Stephen Downes

The work I've done on CList is about creating social interacting learning networks based on personal data spaces and environments, so there's a lot of overlap with ActivityPods, which "Brings together ActivityPub and Solid Pods and empowers developers to create truly decentralized applications." As described here, "all your data are stored in your Pod. You can choose a Pod provider you trust, or host it yourself....  you can share your data with anyone on the Internet, thanks to the ActivityPub protocol." And "since all data are stored using semantic web standards, they can be accessed and understood by many apps." Really interesting. I think one of the big difference between CList and this sort of project is that while you can store or host data yourself, you don't have to. Anyhow, here is the ActivityPod documentation.

Google's Gems are "customized versions of Gemini that help you tackle repetitive tasks or get deep expertise in new areas." They were used by teachers in Google Classroom. But now, as this article reports, Google is retiring Gems and replacing them with skills. But skills won't be available in Classroom. So "what happens to Gems you assigned to students, the key dates, and what to move them to." Similarly, "OpenAI retires custom GPTs on December 11, 2026" - there's an article on what teachers were building with them." Once again, we are learning the danger of relying on a proprietary platform. Now this article promotes something called Flint as an alternative; I can't vouch for them, but at least they posted this useful article.

This I think is true: "digital sovereignty is not achieved by owning more of the technology we depend on but rather by having meaningful agency over it and the capacity to exercise that agency over time." This isn't something that should depend on volunteers, writes Anna Tumadóttir, but is something that needs to be sustained. But how? The warning here is that "Open infrastructure projects can become dependent on philanthropic funding or on the priorities of a particular government or administration." What's the best way to sustain infrastructure generally? We can't depend on the private sector for this, because the private sector prioritizes extracting revenue, not supporting the infrastructure. How often we have seen this! That's why I worry about the direction Creative Commons is taking., as it drifts closer and closer to the idea of a private sector controlled commons. Most key infrastructure is supported through public enterprise - in Canada, that means through government agencies, institutions, or Crown corporations. That way, if they're being mismanaged, we can replace the managers.

In his talk at FediForum yesterday Anil Dash outlined a process whereby companies spend a lot of money to take over a niche where open content prevails, then slowly squeeze out all the openness, then monetize it as a closed proprietary sector. A classic case of this is Spotify, which bought up a bunch of podcasting companies, and has been squeezing ever since. This item is a case in point. Spotify has begun scanning podcast episodes for any spoken work content that might come from a commercial source. If it finds any, the episode is removed. There's no fair use or any legitimate way to even quote from a work. "This is just another example of the ruination of the legal concept of fair use. Fair use is not a copout or a loophole, it's a fundamental understanding that copyright law has limits, and quoting a work to criticize it can't be stifled by authors demanding that their copyright entitles them to prevent critics from quoting their work." See also Anil Dash, We are going to kill "unalive".

From the web page: "The Social Web Incubator Community Group (also known as SocialCG, or SWICG) incubates protocols and other technology for on open social web in which everybody can participate. We work closely with the Social Web Working Group, which uses the W3C process to formally standardize these technologies." I've joined and signed up for the RSS, so I can keep readers up to date. More W3C community groups.

Alex Usher writes that Canada's government can't develop the 'knowledge economy' because it is unable to develop talent, narrowly defined here as "people with very specific talents to spread technology – tinkerers and experimenters, basically." While the government is focusing in recruiting star talent and funding specific companies, Usher writes, it should be "importing it or developing... the most talented people in the labour force, making private industry more productive." How that would work, exactly, is a puzzle. But it's a wrongheaded approach in any case. Private industry is what emerges after the innovation has occurred. It doesn't take the risks; it just eats the profits. To develop a nation of "tinkerers and experimenters" you need a lot of freedom and a lot of economic stability, including a safety net, so people can take risks and pursue their ideas. I personally see a lot of that in Canada, including in this country's pioneering work in AI. Sure, we're much less focused than some countries on privatizing and monetizing the results. But in many cases, that's a good thing.