Re: Hello and Welcome to the Civic Technology Community Group

Thanks for setting up this community group Adam.

There are a lot of concepts brought up here that really range in scope.

It is important to define early in the life of a new group why it exists,
but also what it is not. I haven't heard of this particular mix of topics
proposed before, but I'm also not sure how they are going to be threaded
together.

On what it is not, there are a bunch of existing community groups:
  https://www.w3.org/community/groups/

How is the CivicTech Community Group different than:
  https://www.w3.org/community/humancentricai/
  https://www.w3.org/community/aikr/
  https://www.w3.org/community/webagents/
  https://www.w3.org/community/cogai/
  https://www.w3.org/community/ml-schema/
  https://www.w3.org/community/webmachinelearning/

This came up as a problem when I joined:
  https://www.w3.org/community/sustyweb/

and then started to realize that there was likely overlap with:
  https://www.w3.org/community/sustainability/

On that note, it is worth remembering the huge environmental footprint that
AI and big data has on the environment. Training new language models
consumes a lot of energy and processing power.

 I didn't see anything on the W3C on Open Government, but did see:
  https://www.w3.org/community/smartcity-nordic/

Although, with open government and AI, it would be important to keep in
mind the work of the OGP:

https://www.opengovpartnership.org/documents/algorithmic-accountability-public-sector/

The W3C is also an interesting organization. I am learning more and more
about how it works. For years I've avoided the sausage factory, but I can't
do it any longer. Anyways, this fits within the limits of the W3C's
Community Group structure:
  https://www.w3.org/groups/

There are some fascinating options that can might result in combining a
tool like https://Pol.is with ML. Although, I don't know where I see it
coming.

Aside from posting links and sharing ideas, what would we like to see
happen?

I think there is a tonne of potential here for both good and bad. I do
think that we have to consider the risks both of the process:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ

But also who these tools are excluding:
  https://wecount.inclusivedesign.ca/

New technology usually benefits those with the greatest ability to exploit
it. What role does government have to ensure that everyone benefits from
this new power? Also the awareness and maturity in the use of AI/ML by
government and society at large is minimal. How do we raise the level of
discourse so that citizens of the world can have an impact to weigh in on
how this new super-power is implemented?

Anyways, looking forward to learning and exchanging from folks here.

Mike

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 6:14 AM Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Civic Technology Community Group,
>
>
>
> Hello. New members, please also see the previous welcome email, below.
>
> I am very excited about artificial intelligence, open government, and
> civic technology and I look forward to our future discussions and
> collaborations on these topics as we contribute to advancing the state of
> the art.
>
> As recent developments in AI may be somewhat novel to some members, e.g.,
> GPT-4 and Bard, we can be as both teachers and students to one another by
> sharing Web resources. Please do feel free to share any relevant Web
> resources – be they introductory, intermediate, or advanced – that you
> might find with the group (public-civics@w3.org).
>
>
>
> Best regards,
>
> Adam Sobieski
>
> P.S.: I found the following Web resource, a one-minute video, to be
> interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-waFp6rLc0 .
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Adam Sobieski
> *Sent:* Sunday, April 16, 2023 12:49 PM
> *To:* public-civics@w3.org <public-civics@w3.org>
> *Subject:* Hello and Welcome to the Civic Technology Community Group
>
>
> Civic Technology Community Group,
>
>
>
> Hello and welcome to the *Civic Technology Community Group*! This new
> group will be a forum for advancing the state of the art and for discussing
> technical topics which include, but are not limited to:
>
>
>
>    1. how existing and new standards can benefit civic technology, open
>    government, and artificial intelligence,
>    2. technical requirements from the domains of civic technology, open
>    government, and artificial intelligence,
>
>    3. advanced software interoperability scenarios involving Web
>    browsers,
>    4. ways that AI systems and chatbots in webpages, in Web browsers
>    (browser sidebar chatbots), in other desktop and Web-based applications,
>    and in operating systems can interoperate with one another,
>
>    5. clipboarding and dragging-and-dropping of chatbot-provided content,
>    6. sharing chatbot-provided content on social media,
>
>    7. ways that artificial intelligence technologies can continue to
>    enhance public-sector websites and services,
>    8. multimodal dialogue systems or chatbots which can answer questions
>    which involve processing data from one or more governments, city, county,
>    state, and federal governments,
>    9. multimodal dialogue systems or chatbots which can create responses
>    comprised of language, mathematics, charts, diagrams, figures, graphs, and
>    infographics,
>
>    10. architectures supporting both static and dynamic backing data and
>    content,
>    11. any other topics relevant to civic technology, open government,
>    and artificial intelligence.
>
>
> Our public mailing list's email address is public-civics@w3.org . Please
> feel free to introduce yourselves in new e-mail threads and/or to draw upon
> any of these topics and open new e-mail threads with your thoughts on the
> topics. Thank you.
>
>
>
> Best regards,
> Adam Sobieski
> http://www.phoster.com
>
> P.S.: I've updated the group's *About* content here:
> https://www.w3.org/community/civics/2023/04/11/about/ . Please feel free
> to share any ideas with which to expand upon or otherwise enhance this
> content.
>
>

-- 

Mike Gifford, Senior Strategist, CivicActions
Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer
https://civicactions.com    |  https://accessibility.civicactions.com
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