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"Truly effective, synergistic, collaboration is an elusive beast at the best of times and the idea of making it work at scale, for decentralised projects and organisations, is possibly the essential challenge of our times. If we want to work out how to work together more effectively, to build an equitable and abundant world for all, it seems important to recognise, what hinders collaboration, to identify great examples of effective collaboration and to at least attempt to identify if there are any key themes which we can build on and incorporate into our work."

The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our future is not reliant upon high tech, it will be because civilization has fallen. Big Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it's up to us to seize the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under democratic, accountable control.

Immediate action is required to halt the COVID-19 Pandemic and treat those it has affected. It is a practical and moral imperative that every tool we have at our disposal be applied to develop and deploy technologies on a massive scale without impediment. We therefore pledge to make our intellectual property available free of charge for use in ending the COVID-19 pandemic and minimizing the impact of the disease. We will implement this pledge through a license that details the terms and conditions under which our intellectual property is made available.

Now for the first time ever, we have a global plan of action - the Contract for the Web - created by experts and citizens from across the world to make sure our online world is safe, empowering and genuinely for everyone. We invite governments, companies, civil society organizations and individuals to back the Contract and uphold its principles and clauses. The Contract for the Web will become a strong mechanism for each party to be held accountable for doing their part to build an open and free web.

"Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already having a major impact on society. As a result, many organizations have launched a wide range of initiatives to establish ethical principles for the adoption of socially beneficial AI. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of proposed principles threatens to overwhelm and confuse. How might this problem of 'principle proliferation' be solved? In this paper, we report the results of a fine-grained analysis of several of the highest-profile sets of ethical principles for AI. We assess whether these principles converge upon a set of agreed-upon principles, or diverge, with significant disagreement over what constitutes 'ethical AI.' Our analysis finds a high degree of overlap among the sets of principles we analyze. We then identify an overarching framework consisting of five core principles for ethical AI. Four of them are core principles commonly used in bioethics: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice. On the basis of our comparative analysis, we argue that a new principle is needed in addition: explicability, understood as incorporating both the epistemological sense of intelligibility (as an answer to the question 'how does it work?') and in the ethical sense of accountability (as an answer to the question: 'who is responsible for the way it works?'). In the ensuing discussion, we note the limitations and assess the implications of this ethical framework for future efforts to create laws, rules, technical standards, and best practices for ethical AI in a wide range of contexts."

"Trackers are hiding in nearly every corner of today's Internet, which is to say nearly every corner of modern life. The average web page shares data with dozens of third-parties. The average mobile app does the same, and many apps collect highly sensitive information like location and call records even when they're not in use. Tracking also reaches into the physical world. Shopping centers use automatic license-plate readers to track traffic through their parking lots, then share that data with law enforcement. Businesses, concert organizers, and political campaigns use Bluetooth and WiFi beacons to perform passive monitoring of people in their area. Retail stores use face recognition to identify customers, screen for theft, and deliver targeted ads."

"We are a five-person team concerned about the ways our communities' digital information is collected, stored, and shared by government and corporations. Based in marginalized neighborhoods in Charlotte, North Carolina, Detroit, Michigan, and Los Angeles, California, we look at digital data collection and our human rights, work with local communities, community orginizations, and social support networks, and show how different data systems impact re-entry, fair housing, public assistance, and community development."

"AI Explainability 360 This extensible open source toolkit can help you comprehend how machine learning models predict labels by various means throughout the AI application lifecycle. We invite you to use it and improve i"

August (2020), Democrats introduced a bill in Congress to block manufacturers' limits on medical devices, spurred by the pandemic. In Europe, the European Commission announced plans in March for new right-to-repair rules that would cover phones, tablets, and laptops by 2021.

"In the last decade Open Science principles, such as Open Access, study preregistration, use of preprints, making available data and code, and open peer review, have been successfully advocated for and are being slowly adopted in many different research communities. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic many publishers and researchers have sped up their adoption of some of these Open Science practices, sometimes embracing them fully and sometimes partially or in a sub-optimal manner. In this article, we express concerns about the violation of some of the Open Science principles and its potential impact on the quality of research output. We provide evidence of the misuses of these principles at different stages of the scientific process. We call for a wider adoption of Open Science practices in the hope that this work will encourage a broader endorsement of Open Science principles and serve as a reminder that science should always be a rigorous process, reliable and transparent, especially in the context of a pandemic where research findings are being translated into practice even more rapidly"

Jacques Vallée, one of the co-creators of the Internet, explains how the acceleration of technology in an increasingly connected society is producing "impossible futures" that range from rapid collapse of major banks to the emergence of complex new forms of political power, with the Internet as both a tool and a victim. Quotes: [The KGB] arrested people at random, and brought them to their headquarters; they had one question for them: "who do you know? who do you talk to, and what do you talk about?" If somebody wanted to do that today, they would not need to arrest people, all they need to do is look at Facebook, Twitter, Google; we give this information everyday to the network and the superstructure above the web. [nb: slightly shortened and simplified] The connected world provides many examples of "Impossible" futures that create a dissonance between existing cultures or belief systems... and the sudden emergence of new facts. The impact cannot be ignored.

The Digital Services Act could require big changes to digital platforms. Here are 4 things lawmakers need to know to protect people-powered spaces like Wikipedia.