Webinar with the European Commission and AP Community

Meeting
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Breaking proposal

We want to showcase ActivityPub to the European Union. So my question is:

If the perfect place to meet does exist in ActivityPub and it is 3D and it is a flagship project of grantfortheweb.org -
why don’t we meet there ?

Do you remember 3 months ago, when I organised the rC3 ActivityPub assembly with 15 side events?

See the joint event with Immers and Mozilla Hubs:

“ A journey to the federated 3D ”

It was mindblowing!

ActivityPub in Mozilla Hubs, 3D and with positional audio.
It really adds another dimension to ActivityPub (same thing I’d like to achieve by adding time) - shouldn’t we showcase such successfull things?

For pictures see also:

/ping:
I am seeking the attention of @datatitian one of the founders of Immers!
How about an EU meeting in your rooms?

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There is also this video presentation about immers at Mozilla Hubs account with a chapter how ActivityPub is used (beginning 5:00)

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Hi all, still catching up on this thread, but yeah Immers Space would be happy to provide a federated virtual meeting space for this. We can do avatars, voice, webcams, screenshare, paginated PDFs - all the stuff you might need for a meeting.

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Hello all,

I take the opportunity to thank you for being present today in the call about the talk / webinar @how @j8ter @hamishcampbell @aschrijver ! I find your feedback very valuable and it will help me come up with a proposal for you to check out.

I propose that I work at it over this weekend and make it available on Monday, so we can have the next week available to make comments / final cuts. I will do my best, however, to maintain the current content of the presentation and introduce the ideas as we discussed them today. If I’m bringing new ideas, I will add speaker notes as well, so you could check those out and have an explanation.

If you add new ideas on the slide deck during this weekend, I will do my best to use those as well.

On my side I would prefer to have the presentation ready / agreed upon by Friday the 16th. I am available to do a follow up meeting next week for any discussions and also for making a test with whatever platform we decide to use for the webinars.

Please let me know if you have any comments about these proposals. Thank you again for the meeting today! :+1:

Have a great weekend ahead :slight_smile:

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My username was already set in Keycloak, It is just not honored by HedgeDoc, which still shows the full email address (just as it is doing now for @CristinaDeLisle). Can’t the pad to be set editable by anyone, just as the ngi0-ec-activitypub-liaison pad?

Update:

@how @j8ter I’ve got multiple requests for the Webinars to be recorded (and then published on PeerTube). Have we taken a decision on that yet?

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Hi, I in fact left some comments to @aschrijver’s post (Meeting notes for prep call EC Webinar 19 April) as I wrongly thought they were notes of the meeting (i.e., written afterwards), rather than inputs to the meeting (posted beforehand).

Is the purpose and audience of the webinar any clearer? On the one hand, the hedgedoc defines among the audiences “ Policy makers notably in relation to platforms, the Digital Service Act and Digital Market Act ”, on the other hand I was told “ The current focus of this webinar is to showcase the ActivityPub protocols and NGI0-funded ActivityPub implementations ”.

Expecting a policymaker audience to be interested in protocols is probably unrealistic.

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Hi Mathew. Thanks for your input. It is really valuable and helpful. i think for the first webinar we can assume more of the policy maker audience, and in general people that have hardly a clue what Fediverse is and does (so don’t need to know much about protocols yet)

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That’s really awesome.

How can we (at Startin’blox) help here?

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Any updates on the presentation - the URL i have is not updating is the a different one.

update found it EC - NGI0 Liaison -- Webinars and Workshop April 2021 - SocialHub

The speaker choice is looking a bit strange who is choosing these and whats the criteria :slight_smile:

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Wonderful, great to have you around! In the second webinar on 26 April we intend to make the bridge to Solid community. Time for this topic will be brief, and focus mostly on ActivityPub and what Solid / linkeddata adds to that. From that perspective a brief demo + some slides may be possible, but I leave @how in the lead to make final decisions in this. But I guess we will have a prep call for this webinar, so we can talk things through.

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Hello all,

As promised, I’ve added notes for the presentation and decided on ideas / a structure that makes sense to me, based on everything discussed so far and my own thoughts on the topic.

Please feel free to check it here: ActivityPub for Administrations - HedgeDoc It’s added over the original draft, as a replacement / reorganizing of ideas.

You will notice some slides with bad formatting - I encountered difficulties in integrating the content of the slide as I would have wanted it to be. Where some explanations did not fit the space, I’ve added them as notes. I’m available for explanations if something does not make sense due to this current formatting.

I will work on the slides graphics this week. I wanted to focus on ideas / logic / structure of the slides, so we could address those. Any feedback is welcomed - I will do my best to read your comments, if any, but I can’t promise that I will be available to answer properly to all of them, due to lack of time.

However, I would appreciate to not debate too much on topics and focus on being succinct, especially in writing. It’s a long presentation and I am aware that a lot of things can be said in multiple ways. Please consider that this is what would make sense for me, as content / structure of ideas.

I propose for us to meet a second time this week and discuss more, when the graphics of the slides are done as well. We could take that opportunity to test the platform which we will use for the webinar.

I thank you again for all your help! :+1:

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Is the purpose and audience of the webinar any clearer?

I would have the same question.
There seems to be some confusion.

I have had so many conversations with the EU Commission about the DSA (e.g. NGO roundtable, side events, press conferences and written) and we also talked much about the needs of the EU like Content Creation and Management.

About the vision of prosocial storrytelling instead of funding US hypercapitalist short messaging clones etc.
They are not interested in protocols but what protocols can do for citizens (and administrations).

At e.g. Masters of Digital, digitaleurope summit, Open Source Policy summit, OFE lounge, Lobbying of internet giants webinar etc. we talked behind the stage about an EU funded Fediverse which was also described in front of the german parliament.

Now I don’t even know if this webinar popped out of the blue but the idea as I initially understood was how the EU can use ActivityPub software.

This is rather the opposite of the DSA context where there is no connection to DIGIT.

Expecting a policymaker audience to be interested in protocols is probably unrealistic

Yes, this is exactly my impression from all the meetings with policymakers (and also MEPs)!

They want to see a software which adds a benefit to the European Citizens.
A variety of platforms being interconnected and interoperable (technically just by following the conformance section in the spec. instead of trying to replace a W3C recommendation by a poor API [but we don’t need to say]).
Unfortunately such things were never funded.
And if they were, they did not do anything, like discourse [Admin note: Remove it from the software category] …

I try to give some pointers of roles in administrations
skohub.io - vital role for universities and libraries
learnawesome.org - learning and long writing is what civil society needs
bookwyrm - my 2 cents: Connect it to independent, local bookstores = mega benefit
writefreely - a first attempt for writing

and maybe mention the nice, smart and conformant generic servers and that funding can power a variety of clients (wondering if anybody at NGI understood the protocol and the distinction between C2S and S2S but totally agree: They do not want to hear about it!)
go-fed
Smithereen
bonfirenetworks

Or maybe @mathewlowry sketches out the vision of myhub –
if @alex.bourlier presents a Startin’blox maybe @aveltens (directly working with SOLID/Inrupt/Sir TimBL) can say what we discussed at the meeting with me, a connection to SOLID.
The EU funded Fediverse could mean a Pod for every citizen.

They want to see and learn about platforms where you can show them what is better.
Question again: What do we showcase in the webinar?

btw: A long standing request for peertube is captions, subtitles etc.
redaktor implemented it over the weekend and finishes it today …

IF the DSA is a subject, I recommend to invite Chloé, EDRi and especially Die Geheimnisse des Rats - Investigate Europe

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I made the choice unilaterally (for the first talk) based on the following criteria:

  • excellent speaking skills
  • active in the community and available
  • good knowledge of the community
  • good understanding of the specifications
  • good familiarity with large institutions
  • not biased towards any single project

Based on this, I proposed @rhiaro but they were not available, so I turned to @CristinaDeLisle who stepped up and worked quite a lot last weekend to make it happen.

The second presentation is not clear yet since @cwebber did not reach back out yet, although he posted on the Fediverse about it. I would have preferred an EU-based presenter and a collective work to prepare the presentation in relation to the previous one and the specific context, but…

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@rhiaro pronoun is they

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Nothing. We discussed to focus on the available and potential services and not showcasing anything specific. Since the presentation is followed by a discussion, developers can be ready to answer direct questions. I hope this will demonstrate a will to share the talking space and not self-promote abusively. I find it utterly important at this point that we demonstrate this ability to band together as the ActivityPub community. We’ll have plenty of opportunities to showcase stuff.

Thank you anyway for your input, I already made a bit of changes on the “What is it used for?” slide.

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What we might do is having an animated set of slides that rotate screenshots of various applications during the discussion. Just an idea.

LearnAwesome might replace ForgeFed. The first is an application ready to use and related to Education programmes and such. The latter is a special case: it is a protocol extension of AP (that has no implementations yet), that is interesting to mention but maybe elsewhere.

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On-screen animation while someone is talking sounds like a deceptive anti-pattern that the big guys would be doing. :slight_smile: What about references? There’s already a link to #software and fediverse.party. I would expect that it is enough. We cannot cover everything, and again, the point was not to showcase anyone so as to avoid jealousy

Sharing knowledge is mot than covered, but sharing code is not. Focus is on service not app.

Disclaimer: we ended up having a five hour preparation meeting last Friday where we discussed these things…

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Woww !!! And I thought it was already long when I quit after 1,5 hr :sweat_smile:

Agreed on those points. References sound like a good idea. And based on the discussion… what interests the audience the most, we might focus on the specifics in the 2nd webinar.

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Hey Cristina,

saw the slides.

“The Fediverse is a European take on social networking”
Hm, any evidence from the realworld?
The Fediverse is totally US dominated. This is a fact we can’t deny.
I would say “The Fediverse is a take on Europeans dream of social networking”

Then good intro.
There are many overlaps to the videos of Derek and me from the Conf.
Maybe you can use some of the graphics.

When we had the last meeting for redaktor I really still had trust to get funding and pay your work, now also the students projects are at risk …
However:
We talked a lot about a central benefit to European citizens: Trust.
About your quote from SocialCG e.g.:

“so when you as an admin were peering with another instance you are showing your set of values, and if that other instance believes that they are sharing those values, that instance can peer with you”

  • for peering between instances based on human values

  • we can’t force mastodon but this can be a start

and about a

  • petname system → instance of trust

I am reading the summary of the meeting and I think, this can be a sidenote.
What also got attention from policymakers was when I wrote before the von der Leyen keynote

Find a way to talk about the most important danger for the web:
How do we fight misinformation and hate?
After the attempted storm at the Reichstag [DE] and the storm at the US Capitol: It will NOT help the European Union if crazy people approach Espace Léopold and von der Leyens laptop gets stolen, MEPs suffer from traumas and the EU is incapable of action for a while.

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Moving post and combining with quote:

Yes, I’d say we have a big opportunity to give this dream an European twist. My original post:

@CristinaDeLisle @how I am heavily promoting a rallying cry for people to help evolve the Fediverse. One that stands for innovation, creativity, positive change. I would love to see it mentioned in the slides (maybe twice even… somewhere at the start, and at the last slide). It is the slogan (and fedi hashtag):

:sparkles: Social Media Reimagined :sparkles:

fairy_medium-dark-skin-tone_1f9da-1f3fe_1f3fe

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