The Digital Life Collective is a consortium cooperative that aims to research, design, fund, develop, certify and use digital products and services that respect and protect human rights. They are mapping the decentralized technology ecosystem to help tackle complex challenges, gain understanding, and ask the right questions. Their maps make interconnected data increasingly useful by publishing it in open formats like JSON and RDF to visualize on platforms like Kumu while working towards interoperable and editable maps owned by nodes in a decentralized backend.
What is the Digital Life Collective and its ecosystem mapping work
1.
2. What is the Digital Life Collective?
@tech_we_trust diglife.com
3. What business, industry or trade does the
society intend to carry out?
The society will operate as a consortium co-
operative carrying out the following activities:
research, design, fund, develop, certify and use
digital products and services that respect and
protect human rights.
4. Why are we mapping?
● Help tackle a complex challenge
● Maps offer an easy way to start to understand territory
● different levels:
○ showcasing: single node
○ analysis: what can I understand from the map?
○ empathy: what are the outcomes and obstacles for other
projects?
○ synthesis: ask the right next question
12. Map goals
● make them interoperable & increasingly useful to the communities that co-
created them
● keeping in mind the longer-term goal of allowing a single profile entry for an
organisation or project so it can appear within several ecosystems
● Technical bits:
○ current data behind these maps is a public resource that uses a live JSON file
maintained in our GitHub and is visualized through Kumu
○ working to publish this data in additional forms such as NodeJS and Resource
Description Framework (RDF)
○ Survey:Kinto>JSON>travis-ci>GitHub (minus contact name and email)> Kumu
○ Roadmap: editable nodes / authentication for node ‘ownership’ / muggle-friendly
issue flag as well / notifications / decentralized data backend / data export in
multiple formats / map interoperability
14. All about the Digital Life Collective’s
ecosystem mapping work:
https://diglife.com/our-ecosystem/
@tech_we_trust diglife.com
Notas do Editor
Focus here is on the WHAT and WHY
This is what our formal registration says
and our mapping work is part of our research strand here
Here’s our ecosystem overview
We use kumu Side note for the purists about this centralized and proprietary tool and its kumunity
Zooming in, you can see the 3 main maps of the Collective. Our map of “tech we trust”, the decentralised tech map, and a responsible tech map
Our tech we trust map – and you can see a little of the power of kumu’s engine here on the right
This tries to map tech and organisations that might echo our tech we trust criterial – privacy, decentralisation, equality
You can cluster the map in different ways to spot similarities, differences, gaps
Here you can see a zoomed image linking one organisation with several projects
the distributed web is sociotechnical, all about the relationships. we can catalyze those with our map.
Decentralised web - This is our first map that allows projects to be added directly, making the data entry a decentralized effort. We will be officially launching this map at the Internet Archive's Decentralized Web Summit this summer. Be sure to get on the map before July 29th, and come find us if you'll be there too!
I’malso technology principle at doteveryone, we’re a think tank championing a more responsible tech industry for the good of everyone in society.
We commissioned Christina Bowen, digital life’s mapping lead, to map the (mostly) european responsible tech sector of organisations working on things like digital rights, Ethical tech campaigners, everything from responsibel robotics foundation to cybersecurity activists. The map and analysis will be published pretty soon.
I used to work in open government and also in open research data stuff, and linked data has been going to save the world so many times,
And it hasn’t
It’s very easy to get carried away with the technical detail and forget whether it’s going to be useful
And you often end up with beautiful datasets, that no one wants to maintain, and no one really has a use for.
If we’re doing linked data, let’s