[Bigbang-dev] Clarifying theoretical commitments going into IETF 116

[Sebastian Benthall]

Hello,

I'm very pleased to be going to IETF 116 as a public interest technologist!
I intend to so what everybody does at IETF meetings: ethnography!

To prepare, I've been reading the seminal _Wired Norms: Inscription,
resistance, and subversion_ (WN).
I'm reading this keeping in mind Priyanka's interest in a project
connecting BigBang and Contextual Integrity (CI)-- something I am certainly
interested in!

I thought it might be productive to clarify some theoretical commitments
and terminology ahead of time, since CI use the same terms with slightly
different meanings and literature sources.

What both WN and CI have in common is an emphasis on 'norms'.

In CI, norms are always connected to a social context, and legitimized by
the contexts purposes, the ends of agents within the context, and societal
purposes. The norms in CI are informational norms, meaning they govern
information flows, and especially flows of personal data. CI tends to see
the norms as very stable -- part of the context as an institution and
imaginary, to use the language of WN -- but the norms sometimes change with
the introduction of new technology.

WN uses a less sui generic sense of 'norm' taken from international
relations. In many ways this is a richer sense of norm than CI's, as it
comes with a theory of norm conflict, which CI in its current form lacks.
But it is also perhaps a vague sense of 'norm'. My understanding is that
'norms'in IR theory typically bind state actors, whereas WN considers
standards and protocols as themselves 'norms'. Neither of these are
precisely the same as the 'social norms' at work in CI. For example, norms
abot the use of the personal data of IETF participants, contextualized to
the IETF, would be canonical CI norms.

Norm conflict theories may be a good way to deal with one area where CI has
an acknowledged weakness, which is in its (lack of) understanding of
context collapse.

Just riffing a bit in searching of a research question that might be
broadly appealing... whereas WN addresses the norm conflict between norms
grounded in the private multistakeholder governance values of openness,
innovation, etc. and norms grounded in human rights (perhaps, Californian
ideology vs. European values, to be crude about it), I'd hazard a guess and
add into the conflicted mix managerialist values (corporate) and
authoritarian values (various non-Western entrants into IETF
standarization?).

Of course it is most interesting if these values manifest in different
_standards_. But in terms of using BigBang, maybe what we can observe is
how different actors from different contexts/institutions _behave_
differently within the purposefully "multi"--i.e. pluralized-- context of
the IETF? Do they have different information norms? These are maybe
"metanorms" with respect to the standards protocols, drafts, and so on.

Am I hitting any marks here? What do others have in mind for a research
frontier for BigBang?

Best regards,
Seb
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