Amy Guy

Decentralised authoring, annotations and notifications for a read-write-web with dokieli

While the Web was designed as a decentralised environment, individual authors still lack the ability to conveniently author and publish documents, and to engage in social interactions with documents of others in a truly decentralised fashion. We present dokieli, a fully decentralised, browser-based authoring and annotation platform with built-in support for social interactions, through which people retain ownership of and sovereignty over their data. The resulting “living” documents are interoperable and independent of dokieli since they follow standards and best practices, such as HTML+RDFa for a fine-grained semantic structure, Linked Data Platform for personal data storage, and Linked Data Notifications for updates. This article describes dokieli’s architecture and implementation, demonstrating advanced document authoring and interaction without a single point of control. Such an environment provides the right technological conditions for independent publication of scientific articles, news, and other works that benefit from diverse voices and open interactions. To experience the described features please open this document in your Web browser under its canonical URI: http://csarven.ca/dokieli-rww.

Linked Data Notifications: A Resource-Centric Communication Protocol

In this article we describe the Linked Data Notifications (LDN) protocol, which is a W3C Candidate Recommendation. Notifications are sent over the Web for a variety of purposes, for example, by social applications. The information contained within a notification is structured arbitrarily, and typically only usable by the application which generated it in the first place. In the spirit of Linked Data, we propose that notifications should be reusable by multiple authorised applications. Through separating the concepts of senders, receivers and consumers of notifications, and leveraging Linked Data principles of shared vocabularies and URIs, LDN provides a building block for decentralised Web applications. This permits end users more freedom to switch between the online tools they use, as well as generating greater value when notifications from different sources can be used in combination. We situate LDN alongside related initiatives, and discuss additional considerations such as security and abuse prevention measures. We evaluate the protocol’s effectiveness by analysing multiple, independent implementations, which pass a suite of formal tests and can be demonstrated interoperating with each other. To experience the described features please open this document in your Web browser under its canonical URI: http://csarven.ca/linked-data-notifications.

Self Curation, Social Partitioning, Escaping from Prejudice and Harassment: The Many Dimensions of Lying Online

Portraying matters as other than they truly are is an important part of everyday human communication. In this paper, we use a survey to examine ways in which people fabricate, omit or alter the truth online. Many reasons are found, including creative expression, hiding sensitive information, role-playing, and avoiding harassment or discrimination. The results suggest lying is often used for benign purposes, and we conclude that its use may be essential to maintaining a humane online society.

Computationally Mediated Pro-Social Deception

Deception is typically regarded as a morally impoverished choice. However, in the context of increasingly intimate, connected and ramified systems of online interaction, manipulating information in ways that could be considered deceptive is often necessary, useful, and even morally justifiable. In this study, we apply a speculative design approach to explore the idea of tools that assist in pro-social forms of online deception, such as those that conceal, distort, falsify and omit information in ways that promote sociality. In one-on-one semi-structured interviews, we asked 15 participants to respond to a selection of speculations, consisting of imagined tools that reify particular approaches to deception. Participants reflected upon potential practical, ethical, and social implications of the use of such tools, revealing a variety of ways such tools might one day encourage polite behaviour, support individual autonomy, provide a defence against privacy intrusions, navigate social status asymmetries, and even promote more open, honest behaviour.

Social Personal Data Stores: the Nuclei of Decentralised Social Machines

Personal Data Stores are among the many efforts that are currently underway to try to re-decentralise the Web, and to bring more control and data management and storage capability under the control of the user. Few of these architectures, however, have considered the needs of supporting decentralised social software from the users perspective. In this short paper, we present the results of our design exercise, focusing on two key design needs for building decentralised social machines: that of supporting heterogeneous social apps and multiple, separable user identities. We then present the technical design of a prototype social machine platform, INDX, which realises both of these requirements, and a prototype heterogeneous microblogging application which demonstrates its capabilities.

Self Curation, Social Partitioning, Escaping from Prejudice and Harassment: the Many Dimensions of Lying Online

Portraying matters as other than they truly are is an important part of everyday human communication. In this paper, we use a survey to examine ways in which people fabricate, omit or alter the truth online. Many reasons are found, including creative expression, hiding sensitive information, role-playing, and avoiding harassment or discrimination. The results suggest lying is often used for benign purposes, and we conclude that its use may be essential to maintaining a humane online society.