[MINUTES] CCG Atlantic Weekly 2025-12-02

Okay, here's a summary of the W3CCG Atlantic Weekly meeting held on
2025/12/02, focusing on the discussion about transforming social networks
into sensemaking networks:
Meeting Summary: W3CCG Atlantic Weekly - 2025/12/02

*Attendees:* Alex Higuera, Benjamin Young, Dmitri Zagidulin, Erica Connell,
Greg Bernstein, Harrison Tang, Kaliya Identity Woman, Karen Passmore,
Mahmoud Alkhraishi, Phillip Long, Rob Padula, Ronen Tamari, Ted Thibodeau
Jr, Vanessa Xu

*Meeting Summary:*

The meeting featured a presentation by Ronen Tamari from Cosmic Network on
transforming social networks into sensemaking networks. The discussion
revolved around the challenges of information overload, the limitations of
current social networks, and potential solutions leveraging collective
intelligence and decentralized technologies. There was also discussion on
the relationship with W3C and different standards organizations.

*Topics Covered:*

   - *Introduction to Cosmic Network:* Ronen Tamari introduced Cosmic
   Network and its mission to build tools for sense-making in a world of
   information overload.
   - *The Problem with Social Networks:* Social networks are not designed
   for conveying reliable information, but for profit and engagement.
   - *Collective Intelligence Theory:* Key features include diverse
   participation, rapid feedback, rewarding knowledge, structured discourse,
   and community-governed infrastructure.
   - *Symbol - A Social Knowledge Network:* Ronen showcased Symbol, a
   social knowledge network for researchers built on decentralized social
   protocols (App Proto).
   - *Decentralized Social Protocols (App Proto):* The benefits of data
   ownership and interoperability in the context of research and knowledge
   sharing.
   - *The need for a Science Goodreads:* The history of why a science
   goodreads does not exist and how decentralized IDs and social networks
   provide a good environment for it.
   - *Verifiable Credentials and Reputation:* Greg Bernstein highlighted
   potential uses for verifiable credentials in researcher identity and
   reputation.
   - *Interoperability Challenges:* Dmitri Zagidulin discussed the
   interoperability between App Proto and Activity Pub, and the importance of
   addressing the question of who runs the servers.
   - *Credible Web:* Ted Thibodeau Jr. discussed the challenges of creating
   a credible web.

*Key Points:*

   - *Cosmic Network's Goal:* To transform social networks into sensemaking
   networks by applying collective intelligence principles.
   - *Symbol's Architecture:* A social knowledge network built on App
   Proto, enabling data ownership and interoperability.
   - *The Significance of Decentralization:* Decentralization provides
   resilience against platform capture and enables new forms of value
   distribution.
   - *Interoperability:* The need for bridges between the different social
   web protocols and solutions.
   - *Verifiable Credentials:* Verifiable credentials can play a key role
   in researcher identity and reputation.
   - *Credible Web:* The need for an ecosystem in which the content
   creators have full control of their work.

Text:
https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-ccg-atlantic-weekly-2025-12-02.md

Video:
https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-ccg-atlantic-weekly-2025-12-02.mp4
*CCG Atlantic Weekly - 2025/12/02 11:56 EST - Transcript* *Attendees*

Alex Higuera, Benjamin Young, Dmitri Zagidulin, Erica Connell, Greg
Bernstein, Harrison Tang, Kaliya Identity Woman, Karen Passmore, Mahmoud
Alkhraishi, Phillip Long, Rob Padula, Ronen Tamari, Ted Thibodeau Jr,
Vanessa Xu
*Transcript*

Harrison Tang: Hey, hello.

Ronen Tamari: Hi there.

Ronen Tamari: Hey, Harrison.

Harrison Tang: Hello. How's it going?

Ronen Tamari: Hey, Nice to meet you all.

Harrison Tang: Thank you. Thanks for taking the time to join us today.

Ronen Tamari: Yeah, thanks for inviting me.

Ronen Tamari: Yeah, I guess Will isn't going to be around. Okay. Yeah,…

Harrison Tang: Yeah, I think he has some other events that he couldn't
attend today.

Harrison Tang: So, yeah.

Ronen Tamari: he was the link.

Harrison Tang: So, Ronan,…

Ronen Tamari: Sure, no problem.

Harrison Tang: we'll start in about, a minute or two and then I'll do the
administrative announcements and stuff and then, I'll kick off your portion
around 9:08. Great.

Harrison Tang: I think the other people will stroll in the next few
minutes, but we'll start this week's W3CCG meeting. so first of all, very
excited to have Roman here from Cosmic network to actually lead the
discussions on transforming social networks into sense making networks. but
before then, I just want to quickly go over some administrative stuff.
first of all just a quick reminder on the code of ethics and professional
conduct. just want to make sure we hold respectful and constructive
conversations that we always have but I think it's nice to have this
reminder very quickly a quick note about intellectual property. anyone can
participate in these calls.

Harrison Tang: Harbor all substantive contributions to any CCG work items
must be member of the CCG with full IPR agreements so if you have any
questions in regards to getting a W3C account or a community contributor
license agreement feel free to reach out to myself or any of the chairs. So
these meetings are automatically recorded and transcribed and the system
will actually share the transcriptions the audio recording and video
recording in the next few hours. All right, just want to take a quick
moment for the introductions and reintroduction.

Harrison Tang: So, if you're new to the community or you haven't been
active and want to engage, please feel free to just unmute then actually
introduce yourself a little bit. I see mostly familiar faces. So, any news
announcements reminders? A quick note. So next week we will have the
quarter 4 2025 work item reviews and updates. I'll send an email to remind
all the stakeholders to basically give a quick updates on the existing work
items.

Harrison Tang: And then the week after on December 16th we'll have their
fiber credentials implementations in the community resil resiliency
project. so Frank Sambborn will lead that discussion and we will not have
W3CCG meetings on December 30th or January 6th because of the holidays and
we will pick right back up on January 13th. Any other announcements?
00:05:00

Harrison Tang: So one more thing so my three-year term as a CCG culture is
up right so the end of this year so that if you're interested to kind of
lead the CCG community and carry the torch forward I mean this is the
biggest self-s decentralized identity communities out there right so it's a
privilege I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to actually help serve
the community in the last three years.

Harrison Tang: So I think if any of you will be interested feel free to
selfnominate to the public email list right or reach out to any of the
coaches and then we'll let you know what you are expected to do to carry
the pool. All right.

Harrison Tang: Any other announcements Any updates on the work items? I
know we're going to talk about it next week. but just want to see if
there's any work item updates. All right. last calls for introductions,
announcements, reminders, or work stuff. yeah, please.

Kaliya Identity Woman: Hi there. I just wanted to share that unconference
Africa is coming up in Cape Town. I think it's February 22nd to 24th. So
that's like the Africa regional version satellite of IIW. and IW42 is April
28th to 30th and we will be hosting me being myself and andor also under
the IW foundation the Aentic internet workshop again on the Friday May 1st.

Kaliya Identity Woman: So if you were unable to come and you wanted to come
now you have warning it's happening and we're looking at putting the
digital identity unconference Europe in June and I will know more soon
about what we are organizing with a partner there. So that's just a early
heads up that that's going to happen again. Thanks,

Harrison Tang: Thanks, A lot of things happening as always. Any last
announcements reminders? All right, let's get to the main agenda. So again
very excited to have Roland from Cosmic Network here today to actually talk
about transforming social networks into sensemaking networks. So I think
Will Ron and Will some conference and then Will said you have great
presentations so we're very excited to have you here and thank you for
taking the time to present it here.

Ronen Tamari: Thank Yeah, thanks Harrison. U nice to meet you all and thank
you Will if you watch this recording. sorry you couldn't be here too, but
yeah, I had a great discussion with Will and it seemed like we had a lot of
kind of shared a lot of resonance around some of these topics, social media
and how we make sense of all this complex new reality. and yeah, he invited
me to come and talk with you all and I'm excited to learn more about what
you're interested in too. So I hope we have some time to get to that in the
discussion. So yeah, just a little about myself and Cosmic because maybe
you probably haven't come across us yet. so we're a R\&D lab.

Ronen Tamari: We call ourselves mission and product driven R\&D lab and
we're working at the intersection of social networking protocols AI and
next generation collaborative research tools and tools for thought. this is
the team and we're also supported by some open science foundations
coefficient giving and the Astera Institute. So it's a philanthropy funded
project currently. And so where we start all of this is this kind of
insight that access to information does not translate into the capacity to
make sense of information. And it maybe feels kind of trivial but there's a
lot of profound implications for the feeling of feeling this viscerally if
you know the meme about it's a PhD it's popular with PhDs but you have all
the papers and you never have a chance to read them.
00:10:00

Ronen Tamari: So you have access to all the papers, you can download
everything online, but how do you actually make sense of it all? And
there's a really ever widening gap as the kind of information overload
increases by day with so much access to digital content. And it's not just
a problem for PhD students with too much research. It's also a problem for
kind of societies in general. And people are talking about this all the
time and trying to make sense of this fact that we have so much more access
to information and yet it just feels in a lot of ways like we're actually
all getting dumber in some ways. and we were warned, this is going back
maybe 20 years, great book about journalism, that the quality of our
democratic life depends on the public having the facts and being able to
make sense of them.

Ronen Tamari: So what ended up happening, it seemed like we started out
thinking that in access to information, having the facts that was what we
were focused on and we lost sight of the fact that being able to make sense
of them is actually no less important and maybe even more so, the
traditional paradigm that we've been operating under this is kind of a
gross simplification, but it does capture the kind of basic distinction. we
have, media and science and they're kind of the experts and if we listen to
them, we'll be informed societies. If we listen to scientists, if we listen
to journalists, we'll have the right facts and we'll be an informed
society. the solution here is kind of the experts and the problem is the
public that doesn't have the right information. and that was the
traditional paradigm.

Ronen Tamari: So improving access to information for societies that didn't
work out right because the problem was that people were overloaded with dr
information was drowned with other irrelevant misinformation and what we're
proposing is a kind of different paradigm where instead of making people
part of the problem that you need to kind of educate them and inform them
try to make the public part of the solution and empower individual and
collective capacities. So focus more on the sense making side and less on
just access to information. So here everyone is part of the solution the
public as well as the experts and the problem is making sense of reality
and kind of getting this comprehensive understanding of what's happening.

Ronen Tamari: So science communication becomes science participation and
informed societies become sensemaking societies in this new paradigm and
where a lot of the sort of the ground zero for this is social networks
because that's kind of the cutting edge of where information is being
shared today. most people get most of their information on social networks
and the problem is currently they're not really designed for any of this
sense making aspect. they're not designed for that task of actually
conveying reliable accurate truthful information. They're designed for
profit and engagement. And there's a lot of talks. This is an especially
interesting one by the Bellingat CEO. How disordered di discourse on social
media is destroying democracy.

Ronen Tamari: So it becomes very easy to weaponize social media especially
if you own the platform and that is a huge challenge to be overcome. So
again shifting the paradigms we're trying to promote this idea of these
aren't just social networks they can be sensemaking networks and they can
be designed for agency and collective intelligence beyond just kind of
sharing information or funny videos. So that's kind of what we're doing at
Cosmic. the idea is combining the best of social network design and
engineering with a collective intelligence theory. maybe I should have said
a little about my background. I did a CS PhD in AI.

Ronen Tamari: but kind of midway during my PhD, it was COVID and I ended up
spending way too much time online on Twitter and kind of became really
interested in the intersection of AI and social media and epistemology like
how we form beliefs and gather knowledge. So really been digging a lot into
collective intelligence theory towards the end of my PhD and now really
trying to apply it and drive real world impact with that. So collective
intelligence theory has a number of when you look at the literature and try
to distill some of the key features or dimensions of collective
intelligence what does it involve? some of these things are actually
recognizable from social networks. So collective intelligence it requires a
lot of diverse andre increased participation by the public. So not just
experts that's a good way to have failure modes and group think.
00:15:00

Ronen Tamari: rapid feedback is another one. And this is also something
that social networks are really good at. But then during some of these,
when you go kind of deeper into theory, you start getting further and
further away from things we see on social media networks. so being able to
kind of reward and recognize knowledge, support constructive dialogue and
learning, structured and scalable aggregation of discourse, community
governed infrastructure and data. All these things are things that are kind
of hit and miss. Some social networks better are better maybe in terms of
data ownership and we'll talk about that in a minute. but it's kind of
lacking across the board in a lot of these social networks. They're not
really informed by collective intelligence theory. So this is what we're
trying to do with our projects. And to kind of ground that a little more in
practice what would that look like?

Ronen Tamari: So if we go back to the meme of the PhD student with too many
research papers on their desk in a world with really great collective
intelligence we would have these kind of augmented reality glasses like we
call them and you would be able to see the sort of trails that your peers
are leaving and you're not going to read through all the papers yourself
but you have access to other people's insights and a connected web of
knowledge that lets you really effectively navigate that overwhelming sea
of information. And symbol this is our first product. So this is what we're
currently working on and it's a social knowledge network for researchers
and I'll show a demo of it here. so it feels like Arena if people are
familiar with that which maybe I can't see people's faces so I don't know
if you guys are familiar with any of this stuff but maybe in the chat if
people know knowledge tools like Sublime or Arena.

Ronen Tamari: So this is a lot of the inspiration we're taking for
basically it is here we're looking just at an explore feed of the activity
on the network. But the basic units are cards which are bookmarks basically
that right now they're links that you collect online and you organize them
into collections. So I have my cards. I add them to collections. I can see
other people that have added cards. So, for example, if I see here after
looking on the browsing the feed, I see this has been added by six other
people and I can see what collections they added it to. it's very simple
conceptually. There's actually no AI at all in this right now. and it's
basically just a place for people to share what they're attending to and
what they think about it.

Ronen Tamari: We're gonna add more features here that review and kind of
more knowledgey features for researchers. yeah, definitely group brain is
relevant. So yeah, happy to talk about that more in the discussion. but
yeah, basically right now it's just a place to see it's kind of an overlay
layer for any URL. So you can see here the structure we chose is and then
any URL online is we can access the assemble page. So if I go to this URL
you can see it's on blog post and if I click open insemble I can see the
assemble page for this and then I can add it to my library if it's not in
it already and I can add it to my collections. yeah so that's basically it
for symbol right now. We have a lot of ideas for where to take this.

Ronen Tamari: and one of the key features though about symbol it's not full
screen anymore. Let's see how we do that. 11. There we go. So, one of the
key features about is that it's built on decentralized social protocols. so
it's built on app proto. people here, I'm assuming you're familiar with
Blue Sky, the social network. feels like it'd be that kind of space. Yeah.
So yeah, Blue Skies is, about 40 million users. And the, really cool thing
about the project is that it's the world's largest implementation of DIDs.
Literally. Yes. Thank you, Kalia.

Ronen Tamari: this is the largest implementation of the ids people really
do have data ownership in a more meaningful way. it's similar to the
fediverse massedon. there's a whole discussion about fediverse versus app
proto which maybe we can go into but for our purposes it's not super the
more important part is that users have a personal data store that pds and
blue sky hosts some of these but you can also host completely separate
infrastructure. There's a relay which is basically the piece that
aggregates all the events from all the PDS's these streams of records here
and then blue sky provides different feed generators and labelers and a
blue sky application that you can use to browse that data on these custom
feeds. and then where we come in is the kind of custom app.
00:20:00

Ronen Tamari: So alternative apps. So you can build different applications
on the same personal data store using different kinds of data records. So
new they call it lexicons basically new schemas. so you can build events
dating photo movie apps whatever. and we're building a bookmarking tool
like I showed you. and it's all hosted on the same PDS and with the same
decentralized identifier that gives you the access to it. And I can
actually show it to you here. yeah, this is just a different application on
the approto ecosystem that shows me my PDF. So I can browse my own ID and
then I can look at the different applications that I'm currently storing
data for. So there's blue sky up here. That's going to be a lot of the data
on my PDS, but also cosmic network which is got our assemble data.

Ronen Tamari: And here you can see I've got dev stuff because we've done
doing development work. And then just the cards, collections, and
collection links. so this is my data and I have access to it and I have
access to it with applications that aren't necessarily symbol. So that's
one of the big things about these decentralized social networks. I can
build new applications that use the same data but don't need to go through
the front end of assemble. And this kind of creates an opportunity for an
interoperable ecosystem. my focus right now is kind of science and
knowledge work research on blue sky at proto. So these are some of the
examples that are kind of closer to our space. we have a science feed
that's on blue sky. You also have a feed on blue sky that filters basically
everything that isn't a paper. So you see all the discussions about papers
which is really useful for researchers. you have starter packs which are
basically like lists you can create of users.

Ronen Tamari: So, I create a list, I can publish it, and people can follow
the people on the list. So, it's a great way to network and find people
interested in, the topics you're interested in. there's a new identity app
coming online for researchers called Lanyards. Maybe is of special interest
to you because you're interested in credentials. So you can link your
Orchid ID here which is like a ID that researchers use and then it can pull
in your publications and give you different kinds of verification. and
finally we have bookmarking assemble and there's more that I don't have
time to go through but you get the idea.

Ronen Tamari: it's an ecosystem that can really be interoperable like we
can use for example the identity layer from lanyards and they can use us to
show let's say if they want to show a website with your researchers reading
list they can use symbol for the reading list part and here's just another
example for kind of some future plans for symbol and how we can bring in
data from other parts of the app proto ecosystem. So for example, if we're
looking at the assembled page for a research paper, we can pull in easily
all the blue sky comments about that paper. We can also pull in, from other
places from Fediverse or Arena or other social open social networks. So
yeah, really this idea is, using protocols.

Ronen Tamari: I guess I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but the
idea is, to be able to out cooperate the competition, we like to call it,
because, if we're individual projects and if we're trying to go up against
the big platforms, there's no chance that any of us will manage to do that.
But if we can do that move of organizing then really things really become
real and we're starting to feel this kind of energy now on approto which is
why I'm very excited to be part of these decentralized social networks and
it's still a huge challenge this coordination piece it's a lot of human
coordination and it's a lot of facilitation so it's not just a technical
interop it's also social and organizational interoperability but we can see
that we can see

Ronen Tamari: a possibility and it's really exciting. and maybe yeah, so
I'll end with this story and then leave some time for discussion. maybe
you're asking why does it matter for researchers that data would be owned
by them? why can't they just use some other platform or commercial platform
that they would buy? and there's a lot of answers, but one kind of
interesting one that I don't often see discussed is this question of even
how is it 2025 and we still don't have science good read yet? Maybe that's
another more blunt way to ask that question. this is just a funny post on
Twitter that I saw a few months ago. basically someone just begging for
science good readads and it kind of had this whole huge discussion.
00:25:00

Ronen Tamari: got millions of views and thousands of retweets, thousands of
likes and a bunch of people were discussing it and it was really
interesting. People were asking why don't we have this already? why is it
so hard technically Goodreads is just a review application? what's so hard
about it? and I have been down that rabbit hole so I can share with you how
it is that we don't have the science good readads and I think it's really
relevant to this idea of decentralized IDs and decentralized social. So in
the early days of kind of web one science like the early 2000s I don't know
how many of you here did use reference managers for their research but
basically it's a very simple kind of software that allows you to organize
your research into folders and share them with other researchers annotate
your PDFs and organize your references and so on.

Ronen Tamari: so yeah, founded in 2007. It was actually named startup of
the year in 2009. it was described as kind of last FM for research. So kind
of like good readads for science. and they help people manage and share
their research paper inventory and at the same time discover other people
and papers thanks to a matching algorithm, recommendation tools. so that's
really cool. So it seems like we already had good readads way back in 2009.
Web two science came in. You're probably not surprised. this kind of
surveillance publishing approach, these big platforms. science I think
right now there's four kind of huge platforms that dominate the industry
and Elsavir is one of them. And they bought Mendlay for $65 million. I
think maybe even more. and the reason they bought it is to possess the
aggregated data that Mendlay's users generate with all of their searching
and sharing.

Ronen Tamari: two 2.3 million users sifting through a 100 million
references. Their use patterns reveal who is reading which papers are
popular, and a lot of other extremely valuable information. So, it's a gold
mine of data for a company like Elsair. And this made a lot of people very
angry. when the Rebel Alliance sells out and it was supposed to be this
open science tool and then got bought by Fast forward to a few years later
and Elsair is rebranding itself as a data analytics company. it's not even
a publisher anymore. It's a data analytics company. academics hate this.
people write as an academic you cannot avoid giving them data that they can
sell. and they have huge profit margins from this. Maybe if any of you are
in science have probably heard this already. they provide tools for
institutions and let them make connections between funding publications
people.

Ronen Tamari: basically helping universities decide who to give tenure to
and what research areas to fund. so it's a huge business but it's 2025 now
and we're academics are tired. we feel like we're content creators at this
point. doing peer review for free working for these big extractive
platforms and we still don't even have the science good readads yet. it got
bought and pretty much mendlay got kind of shelved and it's not maintained
anymore. So we still don't have science good readads either. This is why we
think that we're really at this cosmic moment the stars are aligning.

Ronen Tamari: We like to joke about the timing of this where we have now
the pieces we have Kalia wrote we have the world's largest implementation
of DIDs we have user own data kind of not far away it's really insight and
this really gives a new kind of resilience to platform capture it also
unlocks new kinds of collective bargaining versus these extractive
platforms and now with AI it's getting even more crazy we can talk about
that too. it allows for more fair and equitable value distribution. you can
imagine researcherowned ecosystems that have some kind of sustainability.
they can gain revenue from the data and reinvest that back into the
infrastructure.

Ronen Tamari: and finally, I think we're also seeing, especially in the
United States now with a lot of slashes to science funding from, federal
funding sources, whole databases could go offline. Things that we thought
were sort of, bedrock and solid repositories of research, suddenly we
understand that when the government goes rogue, they can disappear
overnight. we really need to be thinking about ownership as a science
community.

Ronen Tamari: how do we actually really govern our infrastructure in a
meaningful way and again these social protocols have a lot of the answers
so there's a huge moment of opportunity here and we hope we can really
leverage it I just thought of some potential connections with your working
group around researcher identity verification new kinds of credentials for
institutional scholy activity but also nontraditional scholarly
credentials. that's part of the beauty of social networks that anyone can
participate and you don't have to go to a fancy university anymore. You can
do meaningful work from anywhere. and finally knowledge provenence and
traceability. I saw that some of you are interested in those kind of topics
and I'd be keen to hear if you have any insights from those areas. and
yeah, I think that's it.
00:30:00

Ronen Tamari: So yeah, happy to take any questions and…

Ronen Tamari: discuss anything you're interested to talk about.

Harrison Tang: Thanks, Roland.

Harrison Tang: Any questions? Yeah, great presentation. Dad, please.

Ronen Tamari: Thank you.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: Just a couple things.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: If you could share a link to your slide deck andor to the
external references that would be very helpful. also I threw this in the
chat. You might consider a presentation for the VCED task force of CCG.

Ronen Tamari: Very cool.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: It's educationally focused and has been on the bleeding
edge of a lot of this stuff.

Ronen Tamari: Yeah, I wasn't familiar with that. So, yeah, it sounds very
very relevant. Thank you. And I'll share the slides and…

Ronen Tamari: yeah, with the links for sure.

Harrison Tang: And by the way,…

Harrison Tang: do you know about the W3C social web community group like
the Fedverse one? Yeah. Cool.

Ronen Tamari: Yes I've looked at I think some of the discussions there and…

Greg Bernstein: Okay.

Ronen Tamari: I think I met Dimmitri who's on the call here. yeah so I have
a brief kind of knowledge not in-depth knowledge. So is there any
connection with W3C and what is the relation between appro and W3C?

Ronen Tamari: Yes, maybe that's a stupid question, but

Harrison Tang: No, no, no, no. Great question. there's not a bunch of
connections. I think the W3C standard is activity pub. so it' I think a
common question people always ask is why did you pick app proto instead of
activity pub and there's a huge conversation in regards to whether app
proto is truly decentralized. so I would say technically not a direct
connection but that said honestly in my opinion all our goals are basically
the same which is creating a self-s sovereign decentralized social network
so whichever protocol I mean it's already better than…

Harrison Tang: what we got right now right so that's my opinion but direct
connection wise not directly with app proto

Ronen Tamari: Right. Yeah.

Kaliya Identity Woman: I'll add in at proto is explor getting itself
standardized at IETF. significant you can think of the IETF as the OGs they
first started talking and…

Ronen Tamari: Yes. So an ITF is something different than I mean yeah
there's W3C and ITF. what is the difference between them I guess?

Kaliya Identity Woman: building the internet in the late60s and there's a
continuous history since then and it has quite a different organizational
structure and the WC is almost a fork in the sense that Tim Berners Lee
sort of was like I'm going to go do my own thing for the web and was a
benevolent dictator of that organization until quite recently.

Kaliya Identity Woman: And anyways, they're just really different. But
anyways, I feel like just like we teach history in school, we should be
teaching technology history now…

Kaliya Identity Woman: because it's really important to understand that
we're in with tech and how it got to be the way it is not obvious unless
you study that history.

Ronen Tamari: And I see here,…

Ronen Tamari: yeah, the comment by Benjamin. Yeah.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: They're significantly different in the social mores and…

Ted Thibodeau Jr: the functional paths to get things done. IETF likes to
present itself as strictly technologically focused, but there's a lot of
social engineering going on there.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: and if you try and get something that some of the old
guard decided some while ago reconsidered, you have to have a planet-sized
ball of evidence that says that it's better to get it changed. W3C does not
move quickly, as you might notice from working groups having charters of
roughly two years these days. but it moves faster than IETF which generally
takes multiple gorounds on anything. so there a new RFC for instance will
go through five or six drafts at least before it gets published and adopted.
00:35:00

Ted Thibodeau Jr: And each one of those drafts lives for one or two
meetings of the IETF which are about every six months and…

Ted Thibodeau Jr: they're numbered sequentially. You can go look.

Kaliya Identity Woman: They made three times a year.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: Sorry, say it again. that's changed since the last time I
looked. Okay.

Kaliya Identity Woman: They made three times a

Ronen Tamari: It feels like they're things we inherited from way back and
maybe need to be revised given the kind of pace of development.

Ronen Tamari: But yeah, I haven't spent much time around these kind of
standards making bodies.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: This is one of the things that software folks run into
quickly when they start working with W3C or…

Ted Thibodeau Jr: ITF or other standards bodies. it's a very different
world to be building an interoperable global standard that's meant to live
for a long time, if not forever, versus software…

Ted Thibodeau Jr: where the ethos is very often move quickly and break
things and fix them as soon as they come up. You can't do that with a
standard and that changes how you have to approach everything about it.
I'll leave it at that.

Ronen Tamari: Right. Yeah.

Ronen Tamari: No, I appreciate that. For sure. There's the different time
scales than the software development. Sometimes it just feels like there's
a lot of urgency around some of these questions and I wish some of these
things could be accelerated but maybe there's just a natural pace to it.
Greg you had a question.

Greg Bernstein: Yeah, I was if you want more perspective about different
standards organizations, that's a good offline place. I've worked at ITUt,
IETF, and W3C, but most recently I've been concerned with the crypto suites
and I've worked with people that also were involved with some of this
Provenence stuff. What at the high level requirements which you guys seem
to be looking at would you want from the point of view of or what are you
looking at I work on privacy preserving cryptography over at CFRG which is
part of IETF been helping with the crypto suites that we use on the digital
credentials.

Greg Bernstein: Do you have some desires? Can we look to see how verifiable
credentials as they exist might meet your current requirements or what you
might want in addition because with researchers sometimes you don't want
anonymity as much as a good reputation and those kind of things because
we've got a number of tools and we're in the process. I mean, I know they
said there's these different organizations, but a lot of times we do work
together. The W3C is working with the IETF on, for example, some privacy
preserving signatures and such. So, I mean, you guys are looking from the
high level.

Greg Bernstein: We always like to hear those requirements and then, if we
run into issues, we go talk to cryptographers, academic cryptographers.

Ronen Tamari: Yeah. that's a really interesting question.

Ronen Tamari: And there's a whole part that I didn't talk about at all
which relates to private data. And here what I showed you in app proto
currently everything is completely public. there is concept of private
data. That is one of the things they're actually really working on. I know
that it's kind of high priority for the outproto developers.

Ronen Tamari: And specifically for science, there are a lot of really
important use cases that we know are kind of waiting for that. having some
of these private data and I think you're probably referring to things that
are maybe even more advanced these kind of different multi-party
computation or zero knowledge for example doing some kind of double blind
review
00:40:00

Ronen Tamari: but using verifiable credentials. I wonder if that are those
examples of things that maybe could be supported.

Greg Bernstein: I mean,…

Greg Bernstein: we can go from something very complicated, but one of the
big breakthroughs in verifiable credentials is California's driver's
license is using a draft version of verifiable barcodes and they're finally
getting a real cryptographic signature on the back of a driver's license to
give you more assurance that it hasn't been forged.

Ronen Tamari: Mhm.

Greg Bernstein: So, I mean, we have things as simple as that. And then,
there's, full ZKPs, so you can prove things about your data without
disclosing it, blah, blah. But the lowhanging fruit of is this a legitimate
person because what was the recent revelations about a lot of the certain
places that were producing a lot of propaganda per se of a certain point of
view in the US were actually being farmed from overseas because they're
rage bait right overseas because they're rage bait and people make

Greg Bernstein: money producing, getting the eyeballs and such like that,
but they're not who they pretend to be, and if you're somebody's reviewing
a paper, somebody's got reputation as a researcher. It's like, yeah, that
guy, that's a good cryptographer. I'm going to pay attention to what they
say. That person's a crank or who knows who this person is. So there's a
range of different things depending on what but sometimes it's like people
forget about the most basic things that's what the start of with verifiable
credentials is trying to show right it came up I was teaching during corona
virus and it's like the verifiable proof of immunization right and doing
that in a good way.

Greg Bernstein: So yeah.

Ronen Tamari: Yeah, there's a whole range here. it's good to have that
context and definitely happy to be in touch as some of these use cases come
up with the private data and…

Ronen Tamari: those kind of things. So yeah thanks for Thank you.

Greg Bernstein: Yeah, we have a good suite of tools and…

Ted Thibodeau Jr: What's this?

Greg Bernstein: sometimes it can be a little hard to understand how to use
them, but I did a walk through kind of from the security point of view of
coming up with your own credential and stuff like that and there's a
presentation I gave a couple months ago or three months ago about that kind
of as if I was teaching somebody to use verifiable credentials. So,

Ted Thibodeau Jr: This is also a thing which sort of reflects off of and
should reflect back to the credible web.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: I think it's still an interest group because there hasn't
been enough implementable focus to make something bigger. but we talked
about things to move this forward in a coherent fashion and to make it
real. Basically, every content creator has to be signing everything and
every platform that's putting content in front of people has to be signing
everything.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: So there's the author and there's the publisher and
there's the commenter and all of these people and I shouldn't say all of
these entities have to be signing everything that they're putting out such
that it can track it back to origin state and such that if you trust me I
can say these are the 12 entities that I trust to put forth useful
information or these are the 12 that I don't trust at all or I trust them
to put out absolutely unreliable information. and putting that into a
coherent package that people can see, it's not going to show up on
Facebook. They have no interest in that…

Ted Thibodeau Jr: because it takes away from the eyeball Clickbait and hate
bait and all that other stuff. It brings them more money so they've got
incentive to let it happen.

Ronen Tamari: And yeah, I wonder how you see Yeah, we run into this with
our project too because in app proto for example,…

Ronen Tamari: a lot of I think people authorize the applications to sign
their data for them, and then it becomes a question too of what
applications you trust I guess not just the people.
00:45:00

Ted Thibodeau Jr: Yeah. and…

Ted Thibodeau Jr: there's the question of whether people start using things
that have existed for a long time but have not been properly used. there's
an on behalf of header in the SMTP message con 822 construct. and that on
behalf of lets my application do stuff on my behalf. lets my secretary do
stuff on my behalf. It lets my boss do stuff on my behalf. It's not really
from me, but it's sort of through me or through my blessing.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: and that has never been fully utilized or put to a useful
state so that you can actually see the on behalf of strata and what is on
this message that I'm looking at right now what path did it take to get to
me right who did actually originate this content that I'm reading and how
did they publish it under whose name that I said was good and…

Ted Thibodeau Jr: I know that they're not so good because they have granted
permission for this other app to publish on their behalf and the other app
is putting out crap. It's a lot of challenging stuff. Yep.

Ronen Tamari: right? Yeah,…

Ronen Tamari: it sounds Yeah. Yeah, we think about these kind of trust
networks. I guess it's taking the follow relation but maybe expanding it a
little and allowing for maybe more nuance or depth in that relation so
people can indicate sources that they trust or not. Yeah.

Harrison Tang: By the way,…

Ronen Tamari: But thank you.

Harrison Tang: Dimmitri, do you want to ask some callers because I know
you're expert on the social web and then the is Distri still on? Okay.
Sorry to call on you,…

Harrison Tang: but I know you are quite knowledgeable in this topic. So, do
you want to add some comments? Yeah. Spec.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So I mean I think the others covered it nicely the
difference between ITF and…

Dmitri Zagidulin: W3C. so one thing I will mention is that W3C is in the
process of chartering the next iteration of the social web working group.
There is a social web community group right now which we encourage
everybody to join and participate. but specifically we're starting up a
working group as well where we're hoping to update and polish activity pub
and learn from the past 10 years of implementation the lessons from
activity or at proto protocol and highly encourage and…

Ronen Tamari: Amazing. Thank you.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Ronan, we would love to host you at VC Edu. So, please
reach out to me. we'll get you scheduled.

Ronen Tamari: Yeah, I'd love to. and I'm very curious about the app proto
and activity pub that whole connection. yeah. I wonder what your thoughts
are on how big is the rift or how possible is interop what levers need to
be pulled for more deeper interop capabilities to actually be available
because right now it does feel like they're kind of somewhat separate
universes and I know a lot of great projects on the pediverse and great
projects on appro just feels like we're both open social web so can they
both communicate

Ronen Tamari: Okay. Better. Right.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah, Great question. so as always, interoperability is a
spectrum, And so on the basic end, they are interoperable even now through
the bridges, There's a number of bridge software that consume posts in
atproto and then deliver them to activity pub inboxes and vice versa.
Right? So even on that level, I think for your apps, it would be fairly
easy to work with the bridge software or even do the bridge yourselves to
be able to say from the Fediverse, I want to subscribe to this scientist or
I want to subscribe to this collection. Please deliver me, simple basic
notes in activity pub format, whenever that stuff is updated.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So I think on that level the rift is not big. on the
architecture and deployment as you've seen there there's a lot of arguments
there's a lot of sort of contention about which one's more or less
decentralized and so on. Honestly, this whole space and this is true both
for decentralized social media and verifiable credentials and dids all of
these any sort of decentralized adjacent spaces are looking to answer the
question of who's going to run the servers. That's what it all comes down
to. that's all of the way wars and things like that come down to. It's like
so at the moment the answer for Blue Sky is Blue Sky is going to run the
servers.
00:50:00

Dmitri Zagidulin: what's the business model? we don't have one yet. We're
VC funded. Okay, let's see conversation is happening everywhere. that
conversation is constantly happening in the Fedverse. It's like who's going
to run the servers there? we've got this flagship model with Masttodon and
their sort of nonprofit and they're struggling to get funded and then we
have these communityrun services and so on. but the same thing is happening
in verifiable credentials land as well. Who's going to run the issuers?
Who's going to run the verifiers? Who's going to run the most important
thing which is the issuer registries? And this by the way, you're going to
run into this in your world as well.

Dmitri Zagidulin: It's like so you have a scientist, right? who runs the
directories that say these are accredited institutions, these are
accredited scientists, all that stuff is just something that the world
needs to figure out. So, it's a lot of interesting conversations.

Ronen Tamari: Yeah. Yeah.

Ronen Tamari: No, for sure. I like that distillation of who's going to run
the servers. I feel like that really does cut to the core. And one of the
things we're trying to promote is really talking to universities and
research institutions and getting them to recognize that this kind of
self-governing infrastructure and being able to coordinate and fund the
servers to support these new open science tools. so I'm sure it'll be
challenging but there is a lot of pressure building now in that direction.

Ronen Tamari: So hopefully we'll be able to get through.

Dmitri Zagidulin: That's the secret way that's the dream what you're
talking about getting the universities to shoulder some of the
infrastructure because they're certainly funded for it whereas smaller
players like us are not and I hope you do succeed and that's something
we're trying to do in the in VCU trying to get the universities to run some
of the issue registry infrastructure and so on. Excellent.

Ronen Tamari: Interesting. Yeah, that'd be great to connect around that too
then because maybe we could pull efforts there.

Harrison Tang: Any last questions or comments? Wait, Ted, you mentioned
something about credible web. What is it? I'm just curious. Yeah.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: credible web community group or actually no interest
group, sorry. it's looking at how to combat the fake content that's out
there, The satire that's not clearly satire. we made it up because we want
to see you guys fight, right? there's an old practice on the playgrounds at
least in America and I think pretty much anywhere children are where
somebody clever says hey why don't you guys fight and causes a problem to
happen between two people who otherwise would not be in combat. This other
instigator is throwing out falsehoods or just taunting them both and
turning it into a fight.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: You see a lot of this happening in the last decade in the
US. things like some of these protests. Some of them have been created by
bad actors in Russia and other not so friendly countries posting falsehoods
and creating groups that didn't exist before. there was one I don't
remember the city I'm sorry nor the date. this group of malifactors in the
Eastern block created interest groups on Facebook and…

Ronen Tamari: crazy.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: got a bunch of members in those groups and then caused
people in both of those groups to schedule protests on the same day at the
same location with the intent of having them come to blows.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: The idea behind credible web is to give people an easy
way to see that these posts are originating in the Soviet Union. doesn't
exist anymore in Russia. these quote unquote people exist only in the
Russian IP block. that lets the people who are coming to join those
Facebook groups say, " this isn't real. This is just trying to rile me up
and they might wind up creating their own group and…
00:55:00

Ted Thibodeau Jr: being a little bit more friendly about it. it's basically
to stop the reality of fake news if we can do it challenge." …

Harrison Tang: Got it.

Ronen Tamari: Is it the content authenticity.org?

Harrison Tang: Yeah, it's different.

Ronen Tamari: Is that the URL you should related to? Or is there a
different one?

Ted Thibodeau Jr: that's Identity Woman.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: No, give me a second and I'll dig up the credible web.
there's a lot of discussion so far.

Harrison Tang: The content authenticity is something else. Yeah. using a
lot of digital watermarks and…

Ronen Tamari: Okay.

Harrison Tang: basically cryptography. Yeah. Correct. how do they solve it?
Is it basically reputation and providence or are there other new ideas that
Yeah. Thank you.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: there isn't a really actionable solution. and part of it
is because there I pasted the group for the links for one of the groups.
you can sort of follow your nose from there. one of one of the challenges
is that software does not yet really make it easy for content creators, for
authors to sign their work, right? You can sort of make it happen with
email clients these days.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: You can sign your messages, but you have to periodically
renew your crypto. And even the easiest setups that exist for it are not
trivial.

Harrison Tang: got it. Okay.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: There's also the problem if you pay one of these services
that give you the signature creating one of the services that gives you a
private public key pair. You can pay a lot of money to have one that's
valid for 10 years, but if it's valid for 10 years, the software underneath
it and the crypto involved is probably going to be broken. So, for some
period of time, you're going to be vulnerable to various things. the other
issue there is that none of the software really makes it easy to deal with.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: So, you might see an email message that says that it has
an attachment. it sort of does, but it's not meant to be an attachment in
the way of a PDF or a Word file. It's an attachment that is the crypto
signature. It's supposed to be invisible. You're not supposed to see it as
such. You're just supposed to see a check mark, kind of like that key in
your browser or the lock in your browser that says this is a secure
connection. and remembering that what that secure connection is. It's just
your client is talking to a server over a TLS line. So there's crypto over
the line between you and the server making sure that people who are
eavesdropping probably can't decode it. But it does not mean that anything
on either end is encoded or encrypted or protected.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: And it does not mean anything about the reliability and
honesty of the site that you're connected to. So you can have that little
lock and be connected to bad guys central and you'll never know that bad
guy central is behind it. They've got their good guy central URL and the
pretty blue padlock on their site and it's verified by 12 things except
that those 12 things are also bad guys. It's a very complex problem because
none of the internet systems were built for bad guys. They were all built
for the idea of scientists who were working in the public good and being
honest with each other even when they were sometimes combative in their
debates. I'll leave it at that because we're about time.

Harrison Tang: Thanks, All Any last question or comment? thanks thanks
Roman for jumping on and…

Harrison Tang: lead this discussion and thanks everybody like Ted, Phil,
Dimitry, ia, everybody for sharing your insights. This is actually quite
good. I love it. So, big thanks. And Ronan, I'll just connect with you on
the invitations to vary me. Yeah, that would be great.

Ronen Tamari: Thank you very much.

Ronen Tamari: Yeah. Yeah, No problem, Harrison. Yeah, thank you all and…

Harrison Tang: And…

Ronen Tamari: nice to meet you.

Harrison Tang: one more thing, if you don't mind, can you either send to me
or…
01:00:00

Harrison Tang: send to the list a link to your presentation? that would be
amazing. Thanks. All right,…

Ronen Tamari: Yes, no problem.

Ronen Tamari: I will do it. All right. Cheers. Have a good day.

Harrison Tang:

Harrison Tang: have a good one. Bye-bye.
Meeting ended after 01:00:21 👋

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