Following @nextgenethno’s meeting on 19 Oct 2020 (today lol), I thought I’d get started on AMA planning.
See @amelia’s initial post about AMA here. The goal with AMAs is to facilitate focused and rich conversations on the platform.
Logistics
The first would ideally take place in about a month’s time. Not much required besides:
Speaker: be on the platform for an hour to answer questions, and return in a week or so to contribute to the discussion
For us and community managers: prepare questions in advance and bring in active participants
NGI Team: advertise
Speakers
To get the first AMA started, a few people I had in mind:
Aimilia Givropoulou, Senior Policy Advisor, European Parliament to talk about her efforts to challenge the European Commission’s project called iBorderCtrl that aims to use facial recognition softwares to restrict entrance to the EU
Anton Ekker, independent attorney, to talk about his winning case against the Dutch government’s use of risk scoring algorithm designed for welfare fraud detection
Divij Joshi, Mozilla Fellow to talk about India’s Aarogya Setu application for contact tracing, exposure notification, and risk scoring and how it has the potential to produce anti-democratic, exclusionary, and discriminatory impacts
Crofton Black, Bureau of Investigative Journalism to talk about how border authorities and tech companies are combining space technologies, social media profiling, and big data analytics to monitor migrant movements.
My favorite is the second: as close to a sensitive, intricate EU domestic policy issue as it gets. The first and the fourth seem closely related, and we know the issue of migrant rights has historically been close to many participants in Edgeryders studies. The third refers back to Surveillance pandemic, and we could try to re-involve the people who participated in that.
I agree with @alberto – all would be excellent. In fact, if we could set up a schedule and have each of them do one, I think that would be amazing. To start with, I think Anton or Aimilia would be great.
Cool. I’ll go ahead and reach out to Anton before the end of the week. @alberto, is there a day/time for best turnout? Otherwise, we were thinking of 6.30pm BST on the later half of a working week.
To be honest I am not totally convinced that live sessions can work. The original format works because it’s a simple forum…right?
But maybe I am wrong, so the only way to know it is to try.
About the time I would choose instead 6:30 CET, just because the majority of people in EU lives under this time zone. But, again, I do not have a magic answer.
Here’s my draft email to Anton to schedule the first AMA. @nextgenethno, lmk if you want to make any changes here. If not, I’ll go ahead and send this.
–
Dear Anton,
[blah blah blah rapport]
I am emailing to ask if you might be interested in being interviewed about your work with SyRI. The interview would follow Reddit’s Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) format: basically, you log on to our platform for about an hour to answer questions about your SyRI case.
The interview is for the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) Forward project, which aims to bring collective intelligence to inform the Commission’s policy agenda for digital technologies. I am involved in this project as a Digital Ethnographer, which means I get to bring in cool people to our platform to start interesting conversations about pressing topics. I think your litigation work on the SyRI case would be of a huge interest to our community members. We might want to title it something like “I won the first case in the EU against algorithmic decision-making system. Ask me anything.”
Time: some time mid-November at 6.30pm CET
What you need to do
Before: prepare a short paragraph of description
During: be online in our platform for an hour to answer any questions community members have
After (optional): check back to the platform in a week or so to follow up
If you’re interested or have further questions, I’m happy to hop on a call to chat.
Would it help to maybe briefly talk about ER community so he has an audience in mind when he write the description? E.g. its a very heterogeneous community from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and interests (activists, practitioners, academics, etc).
Also maybe mention that you/the Ethnography team will be online for the entire event and will help mediate/ask questions at times.
for a week or so, not after a week or so – as in, check in a few times in the week following the event to answer any lingering questions. Otherwise, looks good! Leonie’s suggestions also make sense to me, so you could incorporate them. I’d leave the second one at “I’ll also be at the event with the rest of the ethnography team”, no need to give specific reasons I don’t think.
I also think we should schedule an AMA with Fairwork. Labour and the platform/gig economy is huge in the NGI space, and I’d bet at least Srujana and Fabian would be willing to do it.
@amelia - just a quick note to tell you that if you’ll be organising an event that fits POPREBEL, myself, @Jirka_Kocian and @Wolha are going to help with community management and moderation,
Let me know when the time comes - so we don’t overlap with our planned events?
xx
Studying up to be able to ask good questions:
Link to his website, and specifically to that welfare fraud case. And this is a link to a public’s Guide to Article 8, which they ruled had been violated.
His other recent case is suing Uber on behalf of four drivers for using algorithm to dismiss them.
