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Projects @ DWeb Camp 2019 💻
https://riot.im/app/#/room/#dweb-camp-2019-projects:matrix.org
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Decentralized principles and protocol politics #5

Open benhylau opened 5 years ago

benhylau commented 5 years ago

From Langdon Winner's Do Artifacts have Politics about city infrastructures, to Paul Frazee's Information Civics and André Staltz's A plan to rescue the web from the Internet about digital infrastructures, what do we know about the guiding principles of this dweb and what types of societies will be favoured with our existing decentralized systems? Who is currently served and who should be served, and how will our community get there?

I hope we will surface these "protocol politics" and find terminologies that can better communicate across discipline boundaries. Let's use general language to talk about principles instead of platforms and technicalities. The distributed web is only 20% digital, how do we create a coherent and consistent story with nature, place, cultures, knowledge, communities, institutions, infrastructures, software, labour, sustainability models ... ?

Adding topics here as they come up in the thread.

Topic Proposed by Willing to lead discussion
How protocols assign and govern authority in the network @pfrazee ✅
Strategies for builders and their protocols to live sustainably @benhylau ✅

Project facilitators: TBD

Frijol commented 5 years ago

I'm very interested in this as well! Currently working through a reading group to explore these issues, I'd love to collab on how we can create a space for this type of discussion at Dweb Camp

benhylau commented 5 years ago

Excellent! I think we also have a unique opportunity to explore these ideas together with representatives through the Global Fellowship program, who have had a great deal of experience with distributed community governance, but we have lacked opportunities to have shared space for discussions because of geographic and language bubbles. Often times we are using different platforms, in different social circles, while some communities are not necessarily on the Internet as frequently, and now we may have an opportunity to have shared discussions in the same space!

Pinging potential collaborators ➡️ @pfrazee @luandro @mixmix @dcwalk @b5

pfrazee commented 5 years ago

Happy to get involved and help however I can! I'll be at the camp but will be flying in from Austin when things start.

luandro commented 5 years ago

Would love to be part of this discussion, I feel it's a very important topic :)

mixmix commented 5 years ago

Looking forward to this conversation.

Before the camp I'm putting all my energy into getting a wider diversity of people there to be part of this conversation!

On Sat, 25 May 2019, 02:59 Luandro, notifications@github.com wrote:

Would love to be part of this discussion, I feel it's a very important topic :)

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/dweb-camp-2019/projects/issues/5?email_source=notifications&email_token=AAUK3HQDKS5PSZYOX2UO3O3PW77GZA5CNFSM4HBTSHXKYY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGODWFUPLY#issuecomment-495667119, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAUK3HWXZRATNX2CEVMHEZTPW77GZANCNFSM4HBTSHXA .

benhylau commented 5 years ago

Thanks @mixmix please also pull them into this thread if anyone is interested!

Some thoughts on how this session could go. Please tell me if I am completely off, I don't have much experience with these :D

Format

What kind of format do people have in mind?

In my experience planning for events where attendance can range from 5-50 people, and where it's important for everyone to have opportunities to speak, and reflect on topics they want to be part of, I've done splitting into groups and group share-backs. How do people feel about splitting into groups vs. one large conversation / activity?

For example, one thing I've done is seed the room with a bunch of questions, put on walls, and spend half an hour to let people study them, like a gallery and maybe have small talks around, and also invite them to put up new ones. Then we each gather around the topic we are most interested in, discuss that in a group size of 4-8 and have each group share summaries after.

I am curious to hear other appropriate formats.

Topics & Activities

I wonder if reflecting on quotes written about the motivations of our p2p protocols is a good way to start discussions:

For a large network to scale, it must be subnetted into smaller, more easily manageable networks, which then must in turn be networked together (to form a network of networks from inter-network connections, i.e. the internet). This requires some level of expertise and planning to do, and tends to favor hierarchies wherein small networks are largely at the mercy of a larger network (e.g. the only connection your LAN has to another network is your connection to an ISP, and “peering” or directly connecting to your neighbor’s LAN is virtually unheard of).

-- Arceliar Yggdrasil: The World Tree, https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/2018/07/17/world-tree.html

Perhaps also quotes from other writings, about city infrastructure, data agency, environment sustainability, colonial history... that people feel are relevant threads?

I also think having ways to represent things visually can help us better map this space, e.g. https://benhylau.github.io/talks-and-workshops/talks/201810_nuug-hackeriet/#93 and the next slide

So perhaps they don't have to be only quotes, but some visuals that inspire a conversation?

My main question, what types of activities can help the participants establish a shared understanding of a topic, and be able to draw from their own experience and add to the conversation?

Outcomes

What outcomes do we expect from this? I think it'd be valuable to have some artifact we can share more broadly to people at Camp and not at Camp.

pfrazee commented 5 years ago

My particular interest is looking at how protocols assign and govern authority in the network. I'd be happy to run discussions around that topic.

dcwalk commented 5 years ago

A topic near and dear to me! 😊 I'm pretty swamped with Our Networks and other commitments in the lead up to camp, but will be attending.

This space is potentially very broad (values, principles, politics + decentralized tech) and I could see it being multiple discussions and/or formats depending on folks interest. I wonder if a low-overhead model that might work is the following:

Last year I co-organized the reading group @Frijol is organizing this year (:wave:)-- https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether which is broadly about decentralized data stewardship or my internal working title "what are we talking about when we are talking about decentralization"*. It sort of followed this model, more successfully this year, and I think having the space to focus on ONE THING is as valuable as speaking more abstractly across a broad set of things.

*For folks interested in topics we covered in the reading group:

dcwalk commented 5 years ago

Oh, just thinking back on your original questions @benhylau -- if you are intending more of a developing dweb principles session then I'd look to the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, Design Justice Network, Digital Justice Lab and Digital Equity Lab folks who work in related spaces and think about politics+technologiy.

They've both developed principles (or are doing it), and published resources on how they've developed them. That said, I think an approach like this takes time and care and a level of community connectedness which I'm unsure participants will feel at this event...?

benhylau commented 5 years ago

Agree that this is potentially very broad. I am having a hard time imagining how things will go in different formats without clearer sense of what topics people have in mind... say if things are highly specialized I worry that fishbowl will make the discussion quickly go down a path that most find difficult to tap in, but also that this could be what folks are looking for, that they can listen in on domain experts and contribute only to topics close to them?

How to "market" this session is also quite ambiguous at the moment. In either case, I think if we can figure out topics now and assign people willing to lead them, we can then better think of formats and scope this better. I am going to ask y'all to suggest one topics you have a burning desire to discuss and indicate whether you're willing to lead that topic. I will add to top of thread, as I have done with @pfrazee's.

Frijol commented 4 years ago

Connected to this– here are a couple of blog posts we've been working on in Data Together and just recently published: Knowledge Commons and Civics. I wonder if we could have a couple of fishbowls going at once around themes as broad as "knowledge commons" and have people circulate between them?

You're right to be concerned about the accessibility of the discussion. Do you have a sense of what to anticipate in terms of attendees' backgrounds on these topics? Is our aim to discuss at great depth, or maintain accessibility to all, or to maximize on the intersecting interests of the attendees?

pfrazee commented 4 years ago

I have a couple of specific points to bring and I am a little concerned they're too esoteric. My plan has been to mostly facilitate the conversation where-ever it leads and try to have some small digestible thoughts ready to share.

The "fishbowl of discussion topics" could work well if the questions are accessible enough to people. Here's my shot at a few:

It might be useful to have the discussion leaders prepare some of those questions and some of their own answers so that they could spur the conversation. If the goal is an open discussion, I think the key is to focus on how we can get people to participate even if they haven't spent a lot of time preparing.

@Frijol Small aside: I really enjoyed reading the responses from Data Together! I thought the critiques were on point and I hope I'll get the time for rewrites to address them.