Research and Analysis of Standardization Processes (proposed) Research Group agenda Wednesday July 24, 2024 13pm - 13.15pm Chairs, welcome and agenda Diane Liao, One Size Does Not Fit All - Why Gender Matters in Standards Development [on site] Alessandra Allocca, "Networks and Power: The Effects of Random Selection Into NomCom" [remote] Kaliya Young, "ARC Regenerative Communities Protocol" [on site] Robert W. Gehl, ActivityPub: A Non-Standard Standard [on site] --------------------------------------------- Bios and abstracts: - Diane Liao, One Size Does Not Fit All - Why Gender Matters in Standards Development [on site] Diane (Xiaolu) Liao is a Senior Researcher at the Standards Council of Canada. Her work focuses on applying quantitative and qualitative methodologies to demonstrate the social and economic value of standardization, assess program performance and public policies. Diane has published research on the topics of SMEs, gender, and trade. Abstract: This presentation provides an overview on how standards development can be gender biased due to the lack of data and women representation in the development process, including high tech sector such as AI and IoT. Women can be vulnerable if standard is not protecting them as well as men. But we can improve this situation by developing Gender-Responsive Standards (GRS), which acknowledge the distinct needs of different genders and take concerted action to ensure that the impact of the standard is appropriate and provides equal benefit. - Alessandra Allocca, "Networks and Power: The Effects of Random Selection Into NomCom" [remote] Alessandra Allocca is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Mannheim, Germany, in August 2020. Her research interests are in Empirical Industrial Organization, Innovation, and Organizational Economics. Abstract: When someone in a professional network achieves a position of power within the profession, that person gains a bag of knowledge, connections, and informal credits in favor of exchanges that can be used to increase the entire network’s professional success. Does a random assignment of power to an individual increase the likelihood of publishing an Internet standard or having a new patent granted for someone in his/her network? We address this question by exploiting quasi-random variation in the selection of NomCom members. We compare the productivity of co-authors of volunteers randomly selected in NomCom with the productivity of co-authors of volunteers not selected. Preliminary results show that random selection increases the scientific productivity of co-authors, and this effect is stronger for networks of female leaders. - Kaliya Young, "ARC Regenerative Communities Protocol" Abstract: Summer of Protocols is an initiative Etherium Foundation. We are in its 2nd cohort and were awarded a Protocol Orientering Grant (POG) to study an existing regenerative community that specializes in the development of internet protocols – the IETF. The IETF is kept alive by the energy of people and their decision to actively contribute their energy to the creation of the protocols they develop there. They also actively develop and participate in protocols that are generative forming the “community protocols.” It literally is a recursive organization using its protocol processes to develop protocol processes for protocols. We are using the Group Works Deck Pattern Language for bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings and the Wise Democracy Pattern Language as lenses through which to understand the IETF community processes and culture. We are exploring other regenerative frameworks as potential additional lenses. The project end date is August 31, 2024 and you can see progress of our research on the public forum. Kaliya Young, Identity Woman. For the past 20 years, Kaliya has led a global community of developers and business supporters to create and adopt a layer of identity for people based on open standards. She co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) to bring together technologists who want to develop and deploy user-centric identity protocols. In the past 15 years, our community has created widely adopted internet standards, including OpenID Connect, OAuth(IETF), Verifiable Credentials(W3C), Decentralized Identifiers(W3C) amongst others. She is the author of two books: the Domains of Identity (2020) and A Comprehensive Guide to Self Sovereign Identity (2018) and papers on topics related to digital identity. In 2017, she was awarded an M.S. in Identity Management and Security from UT, Austin. In 2019, she traveled to India for two months as a New America India-US Public Interest Technology fellow to study Aadhaar, the national ID system for India. She consults with governments, NGOs, startups, and enterprises on decentralized identity technologies. In addition, she teaches Computer Information Systems at Merritt College in Oakland, California. She helped define the term unconference and pioneered using Open Space Technology to organize collaborative events in which the participants themselves create an agenda and define their goals. Events she founded or co-founded include She’s Geeky, the FediForum UnMoney Convergence, Digital Death Day, Open Government Playbook, and The Thoughtful Biometrics Workshop. Day Waterbury. What gives my life meaning is to serve and protect the living earth and her people. My mission is to equip the regenerative movement at scale at the pace of the polycrisis, connecting place-based systems change initiatives with trust-based funding, and empowering a global network of networks with tools for coordination. I truly believe that for our species to thrive we need to maximize the number of us who are fully prepared and resourced to contribute collaboratively to co-create a regenerative unfolding. I don’t think of this as political, but rather the rational pursuit of my aspirations on behalf of humanity and the greater blossoming of consciousness in the cosmos. - Robert W. Gehl, ActivityPub: A Non-Standard Standard [on site] Robert W. Gehl is the Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance for Social Justice at York University in Toronto. His current book, Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Ethical Social Media, is under contract with Oxford University Press. His other books include Social Engineering (MIT Press 2022), Weaving the Dark Web (MIT Press 2018), and Reverse Engineering Social Media (Temple University Press 2014). Abstract: Published by members of the W3C’s Social Web Working Group (SocialWG) in 2018, ActivityPub is the protocol that enables the fediverse, a collection of social media sites that can communicate with one another. The ActivityPub-driven fediverse is now one of the most viable social media alternatives to come along in the past decade. It includes the microblogs Mastodon, Misskey, and Meta’s Threads, as well as image-sharing systems, blogging platforms, meeting planners, and dating apps. While ActivityPub has seen massive uptake, the development of ActivityPub has largely remained unexamined from a sociological perspective. As I argue in a forthcoming book about the fediverse, ActivityPub is a non-standard standard. Specifically, there are four aspects of ActivityPub that make it quite unique among W3C standards. First, corporate social media companies were not involved. Second, rather than focus on one or two standards, the SocialWG produced six other standards alongside ActivityPub. Third, ActivityPub – by far, the most popular SocialWG standard – almost did not happen due to internal conflicts in the SocialWG. Finally, a major portion of the ActivityPub standard is actually ignored by implementers in favor of bespoke APIs. The presentation draws on interviews with the developers of ActivityPub and Mastodon, close reading of archival materials (such as the meeting minutes of the SocialWG), as well as critical code analysis of the ActivityPub protocol.