<scribe> scribe: rhiaro

<cwebber2> ScribeNick: rhiaro

cwebber2: joost and sebastian have done the most pre-call thinking about the topics
... I encouarge one of you to frame it
... I'm volunteering joost to start

joost: I work with NLNet foundation
... we go back to the early days of internet working in the netherlands and europe
... early pioneers in establishing open internet betwen EU and US
... we put money into a fund (That's us)
... since then we are a public benefit fund, funded a lot of internet architecture R&D
... currently we are doing that with EU funding within 3 calls
... the first since 2018 as part of next generation internet initiatvie
... which has become this overly complex tangle of actions and acronyms
... lots of interesting work
... we hope to continue to fund projects
... i'm very interested to hear from sebastian and others who are advocating for AP in the EU context what your experiences and needs are and how we could promote that conversation in the right way

sl0071: there are some people from the US so I'll give a short intor about what is happening in the EU
... the european parliament is planning a big package of law called the digital services act
... some regulation to social media and platforms
... the most important thing is the compulsory interoperability
... the platforms must be interoperable to a certain level so data can flow between platforms
... the feelings is germany and france are leading this and advocating for it
... I talked to two members of the EU parliament which is patrick briar, who is a good person to approach, the other is karen (??) who is actively promoting interop
... in general it feels like germany and france are leading, but on the other hand some countries are protecting monopolies, the D9 group, the group with low taxes for google etc. Finalnd, Sweden, Poland, Ireland, Luxembourg
... the main problem is I don't have any idea how the civil society can engage with the EU
... the whole compulsory interop law is discussed within the EU in foru different boards
... these boards have 919 amendments and modifcation endorsements
... there is nothing technically
... and it's only 2 days old
... the EU has not met with anything from the w3c or anything engaged in open protocols
... the EU has yet already met with the messagner vendors like whatsapp and google and other monolpolies
... that is handled by ietf
... which wants end to end encrypted messaging layer, that is where google and twitter and whatsapp and firefox are working together
... I have absolutely no idea now that interop will become a law how we can get a lobby in brussels how we can get in contact with them
... the decision in next weeks will be what protocol will be chosen to be recommended for interop
... I want approach Dr Sylvia Gruntman who is a real expert, but is the head of internet of council of europe so not directly nvolved in legislation
... The other thing is the open tech fund became paused and that was much money for the open free and secure internet
... and I'd like to talk about the funding situation
... I think the most important thing is that we don't have any application which is conformant to AP, major player
... I don't know how to deal with it if mastodon continues only to support the type Note so discovery and interop is really a major concern
... So: how can we get al obby, how can we get funding, and how can we get interop amongst ourselves

cwebber2: one things..
... Right now there's an actionalble step within the EU context, but this is also happening within a global context
... there's a lot of pressure in many countries and attention on the power structure of social networks over society
... in the US major social media execs are being pulled in to talk about the ways they've had influence
... Centralisation creates a using game for these instituions
... in that what you end up with is context collapse
... different people have different requirements for moderation between communities, but with twitter and facebook etc you have an omni context
... and these companies are forced to make one decision, set a global policy
... decentraliation helps quite a bit here

<cwebber2> rhiaro: cwebber2 is in an irc channel with treora; treora has been working on some policy stuff in brussels, we might want to loop him into this conversation?

<cwebber2> rhiaro: he might know something I'll ping him

sl0071: I'm concerned about people in the community getting burnout
... it's important that we get more shoulders than we have now
... Another thing is I was criticised today about language in announcements about the socialcg is too technical and exclusive
... we don't have to talk about it now, but at some point, it is hard to think to address someone who doesn't know anything and just wants to engage
... My primary concern is if we get many people using AP we should make very clear what an AP cnformant servcie would be. Does it have to support all tpyes? Seems nobody cares what it says now
... That's what I tried to say with my talk at apconf
... we should support the whole of the protoocl but we should weigh it by design. Of course there will be specialised and diverse clients but they shouldn't lose information
... if they get an Article they should not lose it or destroy it
... at least I have ot know how I can send them a thing and we don't hav ea discovery things.. so mastodon says to me in advance that they only support Note, etc
... These are the things on my mind

cwebber2: To respond to sebastian - a number of good points
... how to get voices in so our language is less technical? Getting that kind of criticism is a positive sign
... when you start out you have a bunch of people who nobody is paying attention to just worried about getting the tech working
... then you reach enough critical mass that people are worried about being excluded
... we've hit a point where i'ts not just talking about how we can build it, but the reality we're living in
... we do need to get more voices
... but it's a compliment that we've got far enough along that it's not just nerds talking about sending data across the wire, but about building communities
... what are the next steps?

<cwebber2> https://conf.tube/videos/watch/d8c8ed69-79f0-4987-bafe-84c01f38f966

cwebber2: we have seen positive examples of people talking about things in a non techical way
... we want to pull those people in
... see this talk at apconf
... morgan said it was the best intro to AP, and it was about community issues
... we do have people in the community thinking about this - we should identify them and reach out
... It's a good opportunity. Maybe we should reach out to derek explicitly or other people like derek
... On top of that - framing what we actually do
... If we were going to at this moment say we're going to give some principles for the EU to adopt right now as a recommednation or requirement, what would it be?
... The first one is we need to ahve open standards that services are implementing
... It has to be an open standard that federates. The key thing is there are multiple instances, providing the thing, that can talking to each other
... a non-example of thsi would be Signal
... it's technically an open standard but only that Whisper Systems can implement
... The third thing is there has to be at least one major open implementation, but I think it should be at least two
... that are interoperable
... if a major company has a proprietary implementation that they don't expose, we might not prefer it but it's not the end of the world if there are open options available
... One thing that may be surprising - I don't think we should mandate AP but we might give it as a recmmendaton
... If we'd done this in 2005 we'd be saying everything needs to be xmpp
... what's in AP now is probaby, if AP survives long term, I expect AP to shift in how it is deployed and implemented
... we should leave room for those kinds of shifts to happen
... what I'm more concerned about is that those former principles be upheld
... I think the last thing that is critical, goes beyond recommending implementations
... the biggest problem I have and emotionally have difficulty listening ot any of the hearings, is that everyone coming in is from the perspective that this is all about only big players
... they might say multiple providers, if twitter and facebook can talk to each other that's compliant. That's not what we want
... a lot of the languag,e despite a lot of good intents behind it, a lot of the language assumes that it's for big players, and didn't have the assumption that there would be self hosting
... we have to make sure that when this stuff is written it's written with the expectation that self hosting will happen
... the considerations there are different than from a major provider
... and self hosting can heal some of the problems with big providers
... we're at risk of creating a regulatory moat
... that is supposed to stop the big players from being bad, but means only the big players can participate
... those are the key points from my perspective

<cwebber2> ack cjslep[m]

cjslep[m]: The types of people we want to get involved - we want to reach out to more non tech side
... and to add on the technical side with gofed at least, individuals over the past 2-3 years have reached out to offer help
... I've been by far the only major contributor to gofed and the lack of funding and lack of ease of obtaining open source funding definitely was a challenge to get other people motivated to help contribute
... people see the value but then see the barrier and time and effort it can take to implement an AP thing, it's not an easy specification, they get very easily discouraged
... not saying money is a solution but it's a help to rely on peoples' long term investment of time and energy
... otherwise smaller protocols tend to get favoured
... I find value in ngi0 and its grants, it's very accessible
... I' look forward to writing my first grant proposal along those lines

sl0071: I support what cj said
... I have the same impression
... in another situation I applied 11 times for funding at mozilla at the open tech fund and at ngi 3 times.. not blaming anyone that I didn't get funding but my impression is it's because everybody thinks if you did war photography for 30 years of yor life and are well known
... and you did things for all of your life which you can't talk about because they were investigative
... then you lose all of your camears in the ocean and have no money
... and decide to step 100% in the AP world because you see the need for pan european media to do their own thing and become independant from facebook
... the problem is i didn't get any funding at all and I'm in the lucky situation in germany and get money from the state
... the problem is I'm working full time 10-14 hours a day on a thing and I feel unfree
... because my state things that I'm a n00b who does nthing and give 400 euros for food
... but the fact is I'm doing a lot for my state and I want it to be considered work, I'm doing work the whole day
... it's not only me, it's all of my journalism friends (freelance) in the time of the pandemic
... the thing is who I blame is the EU because they put millions and millions in the horizon programs to support monopolies
... but compared to this so little to really important things like ngi0

cwebber2: these are two topics that involve the state and regulators from two different perspectives
... one of them is the state doing things to help its citizens by having them have platforms on which they can communicate and be safe
... that's the goal of the regulatory action, to try to encourage decentralised protocls
... the second one is the health of the community is often built on top of an economic system that isn't really built with the expetation in general that these kinds of free-rider problems
... sebastian and cj are trying to do this.. ngi0 is one of the orgs that is actually doing something about this
... I'm also in a psition of privilege that I've benefited from that
... What is sounds like this is tying into is there a way in addition ot the first set of things - the principles to make sure there's a non-monopolistic community supporting approach to communicatin on the internet
... the second one is how do we make sure the community is healthy by keeping the pepole who are building things for the community healthy
... ngi0 is doing work in that regard
... underfunded per what you'd prefer
... a quesiton would be what could be done?
... While talking to regulators say we can make the situation better for our citizens by accomplishing this former thing - open protocols etc - but some of the work needs to be doine by people who aren't supported by our economic system
... so you can support people like cj and sebastian who are working o nincredible projects
... I suspect that joost you have the most perspective than this..

joost: I agree with the fundamental issue that the maintainers and developers of architecture everyone is relying on are usually the most underpaid people
... one of the main reasons we like to shift focus from these grants we manage from putting it into startups and proprietary or limited lifespan ideas, into the architecture and infrastructure that is being maintained by people on a voluntary basis
... we try to do that.. a percentage of th funding should go to these efforts
... I think the first.. two points, the first point is a very solid one to make
... which I always kind of try to feel out whether political stakeholders are interested in this
... that we rely on major institutions, governments, etc, rely on US based proprietary infra to even get their point across, to engage with citizens.
... the most publicly paid institution is entirely governened/managed/hosted by 2 or 3 companies
... I think in this discussion, sebastian and christopher already mentioend horizon europe
... which is being worked on
... the budget has been allocated, 100 billion or something
... will be initialised jan 1st next year
... that perspective of taking back a level of independance for very fundamental comms and community infrastructure
... which should be promoted as functional, working, vibrant community, and not just the only standard to rely on
... that is a very valid and important perspective to bring across
... that this type of alternative for twitter and facebook, I agree with gdpr and these interop discussions, in the end there's a very strange thing going on
... a thought prison going on where everyone is criticising twitter and facebook but feel that there is nothing beyond those options
... which is a completely strange idea
... the idea is then that everything else outside of those options must not be usable by 'normal' people
... I did not have a lot of technical expertise, still working on that, moving beyond the geek/developer only space to a space where people can explain it without using any of the lingo, that is an important time to wherever possible show members of parliament that there is already an alternative
... already something of a interoperable community based on open standards that is very much alive and thriving
... and showing in actuality that there is a possibility for a community owned and run infrascturcture
... that would be the most important point
... you could go with the popular hype words of saying there's no 'fake news' on mastodon, can imagine that you might run a risk of the discussion being pulled in that direction, the echo chamber idea
... there is something in there
... something to be said that twitter and fb are fundamentally made to instigate sensationalism and extremism. They wll say it's not but that is to attract as many eyeballs
... outrageous voices to attract... I think I'm ranting
... the conclusion here is that activitypub has a very solid footing right now and very solid position to show that there is already something bubbling in europe that the political people are not seeing

<Zakim> cwebber, you wanted to talk about actions and timeline and to talk about blah blah blah

cwebber2: we're coming close to the hour.. I'm willing to go longer
... I want to move to what we want to do next
... how quickly is this legislation going to come up?

sl0071: it doesn't matter how quick this will go, react as far as possible
... I asked patrick briar if he wants to be a guest for 15 minutes, if that is what we want
... patrick briar siad to me that the group around him is very aware that activitypub needs additional funding if it becomes a law and he will help us

cwebber2: we have more than a week to get our act together
... I'd be willing to do another meeting about this next week same time
... looks like joost is saying the same

<cwebber2> +1 meet next week

<sl0071> +1

<pukkamustard> +1 meet next week

cwebber2: can I get +1s?
... I'm going to invite other people
... if you can think of anyone else
... we can look for a different time for other participants as well
... it sounds like agree on a followup meeting
... the last thing I want to get in - everyone roughly agrees on the framing that we put out earlier in this call about how to be able to go about it
... if you feel like that's not the case you should jump up now

<cwebber2> ack cjslep[m]

cjslep[m]: I have two very quick things
... joost mentioned that the whole twitter hatespeech idea might not be one to bring up - you may be curious that in the fediverse land there was a case where a far right extremeist group gab joined and eventually left because 99% of the communities on the fediverse wound up blocking them. It was an instant way th ecommunity self-healed
... an example to keep in your pocket

sl0071: I wanted to say the same as cj - it's very important that there is not much money involved in fb and twitter for moderation. what they're doing is an algorithm to block a page without any discussion about anything
... it is exactly what cj said with gab - the AP community self-healed, humans which did this not algorithms, at facebook these are algorithms which make the loudest even louder instead of equalling the voices

<cwebber2> ack cjslep[m]

<Zakim> cjslep[m], you wanted to talk about quick gut feel about FEP

cjslep[m]: a quick gut feel about the Fediverse Enhancement Process - if you've had chacen to look and like it do a +1

<cwebber2> +1

<sl0071> +1 FEP

cwebber2: when I looked it looked nice, but I'd like to look more
... let's wrap up - I want the last word to go to joost
... you're institutionally in the best position to have thoughts about what to do going forward

<sl0071> feeling that “FEP” should be an additional meeting to talk about

joost: involving my colleague michiel into this, he has a long background and connections in dealing with the EC from the political and administrative ends
... we should involve him in the next meeting
... some thoughts on how to bring all of these voices together into something actoinable

cwebber2: let's follow up on a thread, we'll talk about the next meeting time and about the people we want to pull in
... I"ll message mike, derek and jessica
... if you mentioned someoene else, volunteer to step up and reach out
... This might have been the most productive long term social cg meeting ever
... if we play our cards right there could be a lot of long term positive impact out of this
... Thanks everyone!

This is scribe.perl Revision of Date 
Check for newer version at http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2002/scribe/

Guessing input format: Irssi_ISO8601_Log_Text_Format (score 0.97)

Succeeded: s/two/one/
Default Present: sl007, joost, rhiaro, cwebber2, pukkamustard, cj
Present: sl007 joost rhiaro cwebber2 pukkamustard cj
Found Scribe: rhiaro
Found ScribeNick: rhiaro

WARNING: No "Topic:" lines found.


WARNING: No date found!  Assuming today.  (Hint: Specify
the W3C IRC log URL, and the date will be determined from that.)
Or specify the date like this:
<dbooth> Date: 12 Sep 2002

People with action items: 

WARNING: No "Topic: ..." lines found!  
Resulting HTML may have an empty (invalid) <ol>...</ol>.

Explanation: "Topic: ..." lines are used to indicate the start of 
new discussion topics or agenda items, such as:
<dbooth> Topic: Review of Amy's report


WARNING: IRC log location not specified!  (You can ignore this 
warning if you do not want the generated minutes to contain 
a link to the original IRC log.)