User:Eleanorg/Journal 2.2

16 Jan

Thesis time! Terror! Headspace...So. Narrowed down my technical focus to consensus processes for collaborative document editing. Have excluded earlier interests in aggregation, hosting etc in an attempt to avoid the tunnel of doom. Michael convinced me that spending some time prototyping with wikis would be a good idea. Their functionality plus the history/practice of their communities gives a nice correlation of theory + practice.

SO. My topic of thesistic exploration will be the tricky border where 'consent' meets 'consensus'. ('consent' = agreement of an individual; 'consensus' = agreement of the group.) The aim is to critique the way that consent is encoded in:

1. Dominant consensus practices, and thus
2. Collaboration systems encoding these practices (Eg wikipedia).

The critique will be made using feminist theories of consent. I will argue that:

1. The rhetoric/ideal of consensus often masks the ambivalence and compromise experienced by the individuals 'giving' consent.
2. Accepting this ambivalence/not-consensus is ok and beautiful and a powerful ethical position.

Here is the outline, with research objects in << >> brackets:

• Introduction
  • Demise of hierarchical editorial power online raises question of how to edit collaboratively.
  • 'Consensus' is a popular model used by projects like Wikipedia et al, encoding the popular activist approach to organizing.
  • Question: how consensual are these consensus systems? What is lost in the quest for consensus and who loses out?
  • Argument: interrogating consent at a low level gives tools for evaluating how consensual 'consensus' process are. Feminists give us these tools.

• Summary of the concepts of 'consent' as opposed to 'consensus'.
  • Trace the the source of 'consensus' process in Western leftwing projects
    • Q: What common sources do consensus evangelists (Wikipedia, Seeds for Change, Movement of Movements etc) draw from? << Historic texts/groups; Seeds for Change interview >>
    • Q: What assumptions does this concept of consensus make about individual consent?
  • Summarize feminist campaigns on consent << Reclaim The Night; Rape Crisis policy >>
    • Argument: interrogating consent at a low level gives tools for evaluating how consensual 'consensus' process are. Feminists give us these tools.
    • Summarize origin & dominance of the 'yes means yes/no means no' slogan. << Historic texts/ campaigns; RTN interview >>
    • Outline correlation of this slogan with the legal definition of consent. << 'The Nature of Consent'; 'Consent to Sexual Relations' >>
    • Introduce contemporary debates questioning this slogan. << 'Yes Means Yes'; Hugo S. >>

• Consensus in online publishing
  • Introduce the issue of how to curate crowd-sourced content. (DANGER of diversion into filter bubble debate)
    • Hierarchical editorial control being replaced by user curation / collaborative curation.
  • How consensus is encoded in collaborative editing << CHOOSE RL EXAMPLE/s. Possibilities: post-Indymedia projects; Wikipedia >>
    • Describe an example or two of how consensus is used in collaborative editing. (DANGER of becoming a Wikipedia/WikiMedia thesis)
    • Use feminist theories of consent to evaluate how consensual this process is.

• Proposals for consensual approach to consensus
  • Ambivalence is good
    • Back up with feminist/ direct democracy theory (Q: how/where to include theory on consensus democracy?)

potential fork alert

Writing this I realize that feminist theories of consent can be used powerfully to critique practices of consensus. (Ie, that they are not really consensual). BUT. They are two different topics, with different implications when it comes to software.

1. Consent: TOS, 'I agree' buttons
2. Consensus: wikipedia, comment rating systems.

The former is about individuals giving themselves over to a policy. The latter is about individuals expressing their views. They are related, but are they related enough to both be the topic of a project/thesis? I reckon........... the point of the thesis is to bring them together. BUT. It will become too sprawling if I include how individual consent is encoded in software ('i agree'). Instead I will limit the discussion to collaborative systems for deliberation. BECAUSE: they most closely model the idea of consent that feminists are proposing, albeit with more subtlety needed (which is what my graduation project attempts).

Solution: make the following analogies:

1. TOS/ 'I agree' = conservative status-quo of consent
2. wikipedia consensus = attempt at radical, truly collaborative consent

Thus maybe mention 1. briefly, but my main interest is in 2.

15 Jan

Have been converted to the wiki cult. May be gone some time.

See this for an example of the prized concept of consensus in FLOSS community: https://gnu.org/consensus "I'd like to reach consensus on officially supporting this manifesto" https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/consensus/2012-12/msg00009.html

mediawiki experimental thoughts:

• love wikis. easy cut & paste BUT then requires rules if metadata is to be coherent.
• functionality lacking from mediawiki by default:

* keeping track of where a text has come from (see active archives approach)

* ability to browse tags by who added them (possible w/ semantic mediawiki?)

* ability to add multiple layers of tags to a single page w/out creating a new page, or overwriting page in the VCS

• q: how to integrate the version history with meaningful metadata?

C's observation was useful: I'm trying to make something halfway between a VCS and a metadata system.

9 Jan

Going to join Dave's browser editing club this month and do editors that use different schemes for negotiating consent. First prototype will be a text-editing sketch where a block of text can be reviewed by the user for publication. User can highlight the portions as 'yes' 'no' or 'maybe'; they are stored in a db with these phrases as tags. A separate script that outputs PDF will format the text for print such that these judgements are reflected in the design. (eg - 'no' is omitted, 'yes' printed, 'maybe' printed sometimes at random, or fainter.)

Need to find some js-type code that lets you 'tag' portions of text by highlighting them. C recommended CodeMirror - js that creates an in-browser editor. It comes with optional extras that add the type of functionality I want, like putting text into variables when it's highlighted by the user.

Next steps:

• read CodeMirror user manual.
• make a prototype editor that puts selected string into a variable.

from http://codemirror.net/doc/manual.html#event_cursorActivity Events

A CodeMirror instance emits a number of events, which allow client code to react to various situations. These are registered with the on method (and removed with the off method). These are the events that fire on the instance object. The name of the event is followed by the arguments that will be passed to the handler. The instance argument always refers to the editor instance .."cursorActivity" (instance)

   Will be fired when the cursor or selection moves, or any change is made to the editor content.

...Read user manual. Useful bit = detecting cursor events that mean text has been selected. Looking for a simpler way of doing this in js myself. Seems there is an inbuilt method, .getSelection(), that does just this. Find out how to use it. Try using the sample code at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7416555/getselection

27 Dec 2012

My project has a social side and a technical side. I've put time into figuring out where to intervene socially. Now I need to firm up a software spec and learn some skillz.

FEATURES

• Anyone can contribute to the 'library' (or - limited to a group who've committed + have passwords?)

• Users curate by committing physical resources as a marker of agreement/solidarity (Piracy Project as opposed to Assembling Press, where authors must print own work)

• Popularity is visualized physically (see Amsterdam Weekly)

• Popularity/disagreement is visualized in the software

>> the above two could clash: or somehow make the software configure web2print files such that the two are combined?

• Proliferation of provisional editions

• POSSIBLE: designers make the publication look nice

I think there is some confusion in my mind between transmitting others' words, and this idea of curation. Or maybe not. I'm conflating 'curation' with 'transmitting' maybe. You know, holding a banner for another: both transmission and curation; you decide what you agree with and then you publish it. And it's this process of curation that interests me. When curation isn't simply a personal choice but done out of solidarity. The danger with this project is that this idea gets lost, and it becomes all about debating certain controversial texts in their own right. I somehow have to create an imperative for solidarity (or locate a pre-existing one). I need to find a publication pronto in which to intervene.

And where does curation relate to the 'creation of hybrid documents' that I presented in my diagram? I guess these hybrid documents are simply the edited spreads which will be printed, minus the unpopular text.

The overriding aim is to highlight the dischord that underlies consent. Basically it's Open Sauce, with a more sophisticated way of: - indicating agreement/disagreement - visualising agreement/disagreement

Which is where version control is relevant. Questions to bear in mind while learning Git: - How are documents circulated socially using Git? - How are documents approved of or disapproved of/discarded?

I think my knowledge is still too patchy to create a whole VCS and web to print tool myself - shame, as I wanted a customised one. But I don't just want this to be another Open Sauce, ie, 'artist uses a wiki' -- 'artist uses Git'. I want to draw attention to the social relationships inherent in these tools? No. Actually I want to use these tools to visualise social relationships. (DANGER - being naive about how these tools 'perform' or produce certain behaviour in themselves.)

Goal: make a VCS/publishing system implementing a "beyond yes or no" idea of consent. Editing or version control features to be taken from manifestos on consent - ie, yes, no maybe game.

LEARN what exercises/games are feminists proposing to practice consensual negotiation? Could this be a 'learning game'?

Idea: could the editing/curation process be a more intimate thing, where people are paired with another person and create the document together?

Next steps: Learning about Git to understand how it encodes social relations of approval/discarding of documents; what processes of curation does it take for granted and how could an experimental VCS encode or encourage different relationships?