Wow! As others have said, you’ve picked a fascinating topic.
My interest is in how the data that’s been collected is made discoverable by others, moving away from the current approach of dumping it all in one centralized pile. Since these topics are very much two sides of the same coin, I wonder if you have any thoughts that way?
P.S. Thinks for the worldbrain link, it’s right up my alley!
Hi there!
Sorry for my little late replies, this week is a real killer. 
@MariaEuler
“What types of collaboration or collaborators are you looking for?”
Thanks for the warm welcome! I aiming to look at open, decentralized initiatives and what issues they face. I would assume decentralized structures are more gravitated towards collaboration by deafult, but will meet more challenges as well, compared to centralized structures.
@hugi
Yes, Oliver from worldbrain mentioned your talk. 
Mapeo looks really interesting! Thanks for sharing, and the other pointers too!
@johncoate
Interesting that we have some overlaps. Well, not so strange, maybe, world is always smaller than one would think!
@alberto
I was more thinking about the psychological effects of how and what people say on social networks and why. In this sense I was actually more referring to dialogue than collaboration. I think concerns about data is getting more and more mainstream, leading to some degree of self censorship, though I would argue hate speech is the main issue we face.
Anyway these concerns are also alive on the fringes in decentralized networks, for instance, a small example regarding scuttlebutt:
“Another problematic issue is that you cannot delete posts. Once your posts appear on others’ computers, they no longer have a singular home where they can be accessed & destroyed. Once you send out those posts, they now have multiple homes. I understand that the protocol’s very structure makes deletion difficult. I do. Many developers argue that SSB is the place for “sober” commentary, that the permanence gives folks pause for posting. I don’t know: we’ve collectively witnessed at least 4 decades of online bad behavior. Also, folks say stupid shit all the time. Should they be held accountable forever? What if they wish to leave Scuttlebutt? What if they’re being targeted by malicious actors? What if they just wish to reduce their digital shadows? If you can’t delete your posts, do you really own your data?” Source: Floodgap Gopher-HTTP gateway gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/rusty/Post04-ssb
I think there worldbrain is really on point, as I think information overload is a real issue, as well as quality information.
Another thought that I had last days is the curiosity of gender in community building and construction of networks. If one looks to society, this is generally something where females take the lead, keeping connections in support networks, arranging and managing the social sphere. Would a collaboration, community build by non-cis-male engineers look differently? If so, how?
Cheers,
Julia
Wow, who is this Rusty guy? The post is impressive. @matthias has been thinking a lot about high-latency computer networks for application to rural Nepal, and I see his arguments coming to life in Rusty’s words:
Understanding New Zealand’s geographic isolation is necessary to understanding why SSB came into existence. Birthed from the brain of Dominic Tarr, SSB was originally an attempt to cope with New Zealand’s unreliable internet connections. Instead of thinking that this roadblock had to be overcome, Tarr & soon others developed a way to network using localization & disrupted connectivity as foundational concepts. (source)
I am fascinated by the trade-offs that Rusty mentions (I experience them myself, I have used SSB for almost one year now). Since posting is permanent, you are discouraged from posting in anger. My client (Patchwork) wants you before each post, and asks for confirmation. This generates friendly, “sober” thoughtful responses. People go out of their way to get closure of anything resembling conflict. But then, no, you definitely do not own your data if you cannot delete them.
In the end, he proposes that the best use for SSB is to keep track of interaction with local groups:
Instead, I see its greatest potential as being a tool for aiding communication between individuals in a closed network. […] SSB would make for a great tool in a closed network because everyone’s information is stored on each other’s computers. There would be no corporate spying or targeted ads. Since you avoid outside servers & could even avoid the internet, the rules of discourse could be negotiated by the active participants. In other words, SSB could help maintain autonomous digital spaces at a time where they are rapidly disappearing.
In Edgeryders, this function is fulfilled by:
I can certainly see the value of SSB for activists planning. People also use Signal for that.
@allegra, was great to have you in the call just now. There is a worldbrain connection here, have you already seen that?
This is not a great use-case of SSB. In the future it might be, but at at this point only private massages are encrypted, and there are better protocols (like signal) if that is what you care most about. Most posts on SSB are actually completely unprotected, and viewable from the www-internet through nodes that are sharing their feeds online.
This is an interesting point, because it has some strange ramifications if we follow it through to its conclusion. One of the rationales for not being able to delete your posts is that in a world where data is distributed, is that it just isn’t possible to guarantee that your posts don’t live on. Today, anything embarrassing is impossible to get rid of from the internet if you are famous, but the only reason this is not true for all of us is that it’s simply too expensive to save every piece of information I see online. But as storage grows cheaper, this will no longer be the case. Indeed, Worldbrain saves everything I read online in its local cache on my computer and makes that content searchable and available to me later regardless of whether you have deleted your posts or not. If it becomes as cheap for me to save every image I see forever, if it becomes as easy for people with camera-glasses to cache every moment of everything they see locally, can any data ever truly be deleted? And when this starts to extend into IoT sensor territory, this becomes an even stranger future world.
And if we draw this quote to its logical conclusion: If you can never delete any of the content you release online, does this mean that you no longer own it?
Hello, Loomio dev here.
We have this problem regularly. If someone contributes to a group discussion, is that comment theirs to delete?
How about a vote. If a group make a major decision, then later someone decides to delete all their data, losing their vote makes the decision unclear - to me, it is clear that you do not own your vote data, you give it to the group.
Practically, to give users maximum freedom, we remove the user record with user_id, name, email, photo etc, but preserve the vote record with position and statement. So the outcome of the deicsion is not changed, but the user’s personally identifiying information is removed at their request.
That depends on the kind of discussion and the context of the group I’d say. Your “major decision” example is a good one, in such cases, the vote should be kept, because people need to be able to see how something important was decided. If it is really important, it might even be prudent to say “no, this needs to be in the public record forever, with that persons name attached to it!” In those cases, it is imperative though, that everyone who is called to that vote knows this beforehand.
But for random discussions where someone realized that they inadvertently wrote something harmful and want to delete it? Say, you did a snafu and realized that you copy-pasted your credit card data into a Facebook discussion. You should be able to remove that, shouldn’t you?
Yes, Julia is collaborating with us. She is the one who told me about Edgeryders 
@JuliaV I just came across the political initiative crowdvoice that is all about gathering data from eyewitness collectively.
Hi there again!
First of all, thanks for all the feedback on my post!
I have been contemplating a bit the last days about the upcoming months, and I actually think I need to give myself a bit of a calm time before deep diving into something new. I am really happy to have gotten a small insight in the community, and I would like to stick around to follow the developments in this forum. Maybe i would have a go at another of the fellowships later in time, but for now, I hope the right person finds this opportunity.
Also glad to see that @allegra found her way here too!
Have a nice evening!
Julia
Yeah, i don’t know Rusty, i just came across this post on twitter and thought it was pretty on point.
Welcome @JuliaV
Fun to see someone who’s been at SourceFabric, I’ve been trying out Booktype and have been curious to use it to publish a longer read some day!
I think for collaboration I can recommend having a look at Adam Kahane’s book “Collaborating with the Enemy” about what collaboration really is and different forms of “collaboration”. Would be interesting to learn about different types of collaboration in peer-to-peer network.
For Open data collection, I really think you are on to something. It’s quite political as many authorities often release datasets which are not so interesting even though global warming and climate change are imminent huge challenges. There’s also often a lack of sensitive datasets around economic spending which could cause a lot of debacle.
I think it’s really true that if you can’t delete your data, it’s not yours. At the same time, there’s a big risk someone has already copied the data so it’s no longer “yours”. For event activities off Facebook I suggest having a look at the current crowdfunding by Framasoft NGO Framasoft callled Mobilizon #JoinMobilizon - Let’s take back control of our events which is very well on its way to create an interesting replacement to FB. Events is the only function left on Facebook that I hear keeps people on it.
Hi Matthias!
Thanks for the tip, i will check it out!
On the politics of data collection id like to share this blog https://missingnumbers.org/
Cheers!
Julia
If you can’t delete your posts, do you really own your data?
Back in the 80s at The WELL (one of the first publicly available online asynch conferencing platforms and often cited as the first real ‘online community’ - I was employee #2 there), in trying to determine this issue, the founder came up with the phrase “you own your own words.” He meant that you, rather than the platform, take responsibility for what you say.
But he used the word “own.” Now the guy who wrote the software The WELL ran on (and still does in one form), was so anti-authority that he made it impossible for even someone with root privileges to edit someone else’s words, or even remove them. Even the poster could not remove or edit them later. This was a real anti-Big Brother stance, and quite admirable I think.
But that word “own” meant that some of the members wanted to be able to remove a comment if they did not want it there. So, having a lot of hackers in the community, one of the better programmers figured out how to allow someone to remove their own comments. Not the sysop - only the poster could do it. And it wasn’t invisible - it had to say “scribbled” instead of what had been there before. It didn’t happen much so wasn’t all that bothersome, and many users felt better about at least having that ability.
But then it got taken a step further when someone figured out how to “mass scribble” which means removing every comment you have ever made. So when you leave you take it all with you. The statement said “own” and to many, that is what the word means.
Again, it wasn’t too big of a problem until one guy, one of the very most prolific commenters, who said things all over the place, got in an ugly fight with his fiance’ who was also very prominent on the WELL, and in a huff he did a mass scribble. That made the whole site look like swiss cheese and was kind of a disaster. Luckily the guy came back and it all got restored. But that was just luck. Still, when you use the word “own” that can cut a number of ways…
I should add that later, another guy, very sharp, prominent contributor, did a mass scribble then killed himself. Those comments were never restored because they couldn’t be restored by anyone but him and he was gone for good. What was sad, besides losing the guy completely (he was a friend), was that he was a seriously interesting and insightful guy with great stories and ideas. All of that was lost to the community. But he owned his own words…
This seems to be one of those contradictions that you can never solve by throwing code at. In a conversation, the community has a right to a trusted log: who said what when. But individual humans have a right to oblivion, and starting all over again. Furthermore, communities benefit from a trusted log, because it promotes prosocial behavior. But individuals benefit from being able to respawn with a clean-ish slate, and not having to walk around with the albatross of their past mistakes hanging from their necks, like Coleridge’s old mariner. There’s no solution, only management.
No question he was trying for a kind of social engineering. And pretty extreme. He didn’t trust authority but he also didn’t really trust the people, since you couldn’t edit what you said once you said it. The idea with that was so you couldn’t go back and erase something and later say “I never said that.” So yeah, building his social biases into the code.
@JuliaV, we would love to have you as a participant at the Edgeryders Festival in November. I am sure you could add a very interesting talk or workshop! Events are already planned in Stockholm, Brussels, Berlin and Warsaw. You could fill out this form, answer here or get in contact with me anytime to discuss more in detail how we could help each other to make great projects and discussions happen :). Or join us in the community call this Tuesday the 17th of September 18:00 Brussels time to discuss ideas and possibilities with the community :): Launch Meeting - Zoom