Month: February 2022

Weeknote 06/2022

Posted on February 12, 2022February 12, 2022 by Doug Belshaw

Apparently you can’t diagnose ‘Long Covid’ until at least 12 weeks after infection. Hence I’ve been talking about having ‘Medium Covid’ as it’s been a couple of weeks since I finished my self-isolation I’m still tired. This tiredness manifests itself as getting up later (08:00 instead of 06:30) and my baseline energy levels being on the whole lower.

I’m not a believer in mind/body dualism, so I’ve been going out of my way to ensure that I can discount the psychological element. As a result, I’m still trying to do exercise every day — mainly either arm or leg weights at the gym and the exercise bike in my home office. The thought of running, as I did last week, and my heart rate spiking up to 170 worries me.

Tomorrow, I’m planning to walk the 9.2 miles to Druridge Bay. That’s not particularly far (and in fact, I’ve walked there and back before) but it’s a bit of a test to see whether I’ll need to postpone my plans to walk Hadrian’s Wall during the first week of April. The idea was to walk about 15 miles for five days and camp each night. If I’m particularly tired after walking ~10 miles it wouldn’t bode particularly well.

This week, I did a mix of really interesting work and clocked 26.75 paid hours. My theory is that people who are full-time employed pay a two-hour coordination meeting tax per day that I don’t have to because of my tight alignment with Laura.

That’s not to say, of course, that we don’t disagree or have any conflict. Of course we do. The important thing is how we deal with it, and the two-part Reframing Conflict workshop we did has really helped. The FONT framework that Outlandish use is a form of non-violent communication which I think is particularly useful for people working remotely.

It’s also quite useful as a parent, especially of teenage kids, and can also be used with one’s partner. Talking of Hannah, I booked a suite at Malmaison in Newcastle last Sunday night and we had a fabulous dinner at Khai Khai. We both took Monday morning off. The older I get, the more I realise how much important relationships take work, even when things are going well.

Here’s some of the things I’ve been working on, both through WAO and Dynamic Skillset this week:

Bonfire Zappa project — this is my favourite project at the moment, and you can tell because I not only did some user research and desk research, but wrote one blog post about it and one that was inspired by it.
Greenpeace — we continued to try and reduce the amount of ambiguity in the web strategy project, and we worked on other project with them that I can’t talk about.
Keep Badges Weird — the main action this week was to run the first community call for the project, which we’re doing in collaboration with Participate.
Julie’s Bicycle — we’re trying to move the Creative Climate Digital Platform from the planning to the discovery stage, but are bumping up against some ‘treacle’ which is slowing us down. I’m hoping that is resolved soon so we can get on with doing some user research, after delivering a well-received digital strategy.
Tao of WAO — Laura and I recorded an episode of our podcast about dis/misinformation and we released one we recorded with Kerri Lemoie on verifiable credentials.

I’ve signed up for a free course from Tethix next month about tech ethics. It looks like it’s going to be excellent, the only fly in the ointment being that the difference in timezone between me and the facilitators. I had the choice of 6am to 9am every Tuesday, or 8pm to 11pm. I initially went for the former, as I consider myself a ‘morning person’, but given my Medium Covid, I’ve asked to switch to the latter!

Other than the above, the only things really to note are that I’ve returned my Asus UX325 laptop as there were random restarting issues that seemed to be resolved by reinstalling the operating system each time. I bought a Mac Mini M1 to replace it, which might seem like an odd move, but ultimately I’m happy with a combination of the (family) Google Pixelbook on which I’m writing this, and my trust Lenovo ThinkPad X220.

The Mac Mini now sits upstairs in what I’ll refer to as “Hannah’s office”, despite that being a rather grand title for the space, and the fact that we try to switch for at least part of the day. (I’ve got a sit/stand desk in my office, you see…)

Next week is the last of the half-term for my kids. It’s usually one where kids, teachers, and parents are tired and I don’t think this one is going to be any different. I think I’ll probably end up having the Wednesday of the half-term holiday (week after next) off, but we’ll see.

Countering misinformation in federated social networks: an introduction to the Zappa project

Posted on February 8, 2022February 8, 2022 by Doug Belshaw

Illustration of birds from Bonfire website

One thing I’ve learned from spending all of my adult life online and being involved in lots of innovation projects is that you can have the best bookmarking system in the world, but it means nothing if you don’t do something with the stuff you’ve bookmarked. Usually, for me, that means turning what I’ve filed away into some kind of blog post. It’s basically the reason Thought Shrapnel exists.

Last week I started some new work with the Bonfire team called the Zappa project. Bonfire is a fork of CommonsPub, the underlying codebase for MoodleNet.

Self-host your online community and shape your experience at the most granular level: add and remove features, change behaviours and appearance, tune, swap or turn off algorithms. You are in total control.

Bonfire is modular, with different extensions allowing communities to customise their own social network. The focus of Zappa is shaped by a grant from the Culture of Solidarity Fund.

The grant will be used to release a beta version of Bonfire Social and to develop Zappa – a custom bonfire extension to empower communities with a dedicated tool to deal with the coronavirus “infodemic” and online misinformation in general.

The announcement blog post talks of “experimental artificial intelligence engines” and “Zappa scores” which may be longer-term goals, while my job is to talk to people with real-world needs right now. As I’ve learned from being involved in quite a few innovation projects over the last 20 years, there’s a sweet spot between what’s useful, theoretically sound, and technically achievable.

Last week, I met with Ivan to try and do some definition of user groups and the initial scope of the project. It’s easy to think that the possible target audience is ‘everyone’ but it’s of much more value to think about who the Zappa project is likely to be useful for in the near future.

Priority areas for stakeholders, user groups, and themes

The above Whimsical board shows:

a list of people we can/should speak to (we’ve spoken with two orgs so far)
themes of which we should be aware/cognisant
groups of people we should talk with

The latter two lists are prioritised based on our current thinking and, as you can see, it’s biased towards action, towards those who don’t have merely an academic interest in the Zappa project, but who have some skin in the anti-misinformation game.

A note in passing: many people use ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ as near-synonyms of one another. But, even in common usage, it’s clear that they have an important difference in meaning.

We’d say, for example, that someone was ‘misinformed’, in which case their lack of having the correct information wouldn’t necessarily be their fault. On the other hand, we might talk about state actors waging a ‘disinformation’ campaign, which very much would be intentional, and probably focused on creating a mixture of fear, uncertainty, and/or doubt.

The line between misinformation and disinformation can be blurry, but it’s probably helpful to conceptualise what we’re doing in the terms of the grant: to help “empower communities with a dedicated tool to deal with the coronavirus ‘infodemic’ and online misinformation in general”.

One of the resources that I’ve found particularly helpful (and which I wish I’d seen before presenting on Truth, Lies & Digital Fluency a couple of years ago) is Fake news. It’s complicated. Its author, Claire Wardle from First Draft, lays out 7 Types of Mis- and Disinformation on a spectrum from ‘satire or parody’ (which some wouldn’t even conceptualise as misinformation) through ‘fabricated content’ (which most people would definitely consider disinformation).

Some of the differences between these types can be quite nuanced, and so I found the Misinformation Matrix in the post really useful for looking at the reasons for the misinformation being published in the first place. These range from sloppy journalistic practices, through to flat-out propaganda.

What the user research we’re doing at the moment is focused upon is what types of misinformation human rights organisations, scientists, and other front-line orgs are suffering from, how and where these are manifested, and what they’ve tried to do about it.

So far, we’ve discovered that countering misinformation can be a huge time suck for people who are often volunteering for charities, non-profits, or loosely-organised groups. It seems that some areas of the world seem to suffer more than others, and particular platforms are currently doing worse than others. All of them could, of course, could do much better.

We’re still gathering people and organisations for this project. So if, based on the above, you know someone who you think it might help us to talk to, then please get in touch! You can leave a comment below, or get in contact via email.

Weeknote 05/2022

Posted on February 5, 2022February 11, 2022 by Doug Belshaw

Signal box, Bedlington Station, Northumberland

Everyone’s heard of ‘long Covid’ but I reckon what I’ve got may be best classed as ‘medium Covid’. It’s in no way a scientific definition, but rather just a feeling that while my lingering tiredness won’t last forever it’s certainly taking it’s time to dissipate.

This week was one full of context-switching. We try to keep this to a minimum in our WAO work by blocking out half-days for client projects at a time and this usually works well. This week’s been a little different, though, in that it included our participation in a new workshop from Outlandish around ‘reframing conflict’. It’s good to do things as a co-op that serve to strengthen our communication and give us tools should we need them.

In addition to our client work with Greenpeace (two projects), Julie’s Bicycle (two projects hopefully merging into one), and Participate, I’ve been diving into work on the Zappa project with the Bonfire team. I’m doing this work through Dynamic Skillset and helping them with user research as they figure out ways to help with anti-disinformation efforts with federated social networks.

So lots of interesting work on at the moment. I also had a chance to catch up with Ian O’Byrne, which was nice, and I’m figuring out re-arranged in-person dates with Jeroen de Boer to help his team with ‘Open Bibliotheek Badges’ and contribute to the Dutch National Libraries conference. Oh, and I’m still trying to rearrange a Climate Café in my home town with one of our neighbours.

One of the meetings I attended this week was the Open Recognition working group for the Open Skills Network. The main focus of the session was a demo of the Open Skills Management Tool (OSMT). I’ve written up my (enthusiastic!) thoughts about it in a blog post.

I published a few posts over at Thought Shrapnel:

Next week, I’m returning the laptop (an Asus UX325) as it keeps weirdly crashing in a way that I have to reinstall the operating system. After much (more) research and deliberation, I’ve bought a Mac Mini M1 which my wife and son will use in regular macOS mode, whereas I’ll virtualise an ARM-based Linux distribution. As for a laptop, I’ll just use my trust ThinkPad X220 🙂

Work-wise, I’m just continuing with the six projects outlined above, and taking the second session of the Outlandish workshop with my co-op colleagues.

Photo of train signal box taken by me on Wednesday night in Bedlington Station, Northumberland