"A Suggestion for Bob" (Moved to public list)

The message exchange reconstructed below occurred on the internal list, but
it has been observed that it belonged on the public list instead. I hope
the other contributors to this thread do not object to my repackaging and
reposting it on the public list.

----- Forwarded Messages follow -----

From: Owen Ambur <Owen.Ambur@verizon.net>
Date: Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 12:14 AM
Subject: A Suggestion for Bob
To: <internal-credibility@w3.org>

Sandro, thank for sharing these audio/video recordings.

Since Bob Wyman is troubled by the lack of capability to express to the
world that he is not a communist, the purpose of this message is to offer
him a potential means of relief:

Publish his plan(s) on the Web in StratML Part 1, Strategic Plan (ISO
17469-1) format.

If he were to do so, it would be fairly easy for myriad AI-enabled
intermediary services to pretty well establish whether he is a communist or
not, assuming of course that he honestly documents his vision, mission,
values, goals, objectives, and stakeholders -- as best he understands them.

With reference to Leonard Rosenthol's comment about verification, that
depends upon whether performance indicators of actual results are reliably
documented and shared -- preferably in records published in an open,
standard, machine-readable format like StratML Part 2, Performance Plans &
Reports (formerly ANSI/AIIM 22:2017).

Lacking such indicators anyone's guesses and "assertions" are as good as
anyone else's.  Even if Bob does openly represent himself as a
card-carrying communist, that alone doesn't truly make him one  For
example, he could be working as an undercover agent for the FBI ... or a
spy for fascists ... or a college professor with tenure in an ivory tower
insulated from reality.  Or perhaps he may *mistakenly* believe that he is
a communist.

What matters is the degree to which he actually participates in
commandeering other people's property, discouraging personal initiative,
denying personal responsibility, destroying economic incentives, and making
everyone poorer, i.e., what real communists do.

With respect to your concluding comment, I look forward to learning whether
we can do more together than merely "attend a few meetings and exchange
E-mail messages".  Perhaps I'll have a better sense of that when I've had a
chance to listen to recording of the meet-the-candidates meeting.  If so,
I'll "scribe" my understanding the the group's plan in StratML format.

Owen
---------------------------------
From: Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us>
Date: Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 1:33 AM
Subject: Re: A Suggestion for Bob
To: Owen Ambur <Owen.Ambur@verizon.net>
Cc: <internal-credibility@w3.org>


Owen,
It would be nice if your "myriad AI-enabled intermediaries" could support
Bob's denial of Alice's claim. However, one must wonder if the output of
those intermediaries would actually be useful. The problem is that unless
Alice is willing to allow claims of the intermediaries to be posted
alongside her own claim, very few, if any, of the people who read Alice's
claim will see any claims, rebuttals, or proofs that challenge Alice's
credibility. I think this is a major problem with what appears to be the
current thinking about these credibility signals. For credibility signals
to be more than just a means for authors and their hosts to publish
self-serving claims that support, but do not challenge, their own
credibility, we need to describe how credibility signals, both positive and
negative, can be associated with authors, statements, etc. without the
consent of their subjects and potentially even without their knowledge
(although such signals need not be hidden). This is why I've pointed to
annotation protocols on several occasions. Credibility signals, published
as Web Annotations, would have the needed characteristics.

Of course, the existing W3C Web Annotation protocol is incomplete, for the
desired purpose, since it doesn't define the "search" function needed to
discover annotations that are related to a specific URL. Personally, I
think it would make sense for this group to define Credibility Signals as
annotations and to define the additional protocol needed to allow discovery
of such annotations. If we were to do this, then your "myriad AI-enabled
intermediaries" would be able to publish their assessment of Alice's claim
in a manner that is more likely to be discovered by readers of Alice's
claim -- if only people were to use annotation clients... Your AI-bots
might even be enhanced to search out other posts with similar claims and
annotate them as well.

bob wyman

---------------------------------
From: Georg Rehm <georg.rehm@dfki.de>
Date: Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 2:07 AM
Subject: Re: A Suggestion for Bob
To: Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us>
Cc: Owen Ambur <Owen.Ambur@verizon.net>, <internal-credibility@w3.org>

Dear Bob,

On 5. Sep 2021, at 07:33, Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> wrote:

Owen,
[…]

Of course, the existing W3C Web Annotation protocol is incomplete, for the
desired purpose, since it doesn't define the "search" function needed to
discover annotations that are related to a specific URL. Personally, I
think it would make sense for this group to define Credibility Signals as
annotations and to define the additional protocol needed to allow discovery
of such annotations. If we were to do this, then your "myriad AI-enabled
intermediaries" would be able to publish their assessment of Alice's claim
in a manner that is more likely to be discovered by readers of Alice's
claim -- if only people were to use annotation clients... Your AI-bots
might even be enhanced to search out other posts with similar claims and
annotate them as well.


just as a follow-up to what you sketched in your email, this is an idea
that I described in the following paper a number of years ago:

Georg Rehm. “An Infrastructure for Empowering Internet Users to handle Fake
News and other Online Media Phenomena”. In Georg Rehm and Thierry Declerck,
editors, *Language Technologies for the Challenges of the Digital Age: 27th
International Conference, GSCL 2017, Berlin, Germany, September 13-14, 2017*,
Proceedings, number 10713 in Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
(LNAI), pages 216-231, Cham, Switzerland, 2018. Gesellschaft für
Sprachtechnologie und Computerlinguistik e.V., Springer. 13/14 September
2017.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-319-73706-5_19.pdf
<https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-319-73706-5_19.pdf>

The article proposes an infrastructure to address phenomena of modern
online media production, circulation and manipula- tion by establishing a
distributed architecture for automatic processing and human feedback. The
main building blocks of the proposed infrastructure are: natively embedded
into the World Wide Web, Web Annotations, Metadata Standards, Tools and
Services, Decentralised Repositories and Tools, Aggregation of Annotations.

Best regards,
Georg

---------------------------------
From: Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us>
Date: Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 2:55 AM
Subject: Re: A Suggestion for Bob
To: Georg Rehm <georg.rehm@dfki.de>
Cc: Owen Ambur <Owen.Ambur@verizon.net>, <internal-credibility@w3.org>

Georg,
Nice paper. I think you and I have a common vision of the solution space
that needs to be explored. The question, of course, is whether or not the
Credibility group is the correct context for these discussions. I am hoping
that it is as I am unaware of other good candidates.

Given the importance of having annotations supported in the browser, we
might be encouraged by the fact that there is an existing effort to get
Chrome and Chromium to provide support for annotations. (See:
https://github.com/bokand/web-annotations ) However, I am concerned that if
that effort moves ahead without substantive input on what must be done to
ensure that annotations are useful for credibility signalling, it is
entirely possible that we may find broad deployment of an annotation
interface that makes it difficult to add in the later support at a later
time. Also, there is some risk that a browser built-in annotation system
might make assumptions about the storage of annotations that make it
difficult to provide them via a federated system. We may get locked into
monolithic annotation systems which would not address the needs we both
appear to recognize.

bob wyman
(Resident of Zehlendorf and Dahlem during the 1960's... Berlin bleibt doch
frei!)

---------------------------------
From: Georg Rehm <georg.rehm@dfki.de>
Date: Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 4:36 AM
Subject: Re: A Suggestion for Bob
To: Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us>
Cc: Owen Ambur <Owen.Ambur@verizon.net>, <internal-credibility@w3.org>

Bob,

yes, the idea and vision I described in the paper relies on the massive
adoption of web annotations (and their full implementation and availability
in all browsers), on decentralised annotation repositories, on a
decentralised set and toolbox of text mining and natural language
processing tools that operate on the decentralised annotations and on
shared vocabularies, i.e., annotation formats.

Georg

P.S. I live in Prenzlauer Berg, close to Mitte. Not immediately accessible
to residents of Zehlendorf or Dahlem in the 1960s.