Open fititnt opened 5 years ago
I'm thinking about open a topic on https://ai.stackexchange.com/ and, since maybe there do not have people with experience in forum moderation beyond the 3 moderators themselves, I think if I make the question, makes totally sense also make a answer (see It’s OK to Ask and Answer Your Own Questions from Jeff https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/07/01/its-ok-to-ask-and-answer-your-own-questions/).
I will use as drafts the nexts two comments on this issue here on github. I think I would push these changes to AI SE on next days, but maybe it will take more time.
Tags: ai-community, ethics, digital-rights Title: Trustability of AI community: baseline guidelines for curators on how to handle shutdown of online AI forums
TL;DR: for an online discussion forum or equivalent where volunteers users asked to interact with others on topics related to AI, witch principles the curators (the humans who make the service online; the moderators) can assume to, if in the future the service have to shutdown, it will have a graceful shutdown and give a change to others to organize themselves and potentially assume the responsibility to keep the community, in a way that both the community itself and (potentially everyone who make new online forums on the AI topic) could avoid harm and be harmed by actions of others when dealing with user generated content?
I will share some of my research.
To keep this question very focused, the focus here is only about shutdown.
When we have open software and the original developers lost interest in keep in maintained, in addition to the license (that in case of open source softwares means that they already allow be maintained by someone else), we even have some organizations that can "receive" ownership of a project, for example the Apache Incubator https://incubator.apache.org/.
This question is not about open source software (as it is a different topic), but these baseline guidelines asked here, could be equivalent to some type of license (or moral commitment) of maintainers on the very specific case of when they have to shutdown.
A big difference is that online communities (depending of underline software) to change maintainers could be as "easily" as change the admin on a Facebo
I'm drafting a repository, at this time is called "A/IS Ethics Open Groups" and is available at https://github.com/fititnt/ais-ethics-open-groups, and with a short description:
While I was looking for online references to be listed, a problem caught my attention with a community that, at least when I first started to approach the artificial intelligence community, seemed to be a potential reference. But this community was closed. Some links on the topic:
This issue is open for me to consider discussing with people in the community suggestions for ways to manage online community shutdown so that at least it allows for continuation (if there is interest from others in moderating) and not inspire mistrust in future projects for past mistakes.
Yes, it's a harsh topic.