Webinar with the European Commission and AP Community

Reflecting on the suggested titles for the webinars…

Webinar 1 - Introduce the decentralized social media protocol ActivityPub

An addition?

Webinar 1 - Introduce the decentralized social media protocol ActivityPub and its role on the Fediverse

Webinar 2 - Investigate the need for online federation and how ActivityPub can bridge to other decentralizing communities

There seems a bit too much emphasis on inter-community collab. Most close to AP is the Solid community (in part that is also because we have Linked Data in common that we build on). For other protocols we currently limit to building Bridges.

More interesting imho would be a focus on evolution of the specs. What do we have now (a bit a deep dive) and what is being researched. Then we come to Spritely Project and DREAM / openEngiadina (and this is then a natural bridge to Solid).

Then to match that to needs that live among the EC participants, indeed, and that provides great input to the workshop.

Title-wise, maybe…

Webinar 2 - Activitypub, the EU and the future. Federation in-depth and role in the decentralized technology landscape.

Workshop - Demonstrate how national and European administrations can implement ActivityPub

For the third title “implement” means coding, right? We wanted to address deployment & application first. Participating in the fediverse and such.

Workshop - Demonstrate how national and European administrations can benefit from current apps and make ActivityPub their own

or simply:

Workshop - Demonstrate how national and European administrations can adopt and benefit from ActivityPub

Thanks for the suggestions, I updated the announcement (thankfully have access to the Wordpress-instance for ngi.eu again) → NGI breaks down walls: decentralize social networking with ActivityPub - Next Generation Internet

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@cwebber is suggested speaker for the second webinar, but i think that might be hard to attend, timezone-wise at 10am CET …

Just 2 cents based on experiences:
The shitpost surrounding of pleroma does not encourage the EU.

And based on assumptions:
I doubt that the EU is keen on playing Trump and informing citizens in short messages.
Short notes are one reason for inaccurate information.

@how About peertube livestreaming, it seems to work for digitalcourage –
@chpietsch@digitalcourage.social is the expert there.

So:
Maybe it would be a thing to tell them:
Everything is voluntary, not much means and if they give some money not to the monopolies they get software which would be really beneficial to the EU and these softwares do not go closed source to a huge media publisher.

And about Hubzilla:
It might make sense since it is running on ZOT to showcase the ActivityPub plugin.
Did anyone compare Hubzilla and Friendica?

And my favourite ActivityPub software which I think would be mindblowing to them is

Tried to raise awareness for NGI0 and ActivityPub (and more money for nlnet) during the whole EU Digital Flagship week and beyond at e.g. Masters of Digital, digitaleurope summit, Open Source Policy summit, OFE lounge, Lobbying of internet giants webinar etc. pp.
by being “the normal one” and “bombing” the sidechat and Q&As :wink:
Got personal reponses and DM attention from the organisers and had so nice conversations.
Encouraging everyone to do the same in the future …

When I attended these events, I thought a lot about the roles and tasks which ActivityPub could serve within the EU.
And so, e.g. the producers for an EU plenary session became a Persona for redaktor.

Maybe we can sketch out a VISION for the perfect ActivityPub EU softwares in the webinar?
And I mean ActivityPub “CONFORMANT” softwares, the part of the spec. where you can read “the entirety” 3 times!

I try to share the redaktor findings (maybe useful for the people who got any EU funding [we failed 11 times in 2 years]) because the surveillance monopolies get nearly all the EU money …


The European Union has 27 member states [wishing the best to my scottish friends, so let’s think 28 while also thinking of Catalunya and solidarity for Roma and Sinti and … but anyway] …

In these 27 states

  • 24 official languages exist
  • more than 50 languages are actively spoken
  • 3 writing systems are used [Latin, Greek and Cyrillic].

The whole EU public presence is pretty much multilanguage or audiovisual (or both) !
All the live content is translated simultanuously and the terps play a vital and critical role in the administration with great responsibility.

Sometimes it is a legal requirement that the content exists fully translated in 24 languages !
Frequently even press conferences about the same topic are held in multiple languages [e.g. attended DE and EN for #DSA]

The most important properties to us [which is used in 0 (zero, null, zéro) of actual ActivityPub softwares] are the multilanguage properties:

nameMap
summaryMap
contentMap
preferredUsernameMap
etc. !!!

In the spec, it is this nice NOTE in the BOLD GREEN BOX saying

“Properties containing natural language values, such as name, […], make use of natural language support defined in ActivityStreams.”


A plenary session consist of the Event with multiple Actors (also Groups) and has multiple Collections (private and public).
A common public collection would contain the video recording for https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu plus related press releases, stockshots, photo news and documents or articles related to the topics of the session. As well as maybe the polls.
So e.g. Video, Audio,Image,Document,Article,Question come together.

We can go one step beyond and e.g. cover the protocol in a OrderedCollection with interjections (like the famous ones by Martin Sonneborn [wink smiley]) with the Mention type …

We see, it is mostly important that most ActivityPub properties can have multiple values !!!
And it is also important to have a nice way to “share” the type Collection


So, we have nice multi-language and -values support in the protocol but due to the lack of funding not in the software.

Now the producer creates the Event and it could be type: [Event, Service] because if it an Actor then it can e.g. Announce “Plenary session foo in 10 minutes” and relay comments etc.

The politicians Join when they arrive at the seat.

When the session ends and the video recording with all the multilanguage captions and transcripts etc. arrives, the producer Announces it to the Services audiovisual.eu, documents.eu which can present it in different visual formats without loosing all the related content.

Hm, seems it would be nice to have an ActivityPub CMS but the EU does not fund CMS, sad :rofl:

There is a small multilanguage section which is not even directly in the protocol but thanks to the magic of the Linked Data core is easy to solve:

It is about

• time based content
in conjunction with
• multilanguage texts

You ask “What?”
Simply said e.g. the captions for the plenary session video …
Where I click “Deutsch” when I am to tired or lazy to follow :slight_smile:

So, anyway, redaktor wants to go one step beyond and find a “more native” way to do time based content (anyone remembers the magic of Mozilla Popcorn Maker by that time?)

If e.g. an Audio has startTime and (duration or endTime) and it has attachment:
If the attachment has the same within these constraints, it is shown at this time below the Audio, so when you speak e.g. about a Place, you can also show it to your listeners.

Seeking opinions here

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This is an important point to raise, I agree. Supporting multiple languages should be inherent to any federating tech and even more so in the European/EU-context. I can imagine that this is a good point to raise in the second webinar, once the introductions are out of the way and we go into the nitty and gritty (and underfunded, like you mention).

This might be good for the second webinar also, once we have covered the overall goals and approach of AP in the 1st gathering. @how what are your thoughts on this?

Hi @CristinaDeLisle, Joost here from NLnet/NGI Zero, thanks a lot for your contribution! I would say we can continue to stick to the written materials, but of course we could have a chat sometime soon (maybe coming Thursday or Friday) to meet up and talk everything through (if I remember correctly @how invited you to present during the 1st webinar).

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I was also thinking on such practicalities, from my end I have the following options:

We have good experiences with BigBlueButton. We recently used an instance of hosted by the Dutch technical university in Delft → https://bbb.tbm.tudelft.nl/. It scales well (we had relatively small audiences of up to 50 people), offers moderating capabilities, and is of course open source. We could also get in touch with fairkom, who is actively contributing to BBB with NGI0-funding (NLnet; BBBsecureChat) and can host instances. Of course BigBlueButton would have little to no connection to AP or federation (as far as I know ;)). BBB apparently supports showing PeerTube-hosted vids → Support playing videos hosted on peertube servers · Issue #9226 · bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton · GitHub

Jitsi should support PeerTube-livestreaming (PeerTube documentation) which would be a great combination for at least the webinars: livestream the presentation from a PeerTube-instance (we could reach out to Framasoft) and continue the discussion/conversation in Jitsi (our friends with Radically Open Security providing security advice to NGI Zero-projects have their own Jitsi-instance we could use).

What would your suggestions be?

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As you know we did the whole ActivityPub Conf on BBB …
Including all the Q&A ActivityPub Conference - ConfTube

Please note that I organised an official BBB and nextcloud for the W3C SocialCG.
It is where we usually meet:
bbb.w3c.social

No worries, will include it completed in my conversation with Vestager/Commission in written form.
btw: I have sent the last answers from the Commission re. DSA/DMA to Michiel.
These answers in the PDF are in german, ActivityPub can change this.

Hello, Joost @j8ter , Yes, indeed, there is also a slide deck which is currently available here, as a draft made available by hellekin: ActivityPub for Administrations - HedgeDoc
I am ok with written materials and also meetings as well, as we find a common time to meet. For me it would be ideal to have a meeting this Saturday, 10/04; my proposal would be 15h00 FR. If this is too late or you would rather have it during work hours, I could try this Thursday or Friday, as you suggested, but I would need to check if I could be available, if you have also a preferred time. I would appreciate also any kind of feedback once we have a clear idea about the final content, so I would be available for a meeting/s also next week, preferably a few days before the webinar, if not the weekend before it. Thank you for your help! :+1:

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One final idea for the workshop: as @swentel may be occupied the 29th, we could also spare some time for the NixOS-foundation which is hard at work packaging NGI Zero-projects in Nix → ngi-nix · GitHub, for example for Pixelfed (Inventaire is under construction). Once packaged, this could allow sysadmins deployment in one or two lines of configuration (which is what NGI Zero aims to provide for projects to promote uptake and availability). I can point them to this discussion and we can keep track of what fediverse/AP-tech would be packaged and available for demonstration during the workshop.

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Hi Christina, I saw the slide deck, it’s already a great introduction to the core properties and values of AP in an EU-context, which is exactly what we are looking for.
Regarding the meeting, Thursday or Friday would have my preference, I don’t have any specific preferred time, everything between 9 and 5 CET works for me.
I agree with the importance of feedback, I will start thinking of possible points to add or adjust as is, so we can discuss these Thursday/Friday and use the next week to wrap things up.

Thanks for the reply, Joost @j8ter ! I propose then Friday at 15h00 FR, but let me confirm this to you tomorrow. I would propose also as a discussion to go over the slides and see if we have / find a common understanding of the topics, so that I integrate everything further into something that makes full sense to me and get some feedback on that final proposal as well (preferably next week, if you / all are available). I’m tagging @how as well, since he helped me a lot so far understand the workings done up to this point and proposed the slide deck draft. :slight_smile:

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Really :heart: wonderful work @CristinaDeLisle and @how!

Christina, I assume with FR you mean France, i.e. CET timezone? I am available 3pm CET on Friday.


Some other points:

  • I added the titles as already announced by NGIO to the preparation pad, but the SocialHub Agenda doesn’t show them yet. We may add them to the slides, but shortened.

  • Is the Preparation section in the pad, that points to forum locations useful (if updated), or shall we remove it?

  • @how, I tried making comments on the presentation, which requires SAML login. But the comments are showing my email account and I found no place where I could change to a chosen username. I think I might use html comments in the markdown.

  • We might add some chrome to the presentation (AP logo) to spice it up a bit and maybe some grey / purple colored text, i.e. community branding. The latter is not supported by this markdown, however, I think.

  • We have many possible action points or things to consider… i.e. open issues. This thread is too long to parse them, so shouldn’t we collect them in a bulleted list somewhere and keep track of progress? This list might be in that Preparation section.

I’m sorry for my recent absence, but it was unavoidable. This thread is very long and so is difficult to follow, so I may have missed something.

But here are my .02 euros of (hopefully) constructive criticism, based on over 25 years working with Commission IT & Comms people.

“Introduce ActivityPub to the European Commission (esp. [DG DIGIT]…”

Why on earth DIGIT? I guess it depends on what you are hoping to achieve, but the only funding DIGIT issues is via calls for tender for inhouse EC IT services, which isn’t applicable here.

"From the EC/EU side at least 60 participants can be expected… [including]:

- Interested European and national administration including the European Commission, European Data Protection Supervisor, European Parliament (names to be confirmed)

- Policy makers notably in relation to platforms, the Digital Service Act and Digital Market Act (names to be confirmed)"

Are any names confirmed? I can help with:

  • DG CNECT policymakers
  • social media teams from various DGs

The ideal is for a DG of the Commission to organise it, and invite their peers.

re: the composition and programme, I strongly suggest:

  • including MEPs
  • not going to them seeking funding. They get this every day! Get them familiar with the platforms first. That means getting EC social teams posting on the Fediverse.
  • focusing on the Why, and pointing out the dissonance between today’s EC policy and today’s EC social media activity
  • dialling back the technical content - you will lose 90% of your audience within 10 minutes with the current programme, which is too IT-focused

I am happy to help with the presentation and organisation.

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Hey Mathew,

Full ack !
Will answer your DM soon.

re. including MEPs, I approached and informed those most important to me like
Dr. Patrick Breyer or Alexandra Geese but also MdBs like Anke Domscheit-Berg who described the idea of an EU funded fediverse recently in the german parliament …

Always trying to approach the Commission on “all available channels”,
sorry if my advocating for more NGI 0 capacity was to much :wink:

Also agree, we should tell visions and stories instead of the IT-focused content, would also be happy to help.

And agree, we should maybe wait until usable and ActivityPub-conformant tools come up for the EU itself and there are a few MEPs crossposting their short news already, so the EC social teams would be a good first approach.

Appreciate your comment!

Love the input of both of you, @mathewlowry and @Sebastian

This is a point I’ve also been making. Especially since much of the audience has very strategic focus, and others are involved with regulation which also needs some high-level takes on where we’re heading in the future and on what principles and values, etc.

Also, as Mathew says, the TL;DR-ness of the thread is a bit of an issue. We can mitigate by ensuring that the preparation pad contains the summary of all important stuff addressed here.

I’d be really happy to help out, both with the presentation and with getting people to it. Both require a better picture of who is currently attending from where, so if someone can give a status update?

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Good to get an outcome from this:

  1. #activertypub as a cross-platform standard for #dotcons who operate in EU

  2. funding to further this - we would need democratic structures in the #fedivers style to make this real rather than a Eurocratic/power politics dead-end structures.

  3. Is the path with a good outcome - I have been involved in a number of groups/projects that have received Eurocratic money and the outcome has always been sub optional not to say a compleat disaster. I have seen no/little thinking to mediate this outcome.

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

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