Tonight I went to a fantastic talk by Amy X. Zhang called “Systems to Improve Online Discussion.”

I met Amy last year at LibrePlanet and shortly afterward made a note to myself to follow up with her about communication platforms.

Digging through old emails, it looks like I first reached out to her in June 2015. I head heard good things about Hackstack at the first Dataverse Community Meeting and read her paper called “Mailing Lists: Why Are They Still Here, What's Wrong With Them, and How Can We Fix Them?” She built a system called Murmur to address these problems and I signed up for an account right away. If you check the About page for Good Labs, you can see it's the mailing list software we use.

In her talk she mentioned several new projects I wasn't familiar with:

• Wikum: recursive summarization
• Tilda
• YoUPS
• Squadbox
• Credibility Coalition
• Digital Juries
• PolicyKit: a toolkit for self-governance

I rather not keep the piece of paper I scribbled on, so here are my notes:

• online discussion is getting worse
• two problems
  • scale
  • competing norms
• “a civilization of the mind” quote by John Perry Barlow
• power to speak but power to curate is missing
• need tools for collective curation
• need to summarize unwieldy discussion
• a wiki is neutral and easy to read compared to a forum
• “answer wiki” on Quora is not connected to any posts
• people don't want to edit each other's writing (they append in Google Docs)
• lot of discussion in Jane Austen “talk” page on Wikipedia
• summarization as listening
• Wikum+ for living documents
• when returning from vacation to Slack, people scroll up until they become tired
• people want two things from summaries:
  • structure
  • context
• people are harrassed in different ways
• between user moderation and platform moderation could be networked moderation
• Block Party