Week in review: 17 - 23 July
- Spent the week in Southampton and one day in Oxford talking about decentralisation, scholarly communication, LinkedResearch, personal data stores and the like with cool people like emax, csarven, bblfish, TimBL, Wendy, Nigel, Ramine, Jun, DDR..
- Imagined eprints as a tiny LDN-powered JS app (ldprints).
- Net magazine issue 296 came out in print.. With an article about Linked Data Notifications!
- Missed a bunch of buses.
- Spent a couple of hours eating great food at the Southbank Center food market, just like summer 2014 weekends. Remembered why I love and hate London.
- Surprise visited my Mum. Now I can tweet again.
Review of "Decentralized creation of academic documents using a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server"
This article addresses quite a specific problem: collaborative document editing without third-party servers. The reasons for not wanting to rely on Web servers, even if they're under the control of the document author, is fairly well explained and motivated.
Addressing authoring solutions to MS Word users is diving in the deep end, but a worthy goal as this reaches a lot of researchers. However, I question that the idea of installing software is too complicated for most people.. do you not think it's possible to get the installation process for FW to be as simple as for MSWord?
I realise that this article is not about FidusWriter, but rather collaborative document editing via a NAS, but it would be helpful to explain more about what FidusWriter does and how it is normally run, ie. not on a NAS, and some comparison.
The authors seem to feel strongly about data ownership, mentioning privacy potentially being violated by corporations and governments. It's not clear however that FidusWriter provides a publishing solution, only an authoring solution. That is, once an article is finished it seems that a PDF is exported and turned over to third parties anyway? Relatedly, I would love to know more about how the authors envision this fitting in with the rest of the scholarly communication process, as mentioned in the abstract, particularly peer-review. Could a similar setup be purposed to permit reviewers to control their review contents as well? I assume FidusWriter takes care of access control, citations, formulas and figures, though the article does not state that.
The article mentions that there are other web services for academic authoring, but doesn't name any. I'd be interested to know which ones the authors analysed. Is it only the ones in the footnote? In which case only Authorea and Overleaf are problematic in the ways mentioned for running on third-party servers. I don't really see evidence that the authors have performed a comprehensive search for alternatives in this space. There are certainly clientside document authoring applications which run on personal data stores, such as Laverna which can talk to RemoteStorage servers, and dokieli (which I'm pretty sure the authors have heard of) which can talk to LDP servers, not to mention 'decentralised Google Docs' type things like NextCloud and CosyCloud. It would be worth finding out how easily any of these could be extended to add collaborative editing if they don't have it already, since they have the decentralisation part covered.
Thus, perhaps it's worth comparing running FidusWriter on a NAS to running various generic personal datastores. It seems to me that FidusWriter rather ties the editing application with the storage, which prevents the user from easily switching applications. It's not clear if FW follows a standard protocol for data exchange with the server either. These aren't really the problems of the authors in this context, but it is a downside of a non-standard system even if it's open source and installed on the user's machine. Useful future work might be taking the idea of a NAS forward with other storage/server and client/application options.
That said, I would love to see a docker image prepared to easily set up FidusWriter on any server, if that doesn't already exist!
Limitations are appropriately mentioned as cost and power of NAS devices, though no specifics are given.
Finally, the authors assume a status-quo vision of academic authoring (eg. the "need" for blind peer review) and proceed from there with a decentralisation angle. More interesting would be a paragraph or two about how an approach like this is setting the stage for future advancement in the space. I like the idea of meeting in the middle; addressing immediate problems authors have with their current tooling, whilst laying some foundations for progressing in the direction opened up to us by Web technologies.
Minor comment: what is meant by "Linux boxes" (in quotes)? Are you getting at things like Raspberry Pis?
And I can't help but ask: did you collaboratively author this article using FidusWriter on a NAS? Some screenshots of doing so would add a whole new layer of credibility to your analysis :)
I am rhiaro on toot.cat, boop me.
I have grand plans for posting to mastodon from my own posting clients via ActivityPub, and bridging Salmon to LDN so I can get the notifications back.. but right now I'm exhausted and overwhelmed and trying to finish my thesis, so hang tight.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2017/04/at-wow2017
We had ten years of the Web before we had Google.. We take for granted the future of the Web, but it's really only been around for a tiny fraction of time... Because we put content on the Web is why it grows. If we stop, it dies.
Technologists can't study the web alone. We need a whole interdisciplinary relay to try to understand the Web and make sure it stays good for humanity. Right now I'm worried it's on the cusp of *not* being good for humanity.
Today we're talking about the Web Observatory, and then about decentralisation of the world. They're connected by data. We want Web Observatories around the world... lots of telescopes, links to datasets eg. webobservatory.soton.ac.uk.
Twenty years ago, we started Southampton eprints. People thought we were mad. The rest of the world caught up... but I did not forsee a world where I'd have to pay thousands of dollars to publish an open access publication. That's not we envisioned. To me, a Web Science approach to studying this issue is absolutely overdue.
The Presentation of Self on a Decentralised Web
Preamble
Even though my deadline is coming up fast, I still have a lot of work to do on this thesis. I am, and have been from the start, doing this in the open; my thesis is in a public GitHub repo, and you can see it at dr.amy.gy (aspirational URL which redirects to github pages). Lots of pieces are still to be written, so don't expect a coherent start-to-finish reading experience. With that in mind, feedback and suggestions are welcome in the form of issues; but unless you're my supervisor or someone who knows for a fact I take your opinions on this topic seriously, they might not receive a ton of attention :)
Abstract
Self presentation is evolving; with digital technologies, with the Web and personal publishing, and then with mainstream adoption of online social media. Where are we going next? One possibility is towards a world where we log and own vast amounts of data about ourselves. We choose to share - or not - the data as part of our identity, and in interactions with others; it contributes to our day-to-day personhood or sense of self. We imagine a world where the individual is empowered by their digital traces (not imprisoned), but this is a complex world.
This thesis examines the many factors at play when we present ourselves through Web technologies. We optimistically look to a future where control over our digital identities are not in the hands of centralised actors, but our own, and both survey and contribute to the ongoing technical work which strives to make this a reality. Decentralisation changes things in unexpected ways. In the context of the bigger picture of our online selves, building on what we already know about self-presentation from decades of Social Science research, we examine what might change as we move towards decentralisation; how people could be affected, and what the possibilities are for a positive change. Finally we explore one possible way of self-presentation on a decentralised social Web through lightweight controls which allow an audience to set their expectations in order for the subject to meet them appropriately.
We seek to acknowledge the multifaceted, complicated, messy, socially-shaped nature of the self in a way that makes sense to software developers. Technology may always fall short when dealing with humanness, but the framework outlined in this thesis can provide a foundation for more easily considering all of the factors surrounding individual self-presentation in order to build future systems which empower participants.
Outline
- Introduction
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The Presentation of Self Online
Evolution of presentation of self; social science and social media studies literature. Starring danah boyd, danah boyd, Erving Goffman, and danah boyd.
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Social Semantics
Some studies on contemporary practices of online self-presentation, starring Max and Dave (A++++ would coauthor again), TomSka and other YouTubers, and the Indieweb. Named for Harry Halpin's thesis/book which made me think a lot.
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Decentralising the Social Web, and other stories
A possible future - decentralisation and the technologies to get us there. Starring the W3C Social Web WG.
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Standards for the Social Web
How these technologies affect self-presentation; how does the big picture change? One idea and its implementation. Starring the Social Web Protocols and sloph, both things I was originally doing to procrastinate from thesis work.
- Conclusions
// TODO lol
In reply to: https://twitter.com/KKjernsmo/status/800785163919781888
@KKjernsmo Yes, with those canaries explicitly not being vulnerable minorities.
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Decentralisation considered harmful
As I work - on writing standards, writing code, studying centralised and decentralised systems - and as I read the news and watch events unfold around me, bubbling away under the surface is always an unease. What if we're making it worse? We all have blind spots, limited experiences. And especially so since many of us working on decentralisting the Web are not amongst those who would benefit most from the purported advantages. Some of us have been working (or watching) in this space for years, decades, longer than the Web. But more of us, an only ever increasing number, have not. We are privileged, we are nerds, most of us don't have all that much experience, and we do not know best. We've jumped on this decentralisation thing as a solution to lots of global problems.
Towards the end of last week, Tantek prompted me to actually articulate some of what were previously just subconscious discomfort. How are the decentralised technologies we're working on going to make people more vulnerable?
Smaller attack surfaces: Large centralised systems have robust network architectures; lots of money and expertise to keep things running even if under attack (except when someone uses all of the Web-enabled kettles to DDOS them, but that aside). Many decentralised architectures imagine smaller 'pods' which federate. It's possible many of these servers will be run by volunteers, hobbyists, or small/poor organisations, and could be easily knocked over and kept down by malicious actors.
Quieter takedowns: We want it to be easier for small communities, perhaps vulnerable minorities, to create safe spaces in their own corner of the Web, and to be able to keep out those who jeopardise that. If these communities are 'disappeared' (perhaps made easier by the previous point) the rest of the Web might not notice until it's too late.
Illusion of control: We promote decentralisation as a way to control who has access to your personal/social data, and to be able to move it somewhere else if you want. But a key part of decentralisation is federation, or enabling access to your data by other systems, ie. so that you and your friends can use a different applications for the same thing, without that getting in the way of your interactions. This involves open data formats and standard APIs and likely complex access control setups. Most people tell me they can't get a handle on their Facebook privacy settings, and these are for a single unified system. Just because you could move your data to a different service, doesn't mean it's safe where it is.
Illusion of control 2: Normies look at me like I'm nuts when they find out I share more about myself on my personal website than they do on social media. I tell them I know exactly what I'm sharing, rather than having it slurped up by algorithms which monitor everything they click or hover over. My explicit sharing is greater, but my implicit sharing is reduced. Or so I think. Related to the previous point, my data is all public and nicely marked up to be machine readable. The confidence I have about the fact that I have to jump through inconvenient hoops of my own making to get it online is dangerous. If social media has normalised dangerous oversharing, and the general populace is starting to clock the 'dangerous' part, then decentralised social media runs the risk of convincing people their oversharing is 'safe' again, setting us back a decade.
The filter bubble: The easier we make it for people to avoid abuse online (just imagine for half a second that the decentralisation efforts are even close to solving this, k?), the easier we make it for people to filter out diverse points of view. The first thing I noticed when Twitter introduced its recent phrase filtering thing was a bunch of privileged liberals screaming about the filter bubble and completely missing the point. But anyway. If this is an either/or we're in trouble.
This is doubtless just the beginning of a very long list, and there are others thinking/writing about this as well. I'll update this post to list other articles as I come across them.
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Decentralising the Social Web in Tokyo
This is what I talked about at the W3C TAG developer summit in Tokyo tonight.
東京で2016年11月3日にて開催されたW3C TAGデベロッパー・サミットにて話した内容となります。
I am one of the staff contacts for the W3C Social Web WG. I also co-edit a couple of specs in the group, and procrastinate from finishing my PhD thesis by implementing the group's specs as part of my own website.
まずは自己紹介から、 W3C Social Webワーキンググループのコンタクトを務めています。また、そのワーキンググループにていくつかの仕様についても共同編集者をしてたりもします。そのグループの仕様を自分のサイトへの実装がPhDの論文がなかなか終わらない理由だったりします。
I'm a strong believer in owning your online presence and social data on the Web. What this means (to me) is: making data accessible through a URL that you have authority over - either you own it and host it yourself, or someone you trust does. It also means having control and choice over how and when you express yourself; working against censorship and being free to share as much - or as little - about yourself as you want. This is particularly important when we think about a how social networking works today. Big systems like twitter and facebook - silos - are hoarding the data, and creative, expressive content, and livelihoods, of millions of people. And they're mining it and using it in ways that most people are completely unaware of. If twitter goes down tomorrow - and it could, they just shut down Vine - what happens to your history and interactions? We have this huge hoard of collective digital history that we, as societies, have aggregated over the last decade, and we just gave it right up. The culture of a generation is completely out of the hands of the people who created it, and who it's important to. This could disappear at the whim of an investor, or a glitch in a data center.
私は自分自身のオンラインにおけるプレゼンスとソーシャル・データを所有することについて、強い信念を持っています。(自分にとって)どういう意味を持つか、というと、自分がオーソリティを持っている(たとえば自分自身が所有しているか、あるいは自分が信頼する誰かが所有しているような)URLからデータをアクセス可能にすることを意味します。また同じく自分自身がどう表現させるかについて制御したり、選択したりできることも含んでいます。検閲から逃れたり、自分自身のことをどれだけでも多く、もちろん少なくでも自由に共有できることも大切です。 現在ソーシャルネットワークサービスを鑑みると、非常に重要なことだと考えています。TwitterやFacebookのような巨大でサイロなシステムは何百万人ものデータや創造物、くらしそのものをそのシステムに飲み込もうとしています。その上、ほとんどの人が気づかない内に、データは使われているのです。もしTwitterが明日無くなったら(可能性はもちろんあります、何しろVineは終了するのですから)、あなたの履歴や他者とのインタラクションはどうなるのでしょうか? 我々が社会全体として、この10年間ほどで集約してきた巨大なデジタルの歴史達をただ諦めることしかできないのでしょうか。この世代の文化そのものがそれを生み出した人たち、そしてそれらを貴重だと思う人たちの手から離れて、インベスターの気まぐれやデータセンターのちょっとした不具合によって、消え去ってしまうかも知れないわけです。
This is part of what motivates me personally to work on decentralising the social web. In the SocialWG we are creating open standards for:
その事実こそが、私自身がソーシャルWebを分散させようとするモチベーションとなっています。Socialワーキンググループでは以下のような標準を作成中です。
- representing social content
- creating, updating and deleting content
- federating updates between different servers through decentralised subscription and notification mechanisms
- ソーシャルコンテンツの代理
- コンテンツの作成、更新、削除
- 分散化させたサブスクリプションと通知のメカニズムを通じて、異なるサーバ間における情報更新を連合させること
The idea is that people implementing our standards using completely different technology stacks, and without any discussion between themselves, can build systems which talk to each other for some of these kinds of interactions.
標準が異なる技術で実装されようと、お互いの議論もなく、以下の様なインタラクションを行うシステムを構築できること、というのが全体のアイデアです。
Now we know not everybody can have their own website to replace social media. We also know that the big social networking sites are not going to make it easy for people who want to move their data around, or for developers to create decentralised competitors. There have been people working in this space for a looong time, and it's been an uphill struggle the whole way.
すべての人がソーシャルメディアの代わりとなるウェブサイトを持つことはできません。また、巨大なソーシャルネットワークサイト達がユーザのデータの持ち出しを簡単にしたり、開発者が分散化した競合を開発したりすることを簡単にさせてくれることもないでしょう。これまでにもこの領域でとてもながい間働いてきている人もいますが、その間は長い闘いの歴史しかありません。
Our specs are building blocks for different pieces of the social puzzle. It looks like we have a lot, but they're small and modular to help developers pick and choose the parts they need. Rather than having to implement a whole "social network", you can decide to integrate say decentralised comments into a site you're working on, without worrying about subscription or content creation or even account signup and data storage.
我々が作成している仕様は、このソーシャルなパズルを構成する様々なピースです。多くのことを成さなければならないようにも見えますが、それぞれは小さなモジュールとなっているので、開発者たちが必要なパーツを選べるようになっています。『ソーシャル・ネットワーク』そのものを実装するのではなく、例えば分散化したコメントを、登録やコンテンツ作成、アカウントの作成やデータストレージのことを気にしないで、サイトに統合したりできるような形を目指しています。
We're not aiming for adoption by major social networking players (none are involved in the group) but by individual developers and smaller business for whom collecting social data is not their business model, but rather can be an enhancement for their customers of some other product or service.
我々は著名なソーシャルネットワークサイト達(グループ内にはどのサイトも関わっていません)に導入してもらうことを目的とはしていません。その代わりに各個人の開発者や、ソーシャルデータを集積をビジネスモデルとしていないものの、それらのデータを使って彼らのカスタマーに対するエンハンスメントとして利用するような、小さなビジネスに導入されることを期待しています。
Our specifications are JSON based, and use JSON-LD for extensibility. If you're not familiar with Linked Data, this basically just means using a URL as a globally unique identifier for everything, including relationships between things (which would for example normally just be plain text keys in a JSON object). Sharing URLs this way helps us know when we're talking about the same thing as someone else on the Web, so that we can integrate data across diverse sources, without having to know anything about the other data sources beforehand.
我々の仕様はJSONを基幹とし、拡張性を保つためJSON-LDを利用しています。リンクト・データとは、URLをすべてのデータ、例えば、何かと何かの関連性(JSONオブジェクト内のプレーンテキストのキー名だったりすることが多いでしょう)に対するグローバルな一意の識別子として利用することを指します。URLをこのように扱うことで、あるものが別の人が示したものが同じものであると認識するのに役立ちます。こうすることで様々なソース間でお互いのことを知らずとも、データの統合を行うことができるわけです。
(This is vastly oversimplifying things, see https://json-ld.org to learn more)
(この例はデフォルメしているので、詳しくはhttps://json-ld.orgを参照)
We still have a way to go, and we'd love your feedback as developers. This was a pretty high level overview, and if you have any specific technical questions about the specs up here, I'm happy to answer them.
他にもやり方はあることでしょう。皆様のフィードバックを楽しみにしています。今回共有したのは、非常にハイレベルな概要ですので、もし仕様に関する技術的な疑問などあればいつでも質問してください。
Finally, the WG is finishing at the end of this year, but we're keeping the momentum going with a Community Group which anyone is welcome to join, whether you're a W3C member or not.
最後に、このワーキンググループは今年で終了となりますが、この流れ全体はW3Cのメンバーであってなくても、誰でも参加できるコミュニティグループとして、継続していきますので、興味ある方はぜひ。
Contact
- http://w3c.social (currently redirects to Social Web Protocols, more useful stuff coming soon..)
- WG Wiki: http://w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/
- Mailing list: public-socialweb@w3.org
- Twitter (sorry): @SocialWebWG
- IRC: #social on irc.w3.org
Me
- Amy Guy, W3C & University of Edinburgh
- https://rhiaro.co.uk/
- amy@rhiaro.co.uk
- rhiaro on IRC, and everywhere else.
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Amy shared https://pandelisperakakis.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/how-to-negotiate-with-publishers-an-example-of-immediate-self-archiving-despite-publishers-embargo-policy/
the problem of restricted access can easily be solved using existing infrastructures and with a small additional effort on behalf of the authors or their librarians - Pandelis
If you are Web savvy, it is a 'small effort' to self-archive your work in a space you control. But not everyone can manage that. And then, feedback, reviews and collaboration also in a space you control is no 'small effort'. Linking to and from specific parts of other research is not trivial when reports and results are missing fine-grained open identifiers. Maintaining your reputation and tracking the effect of your work (so that other researchers and institutions take you seriously) is no 'small effort'. Searchability and guaranteeing long-term persistence is no 'small effort'. There's still a way to go on both the infrastructure and cultural fronts here.
The (Social) Web has most of the pieces. They just need putting together.
That's what we're working towards with #LinkedResearch.
"aggressively decentralised"
Lots of people saying "decentralised" to each other and meaning different things at dwebsummit
Part of me wants to move my site to github so commits count towards a streak etc, and that's where pretty much everything else I'm working on regularly is, but really I should keep it on bitbucket in the name of decentralisation, and manage my own 'streak' and contributions list on my site, aggregating commits from both places.
WebSci2015
ACM Web Science 2015 (Oxford, UK) was the complete opposite of WWW2015. Almost to a point of saturation... but I shouldn't complain :)
With a heavy weighting of social science (or social science influenced) papers, despite still having a majority of computer scientists in the audience, most sessions and panels were about ethics, privacy, digital rights, inclusivity and a 'pro-human' Web. The focus was overwhelmingly social media, with a side of Internet of Things, plus a weird smattering of robot ethics. Usually a focus on social media means lots of SNA, detecting content trends, and user profiling and other things I hate, but instead substantial discussion of people as people, rather than users (or targets), was refreshing. There was also plenty of work on sites other than Twitter and Facebook! Such as individual blogs, social gaming sites, specialist and smaller communities. Though I'm not sure if we figured out any solutions to the personal data crisis.
That's not to say it was all social! There were technical talks too, including a few papers on linked data.
Max presented our paper The Many Dimensions of Lying Online during the first Online Social Behaviours session, and along with the other three papers presented formed a great narrative about the complex and nuanced nature of online identities, and how they both affect and are affected by technical systems.
I'm not going to write up content here. Instead, see all my posts from during the conference at /tag/websci15.
Other things. The structure of the conference felt unusual (in a good way); parallel paper sessions were dispersed amongst panels and workshops. All sessions were very interdisciplinary. The catering was really good. There were fewer people than I expected.
I spy @emax telling the world about awesome rad social decentralisation stuff and how silos are bad #indieweb
