Better prepared than last year, I arrived as early as I could possibly manage, wrenched myself out of bed.
Notable highlights:
Sunday
The panel “AI’s Collateral damage” started the morning off. The talk was engaging and I particularly liked Clinfon Watts and Alondra Nelson who were illuminating and had a more seasoned view of the subject matter.
Thankfully YouTube has a recording:
Camille Francois, research director at Graphika and affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Guillaume Chaslot, founder of AlgoTransparency and former software engineer at Google/YouTube
Alondra Nelson, president of the Social Science Research Council
Clinton Watts, fellow at Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, former FBI special agent, and author of “Messing with the Enemy”
Decentralised identities, storage, and applications with Blockstack
An excellent session; 7 apps were showcased and we had a rapid ‘elevator pitch style’ session with the seven apps being presented (10 minutes each) – we ran out of time and we only managed to hear 6 out of the 7 presenatations.
Commons Innovation
1. No implementation
2. Unclear USP
3. Great hairstyle
Air-ware, sorry!
Peergos
Inruiging – the guy showing this has a Peergos T shirt on but I could not find anything online about it. A sort of Dropbox alternative, avoiding ‘prying eyes’ from er… Dropbox, I presume.
Dignity Platform
Allws you to donate automatically to a charity of your choice. No developer to implement the idea. No collaborating charity. Not sure whether this will see the light of day!
https://worldbrain.io/
One of the best of this bunch, Memex by WorldBrain plugin allows you to share or bookmark, not just the page but any sentence or paragraph in the page. I downloaded a free plugin (there is a monthly charge to sync with offline storage). I will test this out as part of my tools for research in conjuncltion with trusty old Evernote.
PeerPad is a web-based decentralised real-time collaborative editing and publishing tool. It uses Y.js and IPFS under the hood to provide conflict-free shared editing without a third-party.
Not had time to look at this, looks interesting.
Launched the day after Mozfest. Slick documentation organization/search engine. Promising for collaboration inside organizations between researchers.
(from blurb:)
“fyberloom sends crawlers across app and weaves tapestry of information from all your legacy platforms. Correlates something happenings in Slack with something happening in Skype and something in your mail, your google drive or dropbox … fyberloom is agnostic and creates a pathway through your knowledge.The data is represented in such a way to reveal identity and relationships, as data is only meaningful in context.”
The host for the meeting points to this site.