 So, let's go ahead and get started. Thanks everybody for joining us today to talk about the knowledge commons or digital commons. I just want to say a little bit about some of the context for why I think we chose to revisit this and sort of a tentative agenda for moving forward in our discussion today. So, we did, so this is the first and our second set of readings in our reading group. So, that's really exciting. Commons, the topic was, we visited that and talked about that last year in August. And full disclosure, I was not, I did the readings for that. I was not able to make the call and I did not watch the recording. I've reviewed all the wonderful notes that you made from that. And, you know, my sense is that, you know, we read the sort of Ostrom's main work in that discussion. And we ended up talking a lot about decentralization, it seems. And so, I think there was a lot of interest in more specifically delving into, okay, Ostrom talks a lot about these environmental or resource commons, you know, things like fisheries or forests or pastures. But we wanted to more directly engage with that as it relates to the digital realm, data, knowledge, you know, technical infrastructures. And so, so that was, I think, the inspiration for this go-around, we wanted to maybe set aside decentralization, which came up a lot last August as its own topic, and it will be later this year. So these readings that Brenna and I chose are, you know, some of them just are straight up from recommendations that we had last year, especially the Ostrom and Hess. And really, I think they provide us a good structure for our discussion. So we have, so I would propose starting with the Ostrom and Hess sort of digging into this framework that they provide us moving on to the digital commons reading, which more directly applies that framework and moves us into some of the more nitty-gritty stuff. And then, you know, at the time that we were developing this reading list, I happened to come around, come upon some work around the actual sort of tragedy that commons like from Garrett Herden in the late 60s, just for a variety of reasons. It was just on my mind several months ago. And so we did a little bit of reading around actually reading that, which of course was, you know, what Ostrom was responding to. So I think that would be a, I think that'll be a really interesting and fruitful discussion, actually going back to that kind of source. I think one way to just kick this off. So how do we feel about just starting then with the Ostrom and Hess and moving forward from there? I don't think about that. Yeah. So we've got a few themes that really stood out to us in this note stock. But I'd just be curious to invite, you know, reflections from you all on this reading and one or two things that really stood out to you is super interesting or that weren't present in this. I think maybe like one of the, like, I was going through and there were a few like key freezes and things that jumped out at me. And one of the very short passages that I remember jumping out at me was this very strong statement about sustainability is not like a thing. It's a continual process and it's a continually changing process. And I think that like it's easy to read, like governing the commons in a lot of other works, even then like sustainability is a little bit of a process, but not quite as much so as you saying it there. And I thought that was a really interesting and strong statement that was super clear. And so there's a lot to like pull out of that in a lot that's based around like this particular reading focused a lot around this idea that like everything is moving much faster now. And so what is like sustainable sustainability mean in that sort of environment where the pace of change is extraordinarily high compared to other other environments. Brendan, you had a hand up. Somebody in that group did Liz. Yeah, that's a little bit. So it's totally you. Oh, hey, there's Matt. Hey, Matt. We're just we're starting that with the Austrian reading and Liz is responding to her thoughts on it, which she has notes on because I can see the table she's reading. Oh, briefly, after the initial just rush of gratitude that, you know, for the economists coming in to hang out with us, like common CDPR people, it really struck me that this article was getting into the knowledge commons from like there were a lot of rules about how to generate like an intangible commons. And they gave those three kind of the tripartite form of like what a knowledge commons is. But I feel like where the article really went and what I got interested in is like, how do you how do you actually govern a complex system? And that's where I personally connected with this reading more because in a CDPR environment, I run into a lot more rules on interaction than on rules to create the knowledge resource itself, if that makes sense to people. Yeah, I really liked the reading from from how it impacts me generally as a reader. I kind of looked at it as like a very clean and to Rob's point, cogent kind of toolkit or something that I would carry along with me whenever I had a discussion about a commons. I thought it really took the time to define terms and and operated at a theoretical level that would allow me to like carry it around every time we have conversations like this. So it's definitely a piece that I feel like I'll cite again. And I think sort of lately round work for everything that goes into making comments and defining it is something that I think is particularly useful. You know, I like to define terms before we have like big interesting discussions about them, just so we have, you know, the discussions can actually be productive. And I thought this piece did an excellent job of that. So it's one of my favorite pieces we've written. That's great. Can you can everyone hear us okay? Yeah, it's awesome. Cool. Yeah. So I would actually jump back in and say it might be helpful for us then to actually start to define what we mean or what is meant in these readings at least by knowledge commons by digital commons. You know, we have some examples we might find that they're potentially limited. For instance, Liz, you just, you began mentioning, you know, CBPR, common space property regimes or I suspect something along those lines. Those kinds of environments and I'm just, I'd invite you to maybe share with everybody else. You know, an example, you know, from your own, you know, work that you know, might be helpful for us as a kind of grist. But in general, yeah, you know, I'd be curious to hear some more about like the examples given in this piece in particular and how they constitute a knowledge commons, perhaps in distinction to some of the commons we've read about last year. Is that to me? Totally. Do you have an example of a CBPR resource that comes to mind for you? Oh, like in the digital space? So, I think there's written a lot about Wikipedia. We can talk about that. And then I spent more of my time in a community called Public Lab, which just makes things more complicated by not only sharing information, but working on how to produce actionable knowledge together. Yeah, that's all I could say. Yeah, I would jump in like one of the things to be back off of lots of examples. And I think there's like a chance to begin on some of these examples that sort of Eric and I were talking before and saying like, wow, it's kind of incredible how much some of these readings seem directly applicable to some of the work that we have been undertaking around and around to do together as part of these projects. Namely like, oh, we can sort of talk about data rescue as a direct effort to sort of build a cognitive core resource. The other thing I found really interesting from the readings was this like Rob mentioned the pace of change already, which I think is a huge sort of point of departure for our knowledge commons. And the other one that we sort of, I don't think we've touched on yet, it's just the scarcity principle, right? Like when we transition from an environmental commons or something that is based on some sort of exhaustible resource into a digital sort of one, it's interesting to see how much like almost all of the articles pointing to, in trying to sort of distinguish a knowledge commons from commons in general, we're trying to sort of point it to this abundance or near zero cost of copying as being a very important aspect of this distinction of an important characteristic of what came into this sort of knowledge commons side of this. And so I think it's really interesting there is like, if we're using the phrase knowledge commons and it's only coming forth when we have this near zero copying, sort of, there is a technological interleaving here that is like, sort of, I think fleshed out more in the Geelong piece, but it's definitely, the state singing the Austin piece for the second is like, it's really exciting to see that all of the print, like the flexibility of the IAD framework in the, which is, and the principles for analyzing the commons do translate in this, in this, there are at least they seem like they do translate to a framework for analysis on the knowledge commons as well as a commons that is based around scarcity. That's my personal feeling. I'd like to see if others agree that it does translate, but it's definitely, to me, it's a really, really interesting, like for a framework to be that flexible for you to move something is as important as whether a resource is exhaustible or not. It's really interesting to me. Yeah, I think I saw your hand first. Maybe Rob, go ahead Rob, and I'll go after. Okay, okay, I don't think that was really that important. I guess just as like a direct response to that, I feel like the institutional analysis, I forget what the D was in the IAD, seems like a framework for analysis that's pretty broadly applicable. Like I don't know that it necessarily even needs to have anything to do with commons. Seems like it applies really well to anything where there are like people utilizing things and trading things, like with other people. And like, so it seems like a really useful framework. I heard about it and seen it noted in other things before, but I'd never run through it. And a thought I had while reading it was like, oh, this would be really interesting to sort of try and frame, like edgy this way or frame, data together this way or frame. Other like commons-ish situations we know about this way. And does that provide anything useful? I don't know, but just as a response, like the thing that jumped out at me about that is like, I don't think that's necessarily very common specific. And I had something else which I forgot. Just when you were talking about the near zero cost of copying, reading those phrases this time, you know, that's like a thing I talk about. I don't know where in my intro classes somewhere. And after edgy, I feel like I believe less that the cost of copying is close to zero. It feels like it's close to zero when you download something, but the infrastructural costs are significant. And I suppose that that is captured a little bit in this idea of underuse, which was especially present in that other reading. But yeah, I just wanted to say that like, I feel like there's something a little bit misleading about talking about digital copying as being free, because it helps us to forget that all this infrastructure is being maintained and that we can't work without it and that we're utterly reliant on it. And so it kind of causes us to lose focus of a place where commons is really important that we're not thinking. Rob? So that reminded me of the thing I had been thinking about. So part of the thing is really interesting because I feel like there's different versions of copy that are worth talking about and that have been talked about, but all under the same term. Because there's copying in the sense of like, just had to copy stuff from here to there. And there is a lot of infrastructure involved, but that is still, I think, marginally relatively cheap. And then there's copying in the sense of like, oh, I like have a copy that I can do things with now and that like maybe I could give to somebody else or whatever, where like copying is also like in some way sort of completed with provision and ownership. And I feel like those are used interchangeably in a lot of places. And what you just said, Matt, made me just sort of like trick some light bulbs in my head about like, oh, those are really two different things that we often term in the same way. But then the other thought I had was a thing, I know we're like trying to stick to the first reading, but especially in the event of copying from the long reading, I honestly, I didn't have a whole lot that I thought commended the long reading, but one thing that I thought was super interesting was that I pointed out that in that more technical sense of copying, just the act of like doing almost anything with a digital resource runs afoul of copyright law because everything is copying. Which I thought was super interesting. And it made me think of a book I read several years ago called River of Gods, which is just a novel, but there's a, if you've read it or if you haven't, there's like a whole section near the beginning where one character is like a detective who hunts down these like rogue AI computer programs. And there's a whole like thing where he's talking about how like software is sort of so functionally different from like us in the world because it can't move because you just copy itself somewhere. And so like his, his act of like trying to chase something down is really like both chasing and cleaning because it's sort of like copies itself in order to move somewhere else as it's like sort of running away from him. Which I thought was like a really fascinating and really good like hard sci-fi conceptualization of like the difference in like dealing with data versus things that we're familiar with in the real world and how copying is so interesting. Yeah, so I definitely think it's fine to, you know, we don't have to feel beholden to this, to the Auschwem and Hass readings. So, you know, we want to jump in on on thoughts from, yeah, especially the DeLong at all reading. We should definitely feel free to. Matt, I know you didn't have anything. Yeah. And I think, so I think it's just to build on what you're saying, Rob. There's a question there of like, is what you're referring to in the sense of the distinction of copy, are we drawing distinctions between the producers and the consumers in what would be a classic sort of terming of the way DeLong sort of like a position of marketplace style? And like, I think I can kind of be like somewhat mentally infectious for us to think about those who make and those who consume versus like co-production as being like another way of thinking about it. But I think that I'm just wondering if what you were saying, Rob, could be directly connected to what some of Liz was asking about or sort of pointing to around the sort of structures for governance of the labor that is sometimes invisibleized, sometimes visibleized of work and production and pointing directly to some of what you were saying, Matt, around the challenge of the heavy lift of making something copyable. And I would jump in and just add that the discussion a little long here around forking I thought was really interesting. Yeah, sorry. The only mention of forking I remember was that an entire community could fork and move to another discussion channel. Yeah, I guess I don't have a, I mean that yeah, that's a reality I feel we all live with, you know, in our online, our mixed reality communities. On a daily basis, maybe what Rob was saying earlier about how it seems pretty far removed about what it is we're governing and more about the governance and the principles of doing the governing that maybe is making like this set of readings really relevant for us and what we're trying to do. And there was, I wrote, there was one sentence, I wrote the whole thing down from the Ostrom reading. It just, it just reminded me of what happened to us after data rescue where this is on page 51 in an era of rapid change. Participants will move from operational situations into collective choice situations. Sometimes without self-conscious awareness that they have switched arenas. And I just, I just feel really seen by this comment by an author who's no longer alive. And so, and rambling on here, I guess I want to encourage us that I think we don't have to get stuck in the trap of the 2012 article that just went from, you know, Ostrom's aid management principles and like being super obsessed with a zero copying cost and like just trying to translate, oh my God, it's an intangible comments, what is that? Because I think another decade almost has passed and we're all quite aware of the servers we might need to have under our control or the fact that the knowledge we're managing is based in hardware. And so, yeah, I look forward to us becoming self-consciously aware of forming the conditions of our own self-governance as we're trying to talk about communities working on decentralized data. I think that's really what's here for us to do. Can I, yeah, I just add on to that one more time. I think the, that's one way in which I agree that I felt very seen by the Ostrom piece, but there was, but it also felt interesting how much less colorful the examples felt like the continual citation of institutional repositories and Ostrom sort of pointed to it, has an Ostrom question, can set the other one. We're pointing to this like, you know, maybe they, open the answer question in the chapter, like maybe this is a dated way of thinking things about things and particularly when contending with the notion of underuse, like maybe the underuse is a byproduct of us just thinking about repositories in ways that need some revisiting. And I think that that's, we've spent a lot of time in the revisiting side, but what I'm kind of proud of in this group is we, I feel like we have a lot of really colorful examples of efforts to construct a commons that all have sort of different characteristics that are worth sort of considering. As the one that like both Eric and I were like, well, we're not going to touch that one. It was like our social networks of commons. Like, do they have any commons like characteristics to them? And I think that, and I think a whole lot of people will be blanking noses, blanking yeses, but I think the discussion in itself would be worth having. I had a wrong man. And then Matt is percolating maybe not. So, like one thought I had when I was doing, when I was getting towards the end of some of the readings that I think falls back in here is that, especially in the sense of like asking what is a knowledge commons or digital commons, is that like, I think there's a lot more variety there than a lot of these things might have come in with as like a basic assumption in terms of like what a digital commons is or what a digital good is. And that like there are a lot of, there's like a much broader variety of like different situations and different like baseline needs that would have to be addressed in different ways for different kinds of like digital goods and digital commons. Just to like thinking, I mean, the long piece goes through so many different things and like my chief complaint about that piece is that there are like a lot of really good interesting anecdotes and things that pulls out, but it didn't, if like totally failed for me to paint any cohesive picture of what it was trying to do. And part of that was because there were like so many different types of like digital commons is it was trying to reference that had like so many different baseline concerns that you like some, some things seem transferable, but some things really didn't. And it was like, how do you put all these things together if like the things you're talking about are not like transferable from one to the other. So like I think there's something there about like the just the variety of different like what it is we're trying to define is already really broad and like the question of a commons of like data sharing like data together is maybe sort of trying to be more specifically is maybe a maybe good more specific frame, but also like to recognize that it is a much more specific frame and you can't necessarily generalize like open source software is like a really different kind of commons actually. Or like the data together thing might share a lot more with maybe like the knowledge repositories type view. I don't know. Anyway, sorry. Matt, did you have a hand up? Well, I feel like Rob and I have been talking a lot. Kevin has something to say. Let's have something to pipe up and say. I don't know. I don't know if it's anything. I remember there was a moment where in our decentralized data archiving project we were wondering about how communities might define each other in terms of access to sharing data. Can I get a quick temperature check? Are we very far away from needing to do that now? Or is that like still? Because I think it wouldn't be crazy to, you know, approach that through Ostrom's eight. And, you know, see where we get. I mean, it doesn't really talk about, well, you know, I want to share only part of my fish. I don't mean being like really, really literal about it, but I mean in terms of community self-regulation and setting up structures who can exclude as well as structures for being included. That could be useful. Can we read that out loud? Yeah, we're going to elaborate on your comment here. Yeah, but talking out loud. Not fun. Anyway, it's fine. Hi, everyone. Also, I came late. I'm Michelle, one of the men of Michelle's that works at Protocol Lab, so you might see me if you're choosing megahertz MHC because my name is Michelle Hertzfeld. So hi to all those that I haven't met yet. Hello. In any case, yep. So I think this, what my brain was going, reflects a lot of what you all have already said, which is just that I don't personally get a lot of value and saying, oh, our things are commons or not a commons, but the frameworks that Ostrom introduces and other people have introduced around how local communities can manage resources that have externalities and other people well and do that in a way that works over time of course has lots of implications for what we look at on the digital side. In particular, on the more negative side, I look at it and go, one of the things that folks that people who study commons say are more likely to produce sustainable communities that people don't hate after a while and make it so that people in that group have agency over their resource are that those groups are relatively homogenous. People understand what's going on. They're able to understand and impact how that resource is used and governed and then have the ability to change the rules around that to meet what that community wants and needs. And it's like, oh boy, that doesn't look terribly good for what we've been doing in tech systems so far where the people who have the specialized skill set to be able to change those rules or build a thing that works for them are very tend to be very separate from the folks who need to be able to do that in a different way. And I was going to say on the other hand, I have a colleague at work who I'm encouraging her to come to this meeting, hopefully she will, who is looking into the effect of what perhaps distributed systems impact of moving towards a more distributed system that encourages smaller communities to have their own networks of information might do to that larger conversation where if that slows the rate of information exchange, maybe that's a good thing. Communities could perhaps create their own homogenous communities. They are talking to other of these communities as well, but that rate of exchange slows a little bit and gives people time to process and decide what could come in, should come in, doesn't get that sort of thing. Maybe it provides an extra barrier. I'm sure she would have more detail around her thoughts there. Hopefully I'll get her to join some other day. Okay, that's that. What do y'all think? I mean, I think it does seem to be the case that fast is not especially sustainable, right? You know, systems that change fast don't stick around for a really long time because they're changing really fast. And you know, you can tell on the historian because the article I liked the best was the Susan Cox, which wasn't even the signed, it's just a link from the tweet storm. But I did find it like, I hope this doesn't count as bike shedding, I don't know, but I found that like this going back and looking at what the English commons were actually and finding that, first of all, there's a whole bunch of different kinds of commons. And the kind of assertions that Gar that Hardin makes are really just repeating something from the 1830s, which was a polemic basically in favor of enclosure, right? So it's like it's a polemic that's part of the enclosure movement. And it's that if you go if you look at that piece, I forget the Lord's name, it's really similar to Hardin where you have like a kind of engine like a machine that human interest in in like accruing capital that automatically leads to the destruction of the commons unless you have enclosure of those commons. And instead, the commons turn out to have, you know, like been pretty successful for 1000 years, because people didn't operate as self-interested machines. And so and they didn't always work out the same way. There are different kinds of problems in different places. Sometimes those problems have bad endings and things don't go well. So it's like not like it's a utopia, but so what so that I would I've been thinking about that a lot as Rob was talking about the way that we're different from from like open source software or like data is different from software or dogs are different from cats or that just that they're the the success or failure of a commons is dependent on these rules that kind of that the kinds of things that Ostrom is talking about that analysis seems borne out by the the fate of the English commons in a more when looked at it in a more granular way. And I found that I found all that stuff helpful that whole kind of response to hardened literature. Yeah, I really, really agreed with what you were saying. I love that you had the brand in the historical side because I definitely did not click that link in the Twitter thread. And so it was really nice to sort of hear that, you know, snapshot of a thousand years of English history. That was that's helpful. I feel more learned. But yeah, I said I wanted to like just like double down on the agreement. I'm like, the one thing I found really interesting about reading the Twitter thread, which sort of like came out and sort of in my opinion, like needed to sort of like throw this sort of like racism Molotov cocktail and hardened to try and make make him seem less sort of less legitimate. And to me, it was like, I can read like actually having read Ostrom stuff. It's like, I didn't even feel like I needed to go there. It's just like, like, I feel like Austin's work has completely refuted what he said with a fairly simple statement of like, you know, you this is Hardin's work was written very much in the face of when economists were econs. And like they thought about people as these like, rational beings. And I think like modern thought, a lot of us are sort of accepting the notion that like, no, like humans are not rational, the belief that we move in rational ways, is not a proper articulation of the way that human beings operate. And that Ostrom being accepting a higher degree, a more nuanced interpretation of what actors participating in a commons look like, was able to bear out information that ultimately brought economists back to the conversation, which I thought was like the win in the end. And so it's just like, it's really fun to read like, oh, okay, here's hard. Here's somebody who wrote a whole series of things that are that were after the popularization of this work. And to me, obviously, I'm biased in this conversation, given that I'm part of this group, but like, it feels like it sort of wholly refutes it without needing to go anywhere else. But yeah, I wanted to throw that opinion out. Sorry. Yeah, I just to agree with you, Brenna, my understanding is that for people following academia, Ostrom did completely refute Hardin, which should travel farther in the popular imagination. There's no confusion about that. But in generally in, like in society, like how many people would say the phrase tragedy to the comments versus how many people had ever heard of the first Nobel Prize winning in economics, a female in the Eleanor Ostrom or for comments management, which sounds like a tight one, right? You need that marketing hook. You had me in a minute, 28. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I was glad for this tweet thread. I had seen it organically on Twitter and then delighted to see that it showed up in our reading list. Super good. Yeah. Matt, you had your hand up. Oh, Michelle. No, I had my hand up before and then I said some stuff. I think. Okay. Michelle. This is a question to throw out at the group. So if I can pull it back out after being distracted a second ago though. I was wondering if anyone had insight or thoughts, I'm sure you have around the thing that I touched on earlier, the specific challenge of managing anything that has to do with our modern technology because the technology is so complicated and that the people who need to or would in a system that follows that is likely to succeed given what Ostrom and that School of Thought recommends needs to have people that are able to engage more fully perhaps in the discussions around it and how that impacts then what we're trying to do or what we broadly, what folks who hope to move to a space where normal folks, people who aren't tech folks, people who are able to support their own knowledge space or data space, that kind of thing. I'm curious what you all think about that or if you've talked about that already or what do you think? I think about this a lot but I go down a little sad hole so maybe you all have more optimistic ideas than me. Maybe just for, you know, to add some rails in the thought experiment, maybe we could have a path like for, you know, a course that technologists would be willing to participate in versus a course that would be done to technologists. I'm not sure if I have much more on the latter but for the former I think setting up community structures where not being an asshole is further defined as like you can insult someone for knowing less than you. You're not making decisions without like reading your community in or like any number of kind of like social structures. So, you know, could, you know, building a society where professions aren't off, you know, chasing the edge. I don't know if that's reasonable, you know, I don't know if that's, I mean, would ever slow down all of, I don't think it would ever slow down all of tech development but I think you could make a pool. I think you could make a corner of society where not only all humans respect each other as peers but all professions respect each other as peers which is hard to capture in codes of conduct but people are working on it. And then other than that, you know, I wonder, you know, what could you do in a situation where technologists, you know, don't opt in? I have no idea. Michelle has a question from the chat. Do you all think that tech will eventually be in a place where it's not so hard, Tim, where people can engage more easily? Where people work non-tech? Wrong. I mean, I think this question and the one you started with, Michelle, are really important but I feel scared that I don't have like better, more optimistic answers also. Does that feel like it has to be for things to work well? Like on a big macro picture, like an example of the problem feels like the fact that we always return to like on a legislative level, like we can't make good laws about technology because nobody understands it but we don't create an environment where it's easily or readily understandable. And like how do we get there? Part of it I think actually does fit into what Liz was just saying about. I mean, it's not just community standards but it's how we discuss and share and explain what other people who are less expert care to at least try and participate. Although that's at like the much more micro level. I think that like builds up and out but I also like I don't have great, great thoughts for bigger things, bigger levers to pull on in that way. And I feel like, like on a more micro example, just thinking about with a decline I'm working with right now. Yesterday we were talking through their, their thinking through like changing their content management system and their whole thing right now is predicated on like everything lives in Git but they have this really painful workflow for the people who are like content authors who are not, you know, technical experts and so they take the path of least resistance which is a really bad path for everybody. And so they're looking at like changing their CMS and one thing that would do would be like put content authors entirely outside of Git and that's nice and easy because then the content authors don't have to understand Git or understand version control. And I sort of like put back a little bit and was like, well, is that really the thing you want or do you need to figure out how to like make that situation more understandable and participate a little situation because like actually the concepts of version control are super valuable. And if your content authors understood that they could work more readily with their developers when they're like building a whole new branch of a thing that needs to say, you know, sort of like separate from what you're releasing every day until it's ready to go or when the content needs to move with the code. It's sort of like this really hard push to say like, oh, how do we, how do we express those ideas and manage those things in a way that like we can teach the less technical expert people to still like use the technology and get the value out of it, you know, and have more understanding and not just say, oh, that's too complicated. It's over here. So like, and I couldn't figure out where we did the situation in that discussion. So yeah, but then also I keep coming back to what Liz just said about, you know, like, even just in our technical spheres, like starting small, having better, more clear concrete rules about the bad things that people do that aren't just sort of flame war sort of things, right? But the like a knowledge deficit is not a skill deficit and so on. And actually I've never seen that. I've never seen that enunciated really clearly anywhere. So I would I would love to like chase down that rabbit hole either now or some other time. I'd love to. We deal a lot with expert cultures in my day job. And there's a set of readings. I'd love to do, you know, a later targets were booked through August. But, you know, after that, bringing down readings that go from, you know, how much how much culture gender or our neuro types are embedded in programming languages and how it doesn't have to be like that or Sandra Harding's the science question and feminism and generally breaking down like how have expert cultures been gatekeeping, been exclusive, been self-selecting, homogenizing of whoever's involved in them. And yeah, we all know the hostile effects of this. But I think our technology, technology cultures don't have to be that way. But that's something that, you know, is going to be up to people like us to build. I mean, they don't have to be that way is the hopeful part, right? Like in and kind of easy to forget it's it's always hard to try to build a different kind of world because the the the mainstream because the world is big, you know, and they're huge forces that organize things in like pretty predictable ways along the lines that, you know, that that Liz just described. And what I feel like like the the thing that we ought to try to get out of these readings is, you know, some provisional signposts towards towards how we might want to organize ourselves, right, like where we think about all the things that Rob was saying and and others also like there are these different kinds of communities and they and what we're doing conditions what kind of rules we need to have but they all you you can you can engineer to some extent the success of a of our comments potentially. This is another question for the group. Matt what you just said and Liz what you were talking about which by the way thumbs up to doing some readings along the lines that you suggested. So as some of you know, I work at Protocol Labs and we're working on these protocol level changes the way information could move. And I'm really interested in thinking about whether there are things you could build in to this, you know, opportunity to create new ways of information movement that would help, as we like to say in user experience design, automate our best selves, make the more the kinder choice the the choice that supports these sorts of networks, the easier one to make. And I'm not sure yet if that's something that can be implemented or if there's any piece there at such a protocol level. But Liz what you mentioned about different ways of building things as even built into code that could be more or at least different that sparked something as well as what Matt was saying. I'm not sure yet I haven't found an inroad yet at a really at this really low protocol level. But what do you all think? Yeah, I just want to jump in quickly. Yeah, I think one of the interesting things that we sort of like if we're being a little but self critical about how commons form and become strong. I think the one point that I would critique would be this question of homogeneity and the question of like it is easier to be it is easier to form a commons around a group that is common or has common interests. And I wonder if if building a more robust commons that doesn't engage as much in keeping whether it be a knowledge commons or otherwise needs to sort of think about the degree of homogeneity that's engaging it. And I wonder if that's a signpost we can use for goal setting. One of the most successful examples I've come across in this department is the work of the Python community, which aggressively moved to try and weed out this sort of technological superiority complex and went so far as to sort of eject certain members from the contributor community on the basis that they were not welcoming of people who were from different technical means. And I think that like you can even more broadly consider how that overlapping principle or you don't want to go all the way to the other end of the spectrum and say that we should we should try to be to connect completely disparate folks with no interest like that. It's just a recipe for frustration I think. And so is there some happy middle ground where we're actually putting a lot of effort into the types of people that we're bringing to a table before we have a conversation? I didn't I'm really glad that Eric and I worked on this together because I really wanted to assign the IETF DNS records white paper as a reading because I honestly think there are some like incredible like moments in that 50 pages of pure like agony of technical reading that explained because like if you think about the way DNS works it's like the origin of a lot of these sort of hierarchical structures and there's some like really interesting bits in there but it's really dry. But I think there's something like really interesting even worth pointing out even amongst this group that we have folks in this room who are excited to read DNS white papers and folks in this room who are excited to read all our ostriches. And I think that that sort of overlap with degrees of commonality is for me is is the reason that I keep coming back and keep saying like this is really special and what we do in joining coming together here is really special. Because I think we have this really unique mix of of of unity with variety to borrow a distal principle but yeah I don't know others feel very rough on that but I think there's something in like really composing the types of people we collaborate with as a method for busting out of homogenized things. I saw Rob sand. I guess I I was more responding more directly to the original question Michelle had about protocols. Jeze is super interesting. I feel a little bit led because I naturally come immediately back to that speed question. You know in somewhere we talked about Twitter earlier and I am fond of always saying that like Twitter makes you feel like you have to have a hot take and that's Twitter's biggest problem. Is that like if you don't respond right away then then you have failed on Twitter and so it's impossible it's like worse against having critical thought. And I think about it's not at the protocol level but that also makes me think about the way like Gmail won't send your email for 30 seconds so you can undo it you know or other sort of sort of tools that work in that regard would sort of like you know it's higher than the protocol level but that like force you or like try and try and detect that you are like dashing something off you know and say like whoa whoa are you sure. And that kind of thing and where can we do more of that kind of stuff at all levels I guess in the technology stack. But also it's a really good point of like what what I just guess I just want to like re-up that that question of like what can we do even at the lowest levels where we usually don't think about that. We're so focused on like computer to computer and not on how that enables or quashes or anything human propensity for good or bad behavior. Yeah Michelle. I can um another way to look at that and point to the conversation I think there's well then I think there's this thread in distributed or decentralized network conversation I think that's around like you know everything should be anonymous and people should be able to be in their own space whatever it is say versus or against or whatever like no we really need to build in controls even in this distributed space so that if something you know someone should be able to block certain content from their own note or whatever it is and that could be a protocol level decision. Rob what do you think about that? Tell me more. That just that that made the connect back to the DeLong piece because the thing it called out that I thought was interesting was it called out as a natural sort of counterweight to anonymity in digital spaces is reputation um in that like if if a space requires you to have some reputation then you can't just have anonymous throwaway accounts um and so that creates a real like it lets you still have some of the things you really like in value about anonymity or multiple counts or any that sort of thing um but but forces you to still like be on good behavior and not treat those things like you can just throw them away and say ha ha I can continue to be a bad actor on under a different name um and so that's actually then that that feeds into there right this question of um like I don't know if reputation is the only mechanism but but in what ways does reputation fit into a system in a very like protocol lab specific way there's there's so many levels at which um I think uh that team has not actually technically gone into this territory but talked about like how does how does how does reputation matter and how can different actors in the system keep track of each other's reputation and know whether to pay attention to what what another one is saying or not or sort of like automatically cut them off etc um and how do you make how do you make the cost of losing that reputation high is probably by making the need to have a reputation also very high um um uh yes um reputation has been a long standing feature of many websites where we go where we need to be able to reliably interact with strangers um I want to point out um that there's a I'm part of a smaller experiment that focuses on empiricism which I think is somewhat relevant because the science has brought us together in some way shape or form here and um in in this social experiment we're really taking care to avoid any reputation certification badging or even social influence per se just due to volume of postings or charisma because what we're talking about doing we need we need we don't need to just move knowledge on trust we actually don't need to move at the speed of trust we need to move at the speed of did you test it for yourself and did it work and so um yeah Rob roll his eyes back in the head yeah it's a little it's a little crazy but I just wanted to say that like experiments along these lines of when you're building a knowledge comments not just choosing like what oh this here's a pre authenticated knowledge under some other system and now we're just going to move it move it around but we actually have to make new knowledge together participation yeah moving moving at this speed of participation that's interesting because that's by definition asynchronous which I think is really interesting to begin with but you can test this synchronously and you report back in no I know it's really interesting Rob I just I just wanted to say super quickly like the reason I immediately went when you said that was because that the first thing that jumped into my head because I I complained about this to other people all the time is code reviews and how often I see people review something without testing it and then it doesn't actually work Rob so true and I'm so guilty the number of times I've been like thumbs up LGTM and like have never even read the thing it's like this is so bad it's awful but like but this is like we get back down to the like now we're really in DRM space right like how do I confirm that you did the thing or didn't do the thing that I really want to know at a technical level right and like I want to make sure you you like when I try to copy and paste from my Kindle you know it's it gets angry with me and says no you can't do that and and what we're talking about right now is is we're trying to come up with some mechanism maybe maybe not I think you're explicitly moving away from database intermediation of this system in your thought experiment and I think that that's really freeing because we often end up in this tense space of like how do I control to make sure that person actually ran the tests and actually ran and reviewed the code legitimately and how do I design a system that quite literally entraps you into a course of action which is like kind of a scary end right but is what we want as the people like we want something that resembles participation but at the same time we're bordering into coercion in weird ways and that's like if we try to influence it as a technical system but we leave it as a non-technical thing and just skip the data I think we have like a really interesting ingredient there right because I can just ask you hey Liz did you did you read the DeLong piece and you'd be like no yeah and then I fail in like technical terms we call that a challenge question right and like this is like the basis of proof of work right yeah like we have like CI to prevent like things going too far out of and I think CI is like a great example of like the we we're we because we have CI we want to go one layer more right we want to go into did you participate in advancing the like code yeah CI is kind of like the trust layer almost like you can like play around more if you have CI because you have like a foundation yeah like a baseline agreement of the well trust that CI is yeah and we can get really good reasons until you edit the tests anyone else I need to read out the chat right now Rob says this call is really just hashing the block of everybody read these four articles on the data together chain and block chain humor we have hit a new high and low block height is high humor quality is low Michelle I couldn't resist that she said proof of work yeah I almost went there I was like I can't do it I would hate myself but you did it for me so thank you I really like it when my work comes around to oh actually that is a block chain and that might be useful instead of the typical no you don't need a block chain that's not a block chain yeah super interesting though has anyone heard of successful or useful either frameworks to think about our actual actual test of this actually worked ways to uh kindly connect real world stuff to online stuff um yeah I can elaborate if that doesn't make sense but yeah yeah how do you mean I mean um real world stuff yeah yeah uh well here's a concrete example so uh you've probably seen over over the years there's been various attempts to try and do like a reputation thing say connected to github that's a little bit broader than just um say code commits or something like that it's like oh product management or design that's all really important to shipping something and we need to be able to reflect that somehow and this is a very you know code oriented example but you can extrapolate that out be like uh there are companies trying to do I don't know blockchain for carbon sequestration or something like that and I'm like uh but how do you actually prove that you know these kinds of things um I don't know if anyone has uh thoughts or examples or have anyone seen seen two people do that actually well that looks like or terrible examples I'm okay with that too discuss I'm interested in this connection of course between the real world and real world the physical world and our online lives and my brain when we were talking early went straight to maybe none of this will work too well we have chips implanted in our heads and then it's going to be a scary dystopia anyways so yep go ahead I don't think there is one I don't think you can actually make a meaningful connection the same way like studying photography really to me comes really close to this where it's like what is the there you can't take an image of the future you can't take an image the present anything that is in the digital realm is a uh biased interpretation of something that exists in a physical world all right if we think about data it's it's nothing but a series of of decided observations and I think that you can't because you can't cleave the interpreter from the interpreted even if you throw as much machine learning at this as you want you you end up in a situation where like there isn't actually like a reliable causal connection between the physical world and the digital one and I think you run into this every blockchain that's like put your art on the blockchain put your carbon on the blockchain it's like no like legitimately no there's and I think this is where like you know DNA and biometrics like this is probably an interesting conversation and I wish just Johnny crunch was around so you could totally talk to us about this related where there is a causal connection but even then the way that we record it and subject to interpretation of what you know how do we write down the bits around fingerprints there's there's a lot of nuance here I'm sorry to somebody else also I guess I was just going to tack on this reminds me a little bit of a conversation we had a couple weeks ago Brendan about starlark and query which is we had this whole discussion about like where trust is involved in a system and impartially how like especially in the blockchain space like probably in my head like one of the most problematic things there is that it seems so predicated around this idea of like oh we can solve trust but really you just like shifted around around where trust matters and then you've done a really poor job explaining to people that like trust now belongs here and you have to like still pay attention there and that's like where you have to pay attention because you have to choose what you trust in this sense of the thing you said Brendan about starlark that I thought was a really good phrasing of it that I think I've heard elsewhere but I can't recall really clearly is this idea of so for some context in query there's like a tool for running scripts to like fill in data and there's this sort of question of like to what degree does that look like query can prove to you that this script created this data and it can't that script is just and then in the term Brendan uses attestation yeah so it's a testing to something but it's not proving anything um and I think that's like a really important concept in here and especially in the space of like moving between different realms that are separate or jicoan analog or or whatever like whenever you're sort of moving between those spaces the best you can do is attest to something and in that creates a whole like an important scene um in systems that uh is sort of like in one conception I guess like the the place where we should all be paying the most attention but I don't know that that moves what we were trying to ask any further along can I tack on that really quick because yeah I think the thing I said to you there Rob that might make sense here is like trust comes from people not cryptography was my like that's my like anti tragedy of the commons line but and I think it's important to sort of be phrasing here to point to the fact that uh while I don't think there is a causal connection going from digital to physical I think coming from physical to digital is totally fine where you can say these people have built this thing and this is the way they choose to write down their stuff um that to me totally works and so it's like I know Rob in real world and I trust that Rob is this person on the internet and so it flows from my trust and Rob that I can trust his work and and that I think is is an important a very important cascade that is maintained in many systems and that is sort of tinkered with in others and it's worth sort of examining up close as Rob has been pointing out. Matt do you want to pose your question? It feels not quite fully formed I was just thinking about this empiricism experiment that Liz described I feel like I don't quite understand it yet and I because it like seems like it tries to run without a trust layer that it runs counter to the way that I want to live and here's the example that I was thinking of which is we keep our bikes in the back shed in the backyard there's no lock on that door every once in a while a bicycle gets stolen that is worth it to me not because I don't love my bicycles because I do and not because like it's a hassle to unlock the door but because I get to live in a world where I believe that it's okay for me to leave my bike shed unlocked even if I'm wrong I still get to live in that world where you know and like I say it's kind of half-baked but like I there's something like I want the commons worked because people operated not as as self-interested machines but as members of community I feel like that if we are to build of you know a data commons or knowledge commons it will work because people operate as members of community and have some interest in fulfilling a role in that community something like that regarding me I think I should just qualify the empiricism point of view it's or that this thought experiment um that we're actually seeing more it's how it's how can more people be involved in actually generating what will then be managed under kind of a commons governance principle um so it's a little separate in that way what do you guys have a chance to speak do you want to Sasha you have a great bit on the side yeah I just saw my name on this note sorry has anybody on the thought so there's no chance to get the thought in I just had a question um because we were talking about like uh the problems of its use under use that's the tragedy of the knowledge commons or isn't the tragedy of the anti commons I think that was the term and so she posed a question and then we posed it to people now like you want to live in this community what kind of incentives do you think we could oppose for these knowledge commons that people want to actually contribute to wherever can't many for repeat the question in New York uh just just that um the problem with like knowledge commons is that people don't want to use it or don't want to contribute so there there has to be this incentive you know we want to live in this nice community so what's the incentive that we propose or give to people that they participate in this knowledge commons in this it's fame power or money usually so which are the most you know innocent applications of each of those and trying to accommodate those um we talked about pretty well help make you famous or you're a work famous which uh Fortina producers ought to be you know some some kind of incentive we want to answer now I think but I think that is important go ahead Liz uh I guess um I'm more on the environmental sciences side more even so on the environmental data side and I think people are starting to really want to participate um from a survival level so in terms of life you know is there I personally love random groups of people um I'm like that's like you know like a challenge project for a Saturday night for me like how are random other group of people can I get into a conversation um and I think it's the coming clear like what is the what is the base um set of you know needs or hopes you know needs or dreams or whatever someone more poetic than me can come up with this set um in the human like search for meaning and survival that can unite literally any group of strangers like in a common project uh yeah I think we're kind of reaching that point so I thought Rob's hand I I don't remember what it was I was going to say other than absurdly cheeky things in chat Michelle did you have your hand up do you want to turn in I can just say I to Kevin I really appreciate that question and it's something that I get stuck in a little corner and so I'd be interested in just talking to all of you over time on that one in the sense that um I suppose the first bit it's like okay well there's something around personal control of data like your own say the Facebook thing that's come up where people are like no maybe I should not be posting all the things on Facebook and maybe there's another way to deal with that that I think could be incentivized but then it gets back to kind of what I mean like Matt you said you're like it's me and I don't even post it's like the it's so difficult right now to fit that into daily life and all this and the tech is complicated that gets back to where my brain goes earlier and they're like yeah will it get easier maybe easier it's not the right thing maybe it's understanding what is it that gets people to to do that and of course that all that all comes from years working in federal government trying to do open data stuff and supporting people to do data management data exchange better and trying to get folks to you know submit metadata or whatever it is for their science data set all these things and it's just difficult so yeah I also appreciate Liz I think you come at this from a different angle and I love hearing your perspective on this and everybody's Kevin do you want to chime back in here I wanted to ask Matt like what are what because you said you don't even do it what do you think it's the barriers obstacles because you like study this obviously care about it yeah I don't know I think I'm a weird case like I don't particularly want anybody ever see anything that I write so I wouldn't put it any more places than I had to um I and also like I'm a particularly inconsistent person I feel like an undisciplined and unself-consistent person but um I mean I think everything has to be like like when we had the vision of like let's get everybody to put all their data on query or data together or whatever is that we think it is at the moment a year ago or a year and a half ago it it had better be easier than what already exists if it's the same then it's not then you won't do it it's got to be easier and it doesn't just have to it doesn't have just get you more it has to be easier so I just want to note that we are about seven minutes from from our scheduled ending point Rob do you want to chime in quickly otherwise we do actually want to spend some time talking about what we're going to do for the next reading group which I think actually will tie in really well with these key themes of participation and trust that have emerged so Rob do you want to just have one quick last comment or question uh oh I guess I remembered what I was going to say it before is uh we and and I will try and keep it short which is that um so so we asked like what what could pull people towards participating um and and I think Matt said like oh the traditional ones are like fame power and that made me think especially in the context of what Liz was saying that um I think fame is a big attractor but it's not back to this question of like a sustainable participation I think it's often not a sustainable attractor but the flip side of fame that is a sustainable attractor is like validation from from close peers and like that really like is is it a these things that is super sticky like people really stay involved if they just have that um and so I think there's something something there awesome so you know I would say that like exactly this I think is it going to be a great uh starting point for our next reading uh which is on civics so you know what are our responsibilities as members of a community um and responsibilities in participating in particular um so the issue is that uh I believe we don't have a designated uh facilitator or two I think Matt had originally signed up Don was maybe on the list um I I think Don and I have been talking about it so I think we thought we were still in charge okay perfect uh yeah I think I know Don's on about 75 different things so if she if it makes sense for her to drop then that's fine with me sure um you know go ahead just we can help cool say one or two more words we had a meeting two weeks ago where we came like this close to defining our readings and which is an issue 45 on the on the thing and what I think that we sort of have is is a an article about civic republicanism which is maybe it it feels a little bit too imbricated like too involved in a political philosophy conversation but on the other hand still kind of cool and useful um because it um it just talks about this sort of tradition and political thinking that is in some ways always been at loggerheads with uh liberalism and individual rights and I think it's useful for us to think about like where we are in this communitarian versus libertarian thing um and then um that's the one because that's the one that I mostly talked about that I remember what the choice was but if you look at the issue you'll see there there are a bunch of categories uh sort of civic citizen community digital civics and um we thought maybe we were going to end up dropping civic tech because we all kind of know what that is um and uh yeah so so we had we don't I don't remember what readings we almost nearly became very close to deciding on but we'll send out an email soon super pumped thanks for coming everybody I think this is like a really good one um yeah I think this is really good really helpful and does anyone want to take a stab at like putting a bow on this maybe not a stab make a try does anyone want to try instead of I'm sharing with a knife yeah you're gonna go again like so one of the things that I saw on the readings is that like this type of work always starts with like individuals and small groups of people and the homogeneity that we have is its common purpose and that lives is talking about I think beyond survival but helping others survive or just helping the world make a better place and I'm glad that this group of small people are working on this problem even though we don't have all the answers obviously it's nice to hear from everybody the thoughts and stuff I like that this is how we have to start very cool I think that's a perfect closing and I completely agree starts small get bigger or maybe don't get bigger and just enjoy the small one whatever I don't care okay oh I need to go back and read Ellen classroom z again uh but cool uh thank you so much everybody for coming I think this is great uh you shall have a lovely Tuesday or whatever day it is wherever you are in the world uh last night were you ever shall oh wow that's impressive we have somebody talking to us in the future oh my god what times are you in I'm in Melbourne Australia at the moment wow that's like so it's Wednesday Wednesday's great it's looking look at all right out there yeah your Wednesday is going to be wonderful leaving edge of time well enjoy the rest of your Wednesday and thank you this was a great way to start it I feel energized amazing how long so good okay well I think that wraps up our first reading group thanks so much thank you all and uh yeah look forward to seeing everybody at the next one awesome thanks everyone bye