Exploring
Community-Driven
Data Stewardship

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We examine models for distributed stewardship of data through community-led reading and discussion groups. Our conversations aim to decompose how decentralized and peer-to-peer web infrastructure can enable communities to access, discover, verify, and preserve data they care about.

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Blog

Decentralized Web Principles Launching at GetDWeb.net

Data Together coalesced in 2016 as a place for its members to explore the idea of a “civic layer for the web,” centered around community stewardship of data and decentralization technologies aimed at a better web. Since then, we have become a community space for deep and often technical discussion of values around trust, civic engagement, and other lenses on what a better internet might look like. In that vein, we are excited to support the new DWeb Principles launching today, which set out core values for a decentralized web:

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Discussing values in a year that tests them

2020 was a year far apart from ordinary. We saw fear, courage, trust, the practice of daily sacrifice for the benefit of the greater community. We each made small choices with large impacts. We felt the struggle to feel connected in a world requiring greater isolation. As a global community, we felt from varying distances raging wildfires, melting sea ice, critical elections, necessary rebellions, and people in the streets both fighting and making food to share with strangers.

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Discussion: Trust (June 2020)

Data Together’s conversation on Trust took place in the context of early June 2020: a continuing Trump presidency, COVID quarantine already feeling long, and the George Floyd rebellion of police riots against Black Lives Matter protestors in full force. Our conversations as Data Together intend to be context aware: we draw both from readings and from the varied perspectives and experiences of participants in the conversation. In the Trust conversation, we asked: New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cryptographic trust truly map onto or enable better human-to-human (or human-to-company or human-to-technology) trust?

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Discussion: Data Monopolies (May 2020)

Most of our data and information is controlled by a handful of companies. How did this come to be, what are examples of responsible and irresponsible holding of this power, and how do we imagine we might slip the trap of data monopolies?

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Discussion: Content Moderation and Consent (April 2020)

This topic covers factors that impact the content that we see. How do platforms balance freedom of expression versus consent to avoid offensive content, navigate algorithmic versus human moderation and curation, or incentivize different types of interaction? What are downstream effects of these choices?

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Discussion: Decentralization (November 2019)

Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash BRENDAN: Welcome to the final topic of this semester of Data Together: decentralization. This is a topic that has pulled a number of us together over the years, months, minutes. Tonight we’re going to look at decentralization in three major contexts. I thought it would be nice to bucket these as technology, groups of people, and the state. Sarah Friend’s ten-minute introduction to decentralization was a great framing for a lot of this conversation.

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Presentation: Understanding How the Decentralized Web Works

This presentation explores what happens when files are shared over peer-to-peer networks. Using Dat and IPFS, two of the leading peer-to-peer protocols, the slides give a beginner-friendly overview of how users connect to the network, add data, and access data—as well as what’s happening behind the scenes.

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