We guarantee that users aren’t subject to platforms. Yet communities are still subject to their stewards. Can we fix this?
Composable Trust, Part 3: 1 Community, 3 Sovereigns, No Landlords - Eclectic Corvine Muses
An architectural model to yield members, Rosters, and Venues sovereignty over their own domains, and none over each other’s.
Composable Trust, Part 3: 1 Community, 3 Sovereigns, No Landlords - Eclectic Corvine Muses
An architectural model to yield members, Rosters, and Venues sovereignty over their own domains, and none over each other’s.
Composable Trust, Part 2: Separating Trust from Governance - Eclectic Corvine Muses
”Who belongs” and “What belonging means” are different questions. What happens if one steward stops answering both?
On Trust Infrastructure Trust underpins civilisation. It expands the scope and complexity of the pursuits within our collective reach by allowing us to act as a…
Symposium: A Skeptical View of Information Fiduciaries
In recent years, the concept of “information fiduciaries” has surged to the forefront of debates on platform regulation. In a forthcoming essay, we question the wisdom of applying a fiduciary framework to dominant digital platforms.
Moderating With Humans, For Humans - Trust Issues
Moderating With Humans, For Humans - Trust Issues
Weave
Weave is accelerating the interoperability of the internet's missing trust layer. True community portability. Trust that travels.
mitchellh/vouch
A community trust management system based on explicit vouches to participate.
Directing the Herd
Social media platforms don’t produce a common public; they produce competing sub-publics, each with its own sense of what everyone knows.
Trust: Foundation of Human Knowledge yet online Platforms won't allow | David Karger | TEDxMIT Salon
Conflict Systems
The zine contends that many recent sites of community building, especially online, have lacked the tools and norms for the practice of conflict. Many reasonable expectations that go by names like due process, justice, accountability, or mediation are unavailable or not even considered in emerging communities. The platforms that communities rely on treat conflict as a corporate liability, not a chance to strengthen relationships.
Falsehoods programmers believe about community management
1. You can launch without a content policy without different subcommunities declaring war on each other. 2. You can create a content policy that makes everyone happy. 3. You won’t spend your days doing battle with the community over your content policy 4. You can completely automate moderation 5.
Community by Design
Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very social fabric it depends on by maximizing engagement for advertising revenue. This paper participates in open and ongoing considerations to translate social and political values and conventions, specifically social cohesion, into platform design. We propose an alternative platform model that includes the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. Citizens are members of communities defined by explicit affiliation or clusters of shared attitudes. Both have internal divisions, as citizens are members of intersecting communities, which are themselves internally diverse. Each is understood to value content that bridge (viz. achieve consensus across) and balance (viz. represent fairly) this internal diversity, consistent with the principles of the Hutchins Commission (1947). Content is labeled with social provenance, indicating for which community or citizen it is bridging or balancing. Subscription payments allow citizens and communities to increase the algorithmic weight on the content they value in the content serving algorithm. Advertisers may, with consent of citizen or community counterparties, target them in exchange for payment or increase in that party's algorithmic weight. Underserved and emerging communities and citizens are optimally subsidized/supported to develop into paying participants. Content creators and communities that curate content are rewarded for their contributions with algorithmic weight and/or revenue. We discuss applications to productivity (e.g. LinkedIn), political (e.g. X), and cultural (e.g. TikTok) platforms.
Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media
Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.
Why “Trusted Publishing” Can’t Save Us from Social Engineering
Unmasking the risky illusion of npm's "trusted publishing" amidst recent cyber attacks.
