Tag: EU

Invisible agenda on the #openweb

A. #NGIforum21 #NGI #EU It’s not “usability” its “control” – the #dotcons are built for control the #eurocrates need, the #openweb tools which work fine is for people to people.

The #openweb tools do not have the control that the #Eurocrats need to move onto our tools and be a part of our community. This is going to lead to a “invisible” fight, as they are increasingly funding development we face a crisis in the #fediverse A Sheldon crises talking the language of our crew.

Q. Yes, we should keep things people-to-people and avoid getting involved with large hierarchical organizations who will try to appear friendly but will move the development into a more centralized mode which they can then influence and have control over.

What the EU people want I think is a Silicon Valley in the EU. A digital portfolio from which they can project influence internationally and a vehicle for venture capital and new digital markets. If you read their blurb this is what they say, and I don’t have any reason to disbelieve them.

Obviously something like the fediverse doesn’t really fit with the cunning EU plan (fits like a fish riding a bicycle) and so at some point there will be an ideological parting of lovers (perhaps it has already happened, I am not following the NGI conversations).

A. The #mainstreaming funding of the #fedivers is already completely dominated by the #EU all the big projects are funded by #NGI

This is more #fuckup than conspiracy though am shore conspiracy is growing as people see the levers of power and control which comes with money agenda.

It’s an “invisible” hot war, standing aside is not an option.

Q. Maybe there should be a plan for whenever the EU launches some venture capital fediverse product. I expect it would be like what Trump is doing, but under some EU branded “incubator” and maybe with centralized moderation.

Something like that would create a tug-of-love between the revenue of projects and a centralizing agenda. I’ve been around the bloc enough times to know it’s bound to happen. These things are so formulaic.

A. I think that’s jumping ahead of were we are for the next year or two. Most of the People at #NGI pushing this agenda simple do not see the damage they do. Only a tiny number are actively “evil” currently.

We have a opening http://hamishcampbell.com the last few posts are a way to step away from this “crisis”.

Q. It’s like you can see the truck driving towards the cliff edge.

“If you go in that direction, you’ll fall off the edge”.

The driver says “Nah mate, it’s different this time”.

And you watch the truck as it reaches the precipice, and then falls off.

A. yep but need to look in the back of tuck as it’s filled with much of the #fedivers infrastructure that’s going to go over the cliff.

Actavisam is to sit down in front of the truck and refuse to move, while talking to the “press” about the issues #fluffy​

Or pour sugar into the truck fual tank in the night #spiky​

Standing and watching while shrugging shoulders is kinda #mainstreaming 🙂

Been takeing part in online #openweb events – and resisting the urge to bite people.

Looking at this event https://2021.ngiforum.eu Way to meany stuffed shirts, technological fantasists (blockchain) and a lot of #EU money what could go wrong…

Spent a hour looking through the list of participants opening in new tab all that said something interesting. Of these more than 2/3’s had the tag blockchain so closed them, and then looked at the rest, then closed them… as we all know the is little hope in places like this, but worth a look, sometimes you find something useful. Someone has to turn over the tech shitpile to make compost.

Last week attended the online event by the Knight Foundation (huge #openweb funders for the last 10 years) in the USA on #reimagining the Internet. It was 100% about the #dotcons kinda nutty how bad things are in the funded #NGO #openweb world

With this in mind I moved the to its own space https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens/wiki it’s a useful #openweb tool for moving tech projects in to the right pile.

Here are 10 sample #4opens reviews to help you to understand what its about and how you can use this simple way of judging if a project is worth supporting or not unite.openworlds.info/Open-Med

Please add to this, sign up for the site and add more or just publish them on your own #openweb site with the hashtag #4opens

UPDATE

Why go to these events? Its about connection to people building bridges and resources for bridge building. The problem is all the resources at these events are poured down the drain and/or consumed by social parasites – the chattering classes.

I spend a bit of time going to the events every 10 years to see if this has changed. COVID-19 and the onlining of the events is a time to do this. This time, like last time, am feeling an “opening” but think the parasite classes are going to be stampeding through it. For a useful outcome we would need a soughted #openweb group to take up space, without this the opening is not going to have any good outcome.

This mythical group does not exist, there are individuals scattered about, but nothing that has much social power to be able to work with/bridge the power politics.

Kinda sad and bad but its where we are at #XR

UPDATE

This strategy can work (up to a point) to get resources, the last time, 10 years ago,  I got a big chunk of dosh to set up http://visionon.tv which the remains of is funding the #OMN infrastructure.  But this is another story – you can likely find articles about this back on this blog.

UPDATE

In any burocracy there are always a few people trying to get out, its what bridges are for, and there will likely be lots of people on our side who want to get in, also what bridges are for hamishcampbell.com/2021/04/16/ a post that touches on this bridging subject and why it has value.

UPDATE

Only now reading up on the background of this #EU stuff

“What is Horizon Europe?

Horizon Europe is the EU’s key funding programme for research and innovation with a budget of €95.5 billion.”

No wonder the is such a feeding frenzy of pigs at the trough was wondering why this sudden interest in the #openweb

UPDATE

This comes to mind when talking to just about everyone on subjects like this today “They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.”

Should we do something that is native to the Fediverse, and what would this look like?

The #Fediverse is #anarchism this is likely the best description of the community.
A represents the Greek anarkhia (‘without ruler/authority’), and the circle can be read as the letter O , standing for order or organization.
We currently have a Herding cats governance in the Fediverse and the projects that make it up
An idiom denoting a futile attempt to control or organize a class of entities which are inherently uncontrollable
This was very evident in the outreach to the #EU project.
We have the A but we do not have the O – we are asking what would the O look like in a online social tech project?
The #liberal #foundation model will be forced onto us if the Fediverse is taken up buy large #Burocratic orgs like the #EU and yes the will be a figleaf of “democracy” placed over the self-selecting oligarchy that will be put into place by “power politics” that this path embeds.
This path is the default outcome.
Should we do something that is native to the Fediverse, and what would this look like?

Q. how can someone “take up” the fediverse while it’s based on free software and open protocols like #activitypub, that are available to everyone and cannot be taken up by anyone?

A. Microsoft used to be very good at “taking up” open source projects. Google is VERY good at doing this… I think this is a part of the crises in #FSF foundation currently. When a big institution brings money and resources into an underfunded project it takes power and shapes the agender.

Q. Platform cooperatives, owned and run by users. Coupling this with netcommons. I am trying to launch PoC in ****

A. This is a path. My experience of this path is problematic and have repeatedly seen “process geeks” kill social movements by ossification of process, without any idea of the damage they are actually doing.

The whole tech co-op movement smells like this issue. But I don’t know anufe about this to make a judgment so kinda put the movement to one side for now.

Looking for places where it works on the ground is always a good thing. Examples please.

#mainstreaming #openweb standerds to the #EU

I have been working with a group based around the activitypub socialhub to outreach the #fedivers and #activitypub  standard to the #EU in seminars you can see the video recording in this post. Looking like the #EU will trial a few fedivers apps as tools for communication.

ActivityPub For Administrations (with chat) 2021-04-19
This is a recording of the first webinar in the ActivityPub for Administrations series.
This version also displays the live chat during the webinaire.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/pub/ec-ngi0-liaison-webinars-and-workshop-april-2021

ActivityPub For Administrations 2021-04-26

This is a recording of the second webinar in the ActivityPub for Administrations series.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/pub/ec-ngi0-liaison-webinars-and-workshop-april-2021

My thought on -Outreaching ActivityPub to the EU

It’s a good fit both strategically, in challenging the big US tech corporations dominance and tactically, in it being simple to implement and open to innovation as it is outside of anyone group control and agendas.

The #EU implementing AP could help to reset the capture of the WWW (which made the internet human) its good to remember was a European project – The birth of the Web | CERN home.cern/science/computing/bi

Let’s look at practical small steps to make this happen.

My thoughts/feelings are pragmatic on a good outcome.

outreaching ActivityPub to the EU – draft

This was an interesting process playing a role to do the document – outreaching ActivityPub to the EU https://pad.public.cat/p/ngi0-ec-activitypub-liaison-presentation-2021-04-19#/13

Good to get an outcome from this:

  1. #activertypub as a cross-platform standard for #dotcons who operate in EU
  2. funding to further this – we would need democratic structures in the #fedivers style to make this real rather than a Eurocratic/power politics dead-end structures.
  3. Is the path with a good outcome – I have been involved in a number of groups/projects that have received Eurocratic money and the outcome has always been sub optional not to say a compleat disaster. I have seen no/little thinking to mediate this outcome.

So on balance good to do this BUT we do need not to go down unrealistic paths.

Am trying to shift the focus so that the story is more “interesting” and “representative” ActivityPub in the EU sense is a movement as much as a standard – standards by themselves have little/no value. If the story comes from the standard it is easy to ignore, and it will be ignored. A movement, with a bit of jingoism (the ActivityPub speck is maybe largely a European thing?) is an easer story to tell/hear.

Good points, the #fedivers while having a good community, as individuals we do tend to act like cats.

Prepping the presentation is going to be a “herding cats” so best to concentrate on #KISS and focus on the ordnance – what do they need to hear.

The second day we can reveal the all to human delight (and worry this brings)

securaty modeal for mastodon

securaty modeal for mastodon712×478 66 KB

 

Like the focus on European as this is true – the #Fediverse mirrors the federated European dream and clearly moves away the US tech imperialism (soft power) of the #dotcons something that is a #EU agender.

My thoughts/feelings are pragmatic on a good outcome.

We have a clash of languages and assumptions for example “surveillance capitalism” and the “social dilemma” both come from inside business and Silicon Valley thinking – so they are not good examples to use for an ActivtityPub presentation which itself is COUNTER Silicon Valley thinking and has its own way of expressing these issues. Just use natural descriptive language instead of quoting the terms.

I don’t have an issue with web01 and web02 yes they are not correct, but they do communicate.

 

The first question is why – It’s a good fit both strategically, in challenging the big US tech corporations dominance and tactically, in it being simple to implement and open to innovation as it is outside of anyone group control and agendas.

But we are unready as a community if a big institution like the EU takes up ActivityPub you can see this in what happened to RSS when it was taken up by the NYT.

#activertypub like #RSS and the #www came out of grassroots movements, they bring world views with them its WHY THEY WORK. Yes the world view are in part incompatible with #mainstreaming, so the is a strong burocratic desire to hide these world views and then push them out of view/existence.

Why work with big vertical organizations like the EU – The bridges, allow our careerists and wona get statues crew a way to cross over to the mainstream to feed. By doing this they strengthen the bridge by adding mainstream value to the bridges.

Then the refuges from the mainstream shitpile have an easy path to get to alternatives gardens when the stink becomes too much to live with.

The bridge shifts out “problems” and “brings” in resources, expirence and skills to build real alternatives.

We need bridges to the mainstream to build alternatives.

Though the process will likely not go well. When dealing with power politics/vertical orgs in the end the grassroots is ALWAYS shafted – it’s the normal outcome they can’t help this behaver. So we need to keep the bridges in place no matter how bad there behaver is, keep calm and carry on – their behaver is shit to shovel for compost to plant seeds to grow a better world.

Am thinking we need more structears “from chaos comes order” rather than “order over chaos” its trust or control.

In the internal process. It’s interesting that people coming into non #mainstreaming projects and spaces then push “common sense” #mainstreaming ways of working and outcomes can’t see that they are creating a problem.

You then inevitably get Clouds of smoke to cover up the mess. When it clears everyone is covered in soot. it’s not a good look for anyone.

We need ideas on how to mediate this without going down the #mainstreaming paths.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/webinar-with-the-european-commission-and-ap-community/1507/179

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/meeting-notes-for-prep-call-ec-webinar-19-april/1567

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/outreaching-activitypub-to-the-eu-are-we-ready/1589/11