RoundTable 3

by: Kim Knight

(Incomplete - See Pablo Colapinto's blog for the first half)

• MM - how do you guide people to credible information in an information-abundant environment?
  • AYL - "who are you to tell me what's crap?"  Is it 90% crap?
  • TH - nervous aobut distinctions about good information
    • AIDS information 20 years ago, Global Warming Info decades ago, etc.
    • need to provide mechanisms to give information about information but avoid value judgments
      • MM agrees - contextual, perceptual evaluations
      • TH - info & social computing
        • wikipedia great for uncontested info
          • for many years marginalized perspectives systematically kept out of official scientific channels
            • question becomes how you avoid reinforcing a particular
            • focus more on interpretive frameworks
  • CP - thing that is disturbing about abundance of searchable information is search w/o context
    • possibility of not reading the book vs. mining a piece of data is cause for concern
    • print culture paradigms of ways of thinking / evaluating, etc.
      • would like to find other ways of thinking
        • music example - brain can do other kinds of things
          • maybe computer can help us discover / do those other kinds of things
          • positive thing -
            • should be teaching multiple modes of thought and how to evaluate ideas
  • AYL - conservapedia examples
    • if you want to build in flexible trust systems - how do you do that w/o going to the opposite extreme of relativism?
    • multiple blogospheres vs. one blogosphere
• RH - question for Larry
  • legal relationships between abundance of information and "powers-that-be"
  • LS - profit would be only point of contest
    • there will be a continued struggle between open access advocates and traditional journals (which has been ongoing for years)
    • it is obvious to too many people
      • archives example - lots of private and lots of public
        • most content in most public archives not yet digitized
          • if there is any resistance to that, from archive managers, for example, they are just going to come across as very conservative
            • there is no moral argument
            • the only argument they can offer is a lack of funding for the digitazation
    • LS kind of fears citizendium's success
      • credibility would exponentially increase the political significance of a wiki article
        • people would want to control them - could be problematic
        • raises the importance of sensible governance over information
      • projects like Citizendium, Wikipedia need to adopt a neutrality policy
        • neutrality is not about relativism but is about tolerance
        • a truly intellectually tolerant society in an information abundant world, it is going to be really important that those in control of this information should be held to some fundamental policies
  • AYL - Wikipedia article on the prophet Muhammad
    • neutrality rules etc sort of come down to laws in the state of Fl where the servers are housed
  • WW - emphasis on all of the information everywhere parallels definitions of God
    • iconophilic Western culture - all images should be available
    • iconoclastic - resists this
    • economics - copyright and patent represents about 1/4 of existing wealth
      • a lot of the 20th century is music and film - why isn't this on your list?
        • because the copyrights will be predictably difficult
    • larger question of how we think of information - outside of culture, information
      • resistance-proof aggregation of knowledge
      • open-source, ethos of tolerance, opposed by people like Joseph Leiberman who wants to prevent access to terrorist sites and change the nature of the web (also with anti-net-neutrality)
• AYL - wants to invite business perspective
  • academics tend to be in favor of open access, etc. (utopian)
  • LS disagrees - not utopian; bad side too
  • AYL - not using utopian as a bad term
    • what will the business take be on lots of free information for everyone?
    • JDM - IBM forward thinking - already thinking of all employee profile pages on the internet
      • doesn't get the impression that most companies are thinking this way
      • AYL - what is the bottom line value of allowing access to Beehive profile pages?
        • IBM ahs become a consulting company - if you can project those faces outward, IBM becomes more accessible
          • increasing meaningful relationships
    • PC - Microsoft .net initiative
      • agoras and castles
        • if you open info a little bit, you create a vacuum where more people want to contribute
        • who is going to open it up first? That is the power move
        • AYL - you are suggesting that you don't ahve to control the info if you control the standard
    • MM - involved in publishing a book for which they wanted a CC license
      • interesting example that could be instructive to watch
        • successful books released both in print and online
        • there are some interesting cracks in the armor
        • MacArthur's clout was influential in realizing that project
        • things may be changing slowly but power players may be required to support change
        • AYL - predominantly Western perspective
          • corporate vs. academic = Western conversation
          • New Zealand - finding it problematic to adapt CC licenses for their purposes
            • definitions of communally owned vs. individually owned property
              • inheritance structures, etc. do not map onto CC systems
          • why do we have such problems on Wikipedia?
            • comes down to the fact that we don't ahve one world
              • to some extent SC tools / software = gigantic sock puppets / mirrors for ongoing struggles in the background
    • NvH - still no business model for free and open information
      • not as optimistic as LS
        • no resources for scanning, etc.
        • NSF will provide resources only if it is really interesting
          • how is it that this gets supported?  How does the infrastructure get supported?
            • Academics have it easy - subsidized for this work because we have a lot of control over how we spend our time
            • if there ar epublic funds, who is going to support it and why?
      • LS - reason for optimism that most archives will be digitized because we've already arrived at the point where we expect information to be free and this will only increase in future generations of scholars
        • at a certain point the need to digitize will become obvious
        • there is a certain political inevitability based on the fact that the culture is changing - increasingly biased toward free information
        • NvH - depends upon the context - State of CA facing deficits that makng going backwards into archives and performing digitization prohibitive
      • TH - we don't have a general acknowledgment that information is valuable
        • hard to argue that all information is inherently valuable even though we may not recognize why atm
          • this is the mindset required to realize Larry's vision
      • AYL - framework for rewarding the addition of information and the removal of dangerous / outdated information
        • some kind of market model
        • MM - another approach to the credibility problem - looking at the information in the margin that will help us make judgments about the information we are looking at; text + social commentary + edit visualizations = meta-information that helps the user decide what to trust
          • idea of social computing to help people decide whether information is trustworthy is an important tool to be thinking about
          • what kind of information will help make decisions?
            • example of Wikipedia chocolate edit wars
              • once you are made aware of it, you approach the article about chocolate in a different way
              • What are the social indicators of trust that one might look for?
              • how can you write algorithms / software that will allow us to visualize / understand metadata
          • LS - what do you mean by credibility problem?
            • MM - there's a lot of information out there - what do I trust?
            • LS - solution = means of answering the quesitons "which information do i trust"?
            • LL - productive literacy vs.
              • information literacy problem and desire to create participants are seen as separate
                • confluence of content creation and assessing credibility
• LL - information seeking among hobbyist cooks
  • information retrieval - much study of established disciplines
    • less about regular people pursuing highly information intensive interests
    • advice networks required for and information intensiveness of personal interests
      • true for every single pursuit you can think of
        • thus, no magic set of metadata
          • users tend to have highly opinionated notions about what works in a particular context
            • may need to go to particular communities and ask
              • what flags work for you?
          • history of credibility in communication, but defined diff term in other disciplines
            • Info Studies - provenance
              • trust based on sourcing vs. just information itself
            • particular communities have 
            • chocolate example = good first step, diagnostic
• KI - project related to credibility
  • how do you assess credibility as a consumer of information?
  • contributors / participatory content on the other hand
  • Sue Rieh (Information Studies) at Univ of Michigan
    • when you are an active blogger, etc. is your ability to determine credibility more advanced than the information seeker?