madisen

The old ideals of free flow of, access, and sharing of information that propelled the open movement in the early 2000s are ill-equipped to address the challenges of the modern internet related to the surveillance and profiling of users and the add-based business model of companies that dominate the internet landscape. Because of the evolution of... See more

The key premise of algorithms is efficiency. Algorithms optimise data for decision-making that we previously did not have before. But humans are not efficient. We are messy and inherently flawed, which makes us human. We value serendipity, community and experiences, which may not be efficient but is impactful.

here are two basic approaches to creating AI datasets. The first one, which is typical of the case we have been studying, a pool of open works is purposefully chosen to ensure license compliance. The second approach creates the dataset by scraping the “raw internet” and relying on copyright exceptions. LAION , a dataset of 400 million image-text... See more

Jimmy Wales described it in 2004, was to create “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” The following year, Wales also stated, “We help the internet not suck.

Alongside technical tools, we need ways of defining and explaining social norms and expectations about contribution and value sharing. We need collective mechanisms for decision-making about shared assets, that make people feel heard while recognising the limitations, constraints and realities of their maintenance. We need people and organisations... See more

Open systems – free speech, democracy, open content, open science – will sometimes produce results we do not like. That openness, of course, will be used by the powerful as well as the powerless. There will be cruel speech, bad democratic decisions and uses of openly licensed content with which we disagree. Thus, it is very easy to blame openness.... See more

Each wave of openness – universal franchise, free speech, the movement for an open web, open access content – helps to solve one set of problems and immediately focuses attention on others,