Wednesday 26th April 2023
Black Sky’s 1st Open Community Discussion was on cognitive sovereignty and the flow of attention in community governance, interface design and data architectures.
The discussion topic was inspired by Nathan Schneider’s talk about Modular Politics at Autonomous Ecologies in ETH Denver and especially by his prompt during the end of his presentation to start thinking in terms of problems of attention in governance and design.
Since we haven’t got the AI conversation tools for the job yet, I as a mere mortal will attempt the job of recapitulation 
. So, here are the main takeaways and highlights of our conversation so far:
@hocwyn bringing up the issue of how communities can keep and own their data/records of interactions (illuminating the adversarial relationships involved).
@gavinly hinging upon the sync/async distinction in coordinating attention
@ntnsndr bringing up the importance of a web of trust for the steering attentional resources of communities
@stellarmagnet : AI as a possible means of epistemic “governance synthesis”
But… who will watch the watchmen?
@eccogrinder: splintering of conversations into private chats as an engine of alignment + “embracing the noise of a community”.
Neat suggestion by @gavinly : could be cool to have a way to host a spinoff convo with custom privacy settings
@hocwyn: “crypto as epistemic layer”
Other cool quotes from @hocwyn we definitely need to expand on:
knowledge flows not only explicitly in user-owned convos but also implicitly in structural properties
what you understand, you can manipulate
Me and @eccogrinder casually normalizing being a lurker.
@tgxth bringing attention to the importance of privacy-preserving AI for discussion querying.