As for expressions of gratitude, if you look at the threads/responses to his post/ video you will see that people literally express this - it is not an interpretation but an account of what is being said.
No, @RobvanKranenburg. It means that we map technology policy choices onto their real-life consequences, so as to make the debate more inclusive. In this, we are learning from experience: for example, that of the 2014 EU consultation on copyright (again!). A consultation was out, but it was not getting many responses. This was in large part because it consisted of an 80-pages questionnaire, contained in a downloadable MS Word file, written in legalese and only in English. A group of activists translated it into several languages, and – importantly – mapped the questions of the questionnaire onto real life experiences. For example: “if you have had problems sharing videos with your friends in other EU countries, answer question 16”. Unsurprisingly, this jacked up participation by two orders of magnitude, and greatly increased the diversity of responses. Only professional lobbyists, who get paid for it, will fill an 80-pages questionnaire in legalese. But that’s wasteful, because lobbyists already have their channels to talk to the EU institutions, and the latter already know what lobbyists think. Consultation are most useful when they reach into the corners of society that normally do not request appointments with the Commission, like – in this case – teenagers sharing videos and amateur DJs wondering on the legal consequences of remixing (more on this).
This sounds like a rhetorical question. However, OK: there is no “Edgeryders”. Edgeryders does not have opinions. People who post on the Edgeryders platform occasionally do, and we do not police them. We do ask them to abide our netiquette. This position is consistent:
- With the NGI Forward Grant Agreement. It lists as the first objective of the NGI Forward platform:
Offer everyone prepared to reflect on NGI and the future Internet more broadly an easy-to-use dynamic platform to do it on, and a diverse, inclusive and dissent-tolerant community to do it with.
- With the EU’s core values. Our motto is, not coincidentally, in varietate concordia. Dissent does not make us enemies. That is the whole point of uniting a continent where people have butchered each other for 700 years, often over matters of religion and ideology.
The material appearing on the platform is not analysis per se. We treat it as data for collective intelligence, again as per the GA. The point of collective intelligence is that it corrects itself. In the case you mention, what happens is this: the ethnographers coding this particular post might enter codes that make a “spurious” correlation, for example social media and CDU (in practice I doubt this will happen, my understanding of the post is that @MariaEuler and @matthias are remarking on the uneasy relationship between political communication and the architecture of the Internet. Nothing to do the with the CDU). This will induce an edge between these two codes in the semantic network. As the rest of the corpus is coded, two things might happen:
- Nowhere else is this connection made. In this case, it is by definition not “collective intelligence”, but just one person’s opinion. It gets discarded in Graphryder, together with the other weak edges.
- The connection resurfaces in other corners of the platform, and in different conversations. In this case, several people see it as relevant. We have an empirical regularity. Win! We might then want to go deeper to interpret what it means. We might even learn something about the issue at hand, which is the whole point of the exercise. If we already knew everything there is to know about the future internet, there would be no point running a consultation.
I don’t understand your point. What are you suggesting here? That we should check all content ever published by anyone who is mentioned on the NGI Forward platform, even if they publish it elsewhere, and erase such mentions if we disapprove of their terminology?
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@RobvanKranenburg, we want to take in ongoing discussions to be able to analyse and learn from them. The post and thread were aimed to get some people discussing their opinion on the video, the problems raised in it as well as the problems they might see with the format or the challenges political communication faces on the platform. The title was in reference to the video as it is was intended to be used as a starting point here, but I tried to give it a positive spin with the “for the future” and that future would be what we are trying to work on with the Next Generation Internet projects.
The post was meant to encourage discussing something that was very relevant and talked about on the platform, not to represent edgeryders alignment with anything.
Therefore I suggested in the call to action that it would be best to discuss the different problems and topics raised in the video with examples and projects rather than focusing the meta discussion searching for constructive and solution models.
" Nimm zum Beispiel einen Timestamp, Clip oder Referenz aus dem Video und füge deine Projektidee oder ein Projekt von dem du weißt an und verlinke es hier, oder schreibe ein Kommentar hier und beschreibe es.
WAS HILFT GEGEN DIE ZERSTÖRUNG FÜR DIE ZUKUNFT?
- Wählen zum Beispiel, aber das allein reicht noch nicht.
- Informieren auch, aber wieder, das allein auch nicht, also was für Projekte helfen oder könnten helfen? Und wer macht sie oder will sie machen?"
And finally, the call to vote in the European election, in the end, is something we can probably all get behind.
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I have to reflect a bit on this joint response. I still do not really see the relevance to NGI, but then again that could then well. be me if you so all are in agreement that this is so. This is fine an interesting assertion: “The point of collective intelligence is that it corrects itself.” Will think about this and do some homework on collective intelligence.
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I think the idea was to utilize a recent online trend as a conversation starter, and then see where that discussion goes. To me, the most relevant part for NGI from that viral video is probably “How do we want to deal with opinions and political campaigns on the Internet?” That’s the discussion that the video stirred here in Germany; basically “who can say what and when online about politics and how does it have to be marked”. Sadly, nobody from the community picked up on the thread, so we did not get there … .
As for opinions, I sure have them but I think I was careful to put my contributions in such a way to not create a politically divisive discussion. Also it’s a post by me as an individual, made in unpaid time – I’m only paid for tech stuff. (If we want to say something with official status for the project, we make that clear by putting it into privileged parts of the site like category descriptions or the company blog.)
If you have an idea how to distinguish more clearly what is project communication and what is just a personal opinion or contribution, let us know please. I think it could be clearer, but I don’t have a good idea for the UX right now …
Hi Mathias, I also have no clear idea but may be indeed it is. start to think about ‘official’ pages. As an outsider, not really knowing who are what edgeryders is, I see a discussion under Internet of Humans that is peopled by all edgeryders (everyone in it identifies as edegryders), so it looks like a kind of ‘supported’ discussion (even though, but I don’t know that as I enter, that edgeryders is not having a vision/mission as a group), and it is without a context that I can identify as NGI. So then I think, like I did, an expert that I invite from a workshop to go to the site and check IoH and find an internal German discussion might get confused, thank you for clarifying, good weekend! Rob
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Since me and filip are responsible - together with you all - for outreach, how I see it:
to @ all of the smart minds here: any kind of news that you think is relevant to discussions you are having, I would like to know about those. Either to see if there’s a way we can hook a topic we find relevant to a larger global conversation, or draw in people from different kinds of believes worried about a certain issue. Of course I actually follow quite a lot of these topics already as a journalist and a hobby news reader, but we can miss things that could be very pertinent to a part of a conversation held somewhere.
And no matter the topic, there’s going to be people who disagree, but that usually makes the conversation - if done well, much more interesting.
Add this:
- Translations and copy in Serbian, Czech, Spanish, Dutch and Italian for the site by this week, preferably Wednesday at the latest.
Translations of basic text for the site
I am Zmorda from Tunis. I will be working on a new project in the MENA region, a P2P online mentoring project, as a project manager. The effective start of the project will be next July. I will be happy to join you for this call to meet the team and learn about your work, and also to explore together what you can help us in this new project.
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Apologies for missing today’s meeting. I mixed up the time zone again. I will do my best to attend as many of the upcoming meetings. R
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just to reiterate: we’re having on today, correct?
Yes
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@noemi @inge @johncoate @MariaEuler @anon82932460 @natalia_skoczylas @owen_mcneir just a reminder this call is still on. Iam on the road and traffic is nuts. Likely to be 15 mins late…
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Would be kinda hard for me to make it today. Do you need me a lot or is it ok if I am back from the next one?
You need to update the team i guess, about what is happening in Germany/big on the national newsstream this week. Also links to conversations or posts, including your own. Maybe as acomment here?
I’m here and ready to go
So, we should have our content curation call in 45 minutes - @nadia were talking last week and we think we should/could bring it down to once a month. I am available for a call today, but let me know if you all want to proceed or if we should schedule for in a few weeks @noemi @johncoate @hugi @MariaEuler @Jirka_Kocian @natalia_skoczylas @Richard @anon82932460 and others
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I can go either way depending on what’s needed.
I am here, so let me know if it s happening, otherwise, anything you need, we can talk through on the platform.