Re: Updates for the Grop [via Credibility Community Group]

I concur with your basic point, Bob, and to my eye it lines up with our 
mission statement well enough that I'd venture we all agree. The tech 
industry should do something about this problem, and do it in a way that 
wont make things even worse.

The question is how.  You say, let's get together and talk about it, at 
least.  Well, we did.  Have you read carefully through the Credibility 
Tech <https://www.w3.org/2018/10/credibility-tech/>and Reviewed 
Credibility Signals <https://credweb.org/reviewed-signals/>?  And there 
are lots of meeting notes and presentations at meetings, at all 
credweb.org.  We made some progress, but not even enough to catch up 
with the rate the problem is getting worse in the world at large, I fear.

In my judgement, the most promising solutions are in credibility 
networks, or reputation networks focused on credibility. That lets 
everyone say everything, at the same time as each of us mostly only sees 
the good stuff. But that work isn't nearly ready for standardization -- 
there isn't even a single product that's proven it works let alone an 
industry that needs to work together. I've spent most of the last year 
experimenting with prototypes and I had encouraging results but nothing 
like a proven solution. There are some companies out there (and in this 
group) like repustar and creopoint which take their own promising but 
unproven approaches to the problem. But, again, they're nowhere near 
ready for interoperation or standardization.

Like, *how* can the industry or this group work together to solve the 
problem?  There are various places to meet and chat and collaborate -- 
technical and academic conferences, where some of those can happen. W3C 
is useful when companies with viable products want to make them work 
together. I don't see that here.  Sometimes it can go farther afield, 
but if there's no clear plan, people are not likely to come along.

On Leonard's point -- C2PA is an example of the kind of thing W3C could 
help with, but Leonard has plenty of his own experience with standards 
and they chose a somewhat different path. I expect it made more sense 
given the exact details of their slice of the industry. I think it's 
great work, but only a tiny piece of the puzzle. I'm most interested in 
how they identify people and organizations; my advice has been to stay 
far from blockchains on this and just use web pages (eg social media 
profile URLs).

       -- Sandro




On 7/18/21 9:49 PM, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
>
> Bob -  well said…
>
> There are, however, a variety of efforts that are ongoing in other 
> places/forums about attempting to provide technology to address 
> various aspects of the larger issue(s) raised here.
>
> For example, I chair the Technical Working Group of the Coalition for 
> Content Provenance and Authenticity (http://c2pa.org) which is working 
> to deliver standards in the area of asset provenance.  The C2PA is 
> doing its work in conjunction with W3C’s Media and Entertainment WG 
> and a proposed PNG update 
> (https://w3c.github.io/charter-drafts/png-2021.html 
> <https://w3c.github.io/charter-drafts/png-2021.html>), the ISO’s JPEG 
> Fake Media WG (https://jpeg.org/jpegfakemedia/ 
> <https://jpeg.org/jpegfakemedia/>), ETSI’s ESI TC 
> (https://www.etsi.org/committee/esi 
> <https://www.etsi.org/committee/esi>) and others.
>
> There is also work going on from Google and Chromium to bring 
> WebAnnots more natively in the browser that seem to align with some of 
> your thoughts - https://github.com/bokand/web-annotations 
> <https://github.com/bokand/web-annotations>. I suspect that if that 
> work were to gain momentum, it could serve as part of the solution you 
> envision.
>
> And of course you have Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized ID 
> work here at W3C and elsewhere to address identity requirements that 
> are necessary to establish any form of trust.
>
> Leonard
>
> *From: *Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us>
> *Date: *Sunday, July 18, 2021 at 9:27 PM
> *To: *Sandro Hawke <sandro@hawke.org>
> *Cc: *Credible Web CG <public-credibility@w3.org>
> *Subject: *Re: Updates for the Grop [via Credibility Community Group]
>
> Sandro,
>
> Thank you for the clarification. I found it somewhat ironic that an 
> announcement concerning leadership of the public-credibility group did 
> not appear to be credible...
>
> I also find it rather bizarre that there appears to be no focal point 
> for discussion within the technical community of problems rooted in 
> technology even though those issues inspire raging, and often 
> ill-informed, discussions outside the community. At this time, it 
> appears that the most commonly proposed "solutions" to the problem of 
> credible online speech focus on various ways to restrict either our 
> right or our ability to speak. It would be unfortunate if such 
> solutions were to be imposed if there exist reasonable, but 
> unexplored, technical alternatives that could address the problem. I 
> suggest that our responsibility as a community extends beyond not only 
> creating and deploying technology but also to doing what we can to 
> ensure that others understand it and that technical solutions are 
> developed to mitigate or eliminate problems caused by what we have 
> done. Just as an engineer would feel responsible to address an 
> unintended bug in some software, I believe the technical community 
> should feel responsible to address, or at least understand, the 
> unintended consequences of its work. If the W3C is not the proper 
> forum for such discussions, what is?
>
> Given an apparent absence of proposals for technical solutions to the 
> problem, I suggest that this group should initially focus on trying to 
> generate discussion of the problems, and the inadequacies of existing 
> proposals, in the hope that a deeper and more broadly shared 
> understanding might generate some useful ideas that could be explored 
> in depth. Thus, I would suggest that an attempt be made to 
> reinvigorate the W3C Credible Web Community Group Zoom meetings after 
> over a year of inactivity. An hour or two of Zoom meetings every month 
> seems like a small investment that might have significant impact. 
> Along similar lines, I suggest that the Chair of this group should put 
> out a call for fresh proposals in an attempt to flush out ideas that 
> have not yet been fully explored or developed. Ideally, that call 
> would be made as broadly as possible. I would like to see a news story 
> entitled "Web Community seeks solutions to problems" rather than yet 
> another story detailing a proposal for how Facebook, Google, or 
> whomever, should improve their ability to decide what can and cannot 
> be said in public forums.
>
> My personal belief is that while Web Annotation has been discussed, 
> it's potential, when combined with Credibility Signals, has not been 
> fully recognized -- either as a means to address credibility or as a 
> potential source of entrepreneurial opportunity. As an individual user 
> of the web, I believe it should be a simple matter for me to publicly 
> tag or annotate any visible resource or fragment as either credible or 
> not, as true or false, etc. In essence, I suggest that *the solution 
> to bad speech is more speech*. Others may observe that such an ability 
> would simply create a cacophony of conflicting statements or claims. 
> But, I am confident that we'll be able to develop tools to extract 
> signals from the noise. If nothing else, such annotations might help 
> those who operate formal fact checking systems by identifying which 
> resources are controversial at any particular moment. Also, it should 
> be recognized that when such statements are made about me, or subjects 
> close to me, Web Annotations facilitate my exercising a "Right to 
> Respond." Today, too much of what is said is protected from response 
> by being on sites or in formats that don't permit comments or 
> responses from those who have an interest in the truth or credibility 
> of statements that are made.
>
> It is my hope that either this group, or some other group more 
> appropriate, will reinvigorate a technical discussion of these issues. 
> What is going on in the world of politics and in the press does not 
> appear to me to be leading us in a good direction.
>
> bob wyman
>