"We did not ask for it" conflicts and a methodological question

Alberto Alemanno pointed me to the story of Eunomia, which very much looks like a recently launched Horizon 2020 project trying to come up with some system to detect fake news. The link above leads to a review written by a site called One Angry Gamer, a news website that covers gaming, but also internet freedom and “ethics in journalism”. The money quote (emphasis mine):

A European Union-funded initiative called Eunomia has contracted various thinktanks, tech groups, and Fediverse evangelists to help with a new social credit scoring system. The system will be applied to social media and the federated destinations using blockchain technology. It will be governed by a crowdsourced system where groups rank up and rank down the trust levels of information. In simple terms, it’s an adaptation of China’s social credit scoring system for the Fediverse. Well, someone working on the project leaked some chat logs, and it reveals a rather antagonistic nature from the people working on the project toward the users who are skeptical of this EU funded project. […] This obviously didn’t seem like an innocuous project from the EU especially given the Union’s recent anti-freedom of speech initiatives like Article 11 and Article 13. […] Why is a social scoring system even needed for social media if users didn’t ask for it?

Note the reference to the Fediverse. One of the partners is Eugen “Gargron” Rochko, the creator of Mastodon. It seems reasonable to deduce that there is quite some trust to rebuild, and that suggests a lot of listening in NGI, and not so much speaking.

And a question to @johncoate. Where does this type of post go in the public space? It was not obvious to me, given the cats you made.

Not done with the cats - still figuring it out. I created 4 discussion sub-categories just now. See if they make sense to you. I’m trying to find a small number of larger 'buckets" that will work with tags to help people get to the things that interest them. Looking for balance between good organization and screen clutter. I’d make those boxes smaller but I don’t see where to do that.

So, then, in the case of this ‘we did not ask for it’ topic, I would put in under Governance since it is talking about a EU-directed potential regulation.

Ok, done.

As for “making sense”, I dislike ontologies and see them as a necessary evil, and they are overrated anyway. From a community management point of view, I also dislike empty or semi-empty cats. So, my instinct would be to have only ONE cat, Internet of Humans, with one subcat for the research team, and maybe (maybe) differentiate later, when the discussion is so crowded that it begs breaking down. That’s how OpenCare worked, and that’s how I would do it if I were in your shoes.

I wasn’t fixed on keeping those subcategories up there. Was trying them out for size in anticipation that more organization will be called for later. Pre-release mocking up. Ontologies and tags and all are not as important as they once were when search was more cumbersome than it is today. But I think they are more useful than you do probably. At any rate they help describe the landscape.

Anyway I moved this into a general discussion area. Probably will come up with a snappier name for it…