reporting and we will garden it.

There'll probably be large scale spam and trolling, but with some good design, wiki revisions and restores, along with maybe a tight linking to google accounts before granting edit, perhaps wiki principles will out.

Oh, and there's no reason why the public entry shouldn't work as just another entry alongside all the others, only rising to the top if it gets voted there.

....
update (20100117)

I remember digging the first "wiki margin for the internet" i saw, i think about 5 years ago. wikalong - a firefox extension and a promising idea i thought - a firefox extension that let one create/edit a wikipage for any web page out there.

so when google recently(ish) announced their Sidewiki , and it turned out to be more of a side blog i tried shouting out that bit above.

But now maybe I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe, rather than google's one and only sidewiki, we need an open extension that allows us to choose which side wiki community we want to follow and contribute to..

like a host of wiki channels for discussing the web. many internet margins - with choices between real wiki's, public and private, and sideblogs (like the current google sidewiki)

vyf-ster

UPDATE: replaced 5star tag with rated.01 for my highest rated public Delicious bookmarks. still a silly name i know.

anyways, use it, don't use it...

a basic delicious hack

a quicksearch shortcut to get to your del.icio.us tags:

1. In the firefox bookmark menu, choose Organise Bookmarks..
2. in the Bookmark Manager, click on 'New Bookmark'
3. name it something like delicious quicksearch
3. Enter http://del.icio.us/jaysen/%s in the location field (replacing jaysen with your delicious username),
4. Enter d in the keyword field.

Now, typing d tag1 in firefox's address bar will take you to your delicious pages tagged with tag1, and d tag1+tag2+tag3 will take you to your pages tagged with all of tag1, tag2, and tag3.

simple, i know, but i haven't seen it on any delicious-tool-list sites, and i use it a lot, so thought it was worth mentioning.

imagining OpenGovernment

some scribbles from fevered vision

taking government from the cathedral to the bazaar. or, at least, adding a bazaar to the cathedral of current governance.

creating collaborative open communities -an OpenGovernment space- with access to all documentation including all government processes, policies, decisions - those being in the public domain - using open content and discussion systems like wikis and forums for comments, discussion and debate. the space managed by the meritocracy based community of all participants. with access filtering, all the way to public redrafting, and beyond?. starting as a sort of a shadow government entirely in the public domain.

and people getting involved in these communities on large scales. awake to the necessity and possibilities of participation. trained in the hierarchies, groups and forum-rules of the these communities at all schools, and as part of ubiquitous computer/net-community studies. This learning and participation becoming an aspect of widely deployed community internet facilities , and an aspect of social life itself.

using rules for handling debate, discussion, flaming, vandals, and misinformation that are emerging from wiki communities and the larger opensource communal space

patterns similar to those noted in opensource communities concentrating participation from the people with the most in stake, the most interested and the most able contributers - from an enormous pool of potential contributers - using our vast numbers more to our advantage. the knots of complex problem spaces untangling under the weight of a multitude of eyeballs.

another two pieces of social software

LastFm is social-networking for music. You grow networks of people that listen to similar music, based on your ongoing listening and tagging, and then listen to their playlists as streamed (tag radio) stations..
my lastfm userpage - early days but growing.

AllPeers is a group based filesharing extension for firefox using bit-torrent transfers.

UPDATE: uninstalled the AllPeers extension without testing - mainly because couldnt find anyone who wanted to try it out - probably will look at it when next i actually need to transfer large files with a friend. LastFM on the other hand is mostly all good.

writing in common (with google docs)

you getting this
Yeah very cool
this changes things, huh?
truly revolutionary bru

These were our first words on screen when sometime yesterday morning, DS - in Johannesburg - and jaysen - in Algiers - decided to check out google's collaborative authoring tools. I know what you thinking, and you right, we're are a little geeky. But now that we got that out of the way we can say, without fear of ridicule or censure...THIS SHIT IS FUCKING IMPRESSIVE. We were so impressed that we decided to test it with a joint blog.

First, We got there via http://docs.google.com. So far, google have come up with word processor and spreadsheet web applications done with some fancy AJAX. It imports/exports from/to openoffice, word, excel, html, and pdf and runs off your browser. The interface is pretty much what you get with most office applications. What makes this so cool is that any number of people, anywhere in the world, can be working on the same document at the same time with changes appearing almost instantaneously. (We did notice some delay creeping in sometimes, but not often)

The only shit thing we've found so far is that it doesn't allow footnotes. Although it transports footnotes from word documents as anchors in the text, its a bit of a pain to have create a new anchor every-time you add a footnote (DS likes footnotes).

There is an almost direct and linear progression from the wiki idea, or at least, the collaborative part of the wiki idea (not the unique funkiness of wiki's massively linked network of nodes - yes, we're both fans of wiki as well). But the collaboration with this tool just seems so much more immediate and realtime -with changes appearing almost as soon as others can make them during simultaneous use, with an excellent revision control system (the latter allows you to track changes in the document, literally, to the second. although the increments of time get larger the further back you go).
Add the extra dimension of a skypecall, and this becomes a dangerously powerful tool. Truly revolutionary. In fact, we're thinking, this might even be better than working together in the same room.

Apart from footnotes, the only drawback we experienced has less to do with software, and more to do with the singularity of each of our styles of writing and ways thinking. But the gap, if you can call it that, is the real tension that creativity springs from. Its a good thing even if takes working through

my stumbleupon blog

my stumbleupon reviews, where you'll find links/reviews . some of them to things as pretty as this.. even.


i'm currently posting more there, anyway.

my del.icio.us tagroll

the del.icio.us tagroll shows your del.icio.us tags as a weighted 'cloud' that can be displayed in any webpage - the more links contained within any tag, the larger it appears in the cloud. checkout del.icio.us help for tagrolls to get the code for your tagroll
For those that dont know, del.icio.us is an online bookmarking service that allows you to sort your sites by tags.

UPDATE: i moved the actual del.icio.us tagroll to the sidebar on the right as a permanent fixture