Category: Community

My birthday fell earlier this week, and brought with it the usual delightful overflow of Facebook greetings. It was always my favorite part of that platform, and it managed to draw me out of the semi-boycott I’ve been conducting to say thanks to everyone.

My semi-boycott means that while I haven’t deleted my account because I still lurk a bit in order to see pictures of my nieces and nephews and so forth, I don’t post or interact with others’ posts. This decision has largely been driven by the enormous damage the platform has wrought in recent years, at levels from national politics to individual health and well-being. I miss some of my interactions there, but the nausea I feel when I consider contributing my time and attention to that company is just too much to squelch.

I bring this up here because this morning we discovered a new CORE deposit filled with highly problematic claims about the spread of COVID-19 and the effects of vaccines. We don’t — and can’t — review deposits for soundness, and yet we bill ourselves as a scholarly network, where work with some measure of academic authority can be found. Because of this, I believe we have a responsibility to prevent, or at a bare minimum not contribute to, the spread of harmful misinformation.

As a result, we’ve removed the deposit, and we will remove any similar deposits that we uncover.

We want, however, to develop the best policies and processes we can in order to ensure our network — whose openness we are committed to — does not risk becoming another vector for damaging misinformation. We’d very much appreciate your thoughts about this work; please leave your ideas and concerns in the comments. We’ll keep you posted as our work continues.

The questions that have recently surfaced for us around community, safety, and trust have made clear the extent to which we on the Commons team need ongoing feedback and advice from our users. Our network governance model, recognizing that need, provide for two advisory groups: a technical advisory group and a user advisory group. Members of each are to be named by the Participating Organization Council, and each group will bring the concerns and ideas of the Commons community to the team for discussion and integration into our project roadmap. (See our bylaws for more details.)

We are currently seeking nominations for each of these groups. If you would like to join us, please email a brief statement of interest, along with a link to your Commons profile, to hello@hcommons-staging.org.

Let us know if you have any questions — we’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Earlier this month, the Modern Language Association held its annual convention, and our team hoped that we would be able to engage with attendees, helping them continue their conversations with one another via the Commons. Instead, we found ourselves fending off what initially looked like a bot attack: a massive influx of new account creation attempts with a few shared characteristics that made clear that there was orchestration involved. We put some measures in place to attempt to ensure that the majority of these attempts did not succeed, and spent several days playing whack-a-mole with the few that did.

In the process, it gradually came to seem that we might not be dealing with bots, but with humans: bad actors who were trying to find ways into the Commons community. To what end, we weren’t sure. But given the visibility of the MLA Convention, we really, really did not want to find out.

Things have gotten a bit quieter since the convention ended, but the suspicious account creation attempts continue. And fighting off this attack has taken all of the time that might have gone into the work we’re trying to do to improve and advance the platform, and it’s left our very small team exhausted. So we’re discussing some longer-term options, options that raise a few key questions we’d like to open up for discussion with the Commons community.

The most important question is this:

How do we balance our commitment to ensuring that the Commons is open to anyone — regardless of credentials, memberships, employment status, language, geographical location, and so forth — with our commitment to ensuring that the members of our community are safe and free from harassment? We’ve all seen much too graphically of late the costs of a hands-off approach to open social networks, but even within a more local academic frame of reference, we’ve seen what can happen when virtual events get Zoom-bombed or otherwise disrupted. We absolutely do not want members of our community to be threatened in any way that unsettles their ability, not to mention their willingness, to engage in the shared collaborative work that they’re undertaking here. We’re grateful that the Commons has managed to avoid such incidents up until now, but we’ve achieved a size and a visibility that has led us to become a target. As a result, we need to take action to protect the network and its members.

Should we establish some kind of verification requirement before new accounts are permitted to use some of the network’s features? We imagine that we might restrict new, unverified user accounts in ways that prevent such accounts from sending direct messages to other community members, for instance, or from creating unwelcome groups and sites within the network. This might work something like the trust levels model that Discourse uses, relying on a demonstration of good-faith engagement to gradually open up features to new accounts, though we may need something a bit lighter weight as we get started.

If we establish such a requirement, what paths toward verification should we enable? We could imagine verification happening as part of account creation if the new user uses an email address that demonstrates a connection with a trusted institution or organization, or if the new user links their account to another trustworthy scholarly data system such as ORCiD. But we also want to ensure that independent scholars and practitioners who may not have institutional credentials or established publication records can join us as well. Should we take the arXiv approach of having established members of the community vouch for new members, or does that run the risk of clubbiness? How do we preserve access for good actors while minimizing the damage that bad actors can do?

We welcome your thoughts on these questions, and we look forward to discussing the path ahead with the community as a whole.

For those who have had to cancel events or shift to virtual meetings in response to COVID-19, this post will provide information about ways Humanities Commons could be a resource.

CORE, our open access repository, is a place presenters can share conference papers and other presentation materials. The deposit will get a DOI and structured metadata; it will be openly available and indexed. 

Conference organizers can create a group for the event. Members of the group can use the discussion forum, calendar, documents library, and collection of CORE materials for asynchronous communication. For presenters who don’t want to share work in CORE (where work can’t be edited), Docs could be used instead of CORE. 

If the event doesn’t already have a site, organizers can create a WordPress site on the Commons to share information about the event and present conference materials. For more information, see What is the difference between a group and a site? 

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The planning committee of the Global Digital Humanities Symposium recently decided that their event would not be held as planned. Instead of meeting in person, presentations will take place via Zoom. Below, you’ll find a guide adapted directly from the materials they are distributing to symposium participants, describing how to use their Commons group and CORE to participate in the event. You may find this example helpful to think about how you might communicate with your conference participants about using Humanities Commons.

Thank you to June Oh and the Global DH Symposium organizers for making this example available!

Continue reading “Using the Commons for Canceled or Virtual Events”