Dr Laura James's writings

OPEN 2018  last week was an exciting event, not only because of the incredible people the organisers brought together, but because it felt like something new was starting to take off. There were people from many different organisations, sectors, and backgrounds, and they found sometimes unexpected things in common with each other. Although we heard some big ideas from the stage, it felt like most attendees were actually working on things, and had practical questions and collaborative opportunities they wanted to discuss. To me, the diversity and the blend of pragmatic action and shared big vision feels like a new movement getting off the starting line. But what  is  the movement?  OPEN 2018  has “platform cooperatives” next to the logo and yet a lot of the most interesting conversations weren’t actually about platform co-ops. It felt like a melange of several things: internet technologies open source open standards and protocols (as distinct from open...

The  Trust & Technology Initiative  has been awarded a  Mozilla Research grant for a new project to help bridge between sectors and disciplines when exploring issues of trust around internet technologies. The support from  Mozilla  will be really helpful in enabling us to create lively and accessible materials which describe different facets of trust, distrust, mistrust and trustworthiness, and we’ll be sharing all we create under an  open licence . Why does this matter? To build internet technologies which work well for society, we need to have more effective collaboration across different disciplines and sectors, connecting technology development, social science and humanities, policy-makers and more. Today, we lack the shared understanding and terminology to make this work around one of the most critical concepts: trust. Trust in technology and the organisations which make it is essential for a future in which the internet is inclusiv...

Concerns about the internet have hit the mainstream. People are talking about the downsides of social media, election manipulation, algorithmic bias, privacy, the power of dominant platforms like Google and Facebook, cybersecurity, and what AI is going to do to the world. Most of these  issues  are not new; folks have been working on them for many years. There’s a lot of different, intersecting questions here. It’s frustrating for me as an engineer with a background in emerging internet technologies that it’s hard to find good projects to work on, which are useful, stand a chance of scaling, and avoid harm as far as possible. As I’m something of a generalist, who likes to be building things and tackling problems, I’m working on a few of what seem to be the underlying issues, to see if we can find better ways to build things in the future. This is why I have a somewhat diverse portfolio at present. This post is a rough attempt to draw all the threads together, and explain wh...