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

[Priyanka Sinha]

This is exciting news!! Thanks to Niels' push, I received the IRTF
Diversity Grant for just this work Seb !!! Look forward to seeing all of
you at the first RASP meeting in Tokyo!!

Please let me know what all you might think I should come prepared with.

Seb, I'll read up, and I want to express that I shall still be a noob to CI
and WN.

>From a computational perspective, in my opinion from what you are saying,
doing CI would mean I just look at the flow of dialogues, i.e., turn by
turn or order of the messages (posts and comments) that one and others have
posted, but in a graph theory sense, I can ignore the temporal aspect and
treat all the conversation together. Technically, this may avoid getting
into issues of short text, noisy text that some statistical NLP methods
become difficult due to short context. This may also be less complex
computationally.

If the WN world view is so fine-grained that we need to look at timestamps
and model in continuous time domain, then for me I think that is too
challenging, albeit interesting. If WN is just major events and thus we can
split our data into windows or chunks manually, then we avoid the problem.

Cheers!,
Priyanka


> 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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