Ars Electronica Digital Communities 2004-2014 Anthology :: Remember, remember, the velvet November


node:	Ars Electronica Digital Communities 2004-2014 Anthology
template:	12
parent:	Anonym - books (a vsetko, co sa nehodi inam)
owner:	Prospero
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created:	12.10.2015 - 14:30:29
updated:	12.10.2015 - 14:35:46

cwbe coordinatez:
101
63532
683817
683643
903845
8015177

ABSOLUT
KYBERIA

permissions
you:	r,
system:	public
net:	yes

The idea for this publication was born a day after the Prix ARS jury meetings in May 2014 when we were sitting with jury member Washio Kazuhiko on a fine spring evening at Café Palmenhaus in Vienna. We’re not sure if it was the intensity of the jury deliberations of the previous days or the serenity of the surrounding imperial urban garden that inspired us, in any case, it was on that evening that we felt a strong obligation to do something with the wealth of knowledge Prix ARS had collected about digital communities in the last years...

editors: Ingrid Fischer-Schreiber & Ian Banerjee

Stranky o kyberia.sk: 103 (popis) a 104 (interview)

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so after shorter or rather longer pawse, here I think, therefore I'm...
dik, 23

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What is the secret of this project’s longevity?

DDH: The main secret is rather simple: Kyberia is one of the most ancient platforms. It emerged before cyberspace was partitioned by the big corporate players. It attracted particular users (Slovak and Czech hackers, artists, scientists) before Facebook, Twitter, or G+ even existed. For many of these users, Kyberia was the first digital community or social network they were ever integrated into. Such a “loss of virtual virginity” could, in the minds of these users, create a lasting imprint, a kind of habitus that causes this “community kernel” to appear and reappear—either on a regular basis or after shorter or longer pauses.

In the current era, when cyberspace is already partitioned and its participants’ habits are fixed, it is almost impossible to establish such an intimate relationship between a user and a new “startup” project. Today, any project is just one among thousands of others, and any domain is merely a point of little significance in an almost infinite digital space.

However, there are other reasons for Kyberia’s longevity as well. Kyberia does not harass its users with advertisements, implicit business models, legal licenses, or other corporate clutter. It’s not a megapolis like Facebook but rather a kind of cybernetic village. This does not mean it is any less meme-virally insane than Facebook; it just means that in its “virtual insanity,” it is still more intimate, personal, and human. The fact that new users must pass through a registration procedure makes it harder for toxic egos and propaganda bots to infiltrate. As a result, the community seems more resilient to external disturbances.

For nearly 10 years, Kyberia has been in a state of slow, unfolding homeostasis that is neither pure progress nor pure decay—something in the middle: Life, perhaps.

Lastly, the community has demonstrated a capacity to reproduce. In a sort of virtual endogamy, a significant number of Kyberia members have had children with other Kyberia members. It is reasonable to expect that old IDs will, sooner or later, be passed down to their progeny. As Kyberia has existed for nearly 15 years, another 10 years would bring it to the 25-year mark, considered a single human generation. Only if we surpass this threshold can we begin to speak of a “secret of longevity.”

You say it is a “social body with a collective identity.” What are the implications of such an approach for the community/members?

DDH: It is about a bi-directional flow of information between the whole (the community) and its parts (the members). The more feedback loops you have in the system, the more complexity will emerge from it. I intuitively implemented this principle into the architecture of the system long before I knew anything about graph theory, complexity, or A.I.

Later, there was a tendency to operationalize this intuition in scripts implementing the Parallel Democracy Model (PDM). Ideally, PDM could allow users to directly influence many of Kyberia’s global parameters—such as immigration rates, the number of new Ks generated and distributed, and ostracization thresholds—via a simple voting process aggregated in an innovative way. The goal is for the system to adapt swiftly to emerging challenges, but to do so fundamentally in a bottom-up manner: netizens should decide, not a caste of administrators.

Unfortunately, not many members are willing or ready to constructively participate in building a shared cathedral. It is much easier to criticize those “up there” than to recognize that those “up there” are, in fact, “we here.” With that recognition comes the responsibility to make decisions and perform courageous actions.

What are your visions for the project?

DDH:
0) To protect its existence and its raison d'être, which is to “protect diversity in cyberspace.”

To integrate our own state-of-the-art natural language processing semantic search engine.

To become more distributed, more decentralized, and to replicate into Czech, German, and potentially other regions of European cyberspace.

To use Kyberia’s database—or a specific subset of it—to train a collective artificial intelligence representing the mind of Slovak intelligentsia during the first decades of the third millennium.

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Kyberia is an independent and innovative archipelago of digital commu-
nities that emerged in 2001 on the Slovak domain kyberia.sk. Initially
a website informing the Slovak public about topics that were ignored
on the Slovak web at the time (e.g. trans- and post-humanist philos-
ophies, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, entheogens). Kyberia
swiftly evolved first into a threaded forum and subsequently into a
fully-fledged digital community where hackers, artists and scientists
were able to interact in a densely hyperlinked graph.

The current version released in 2006 focused more on internal K-econ-
omy and the politics of the community. More concretely, a Senate was
created and first trials to allow the system to auto-configure by using
the parallel democracy model were run. In 2007 Kyberia won the prize of
distinction as a “best Slovak virtual community” in the biggest public
competition ever organized on the Slovak web. In 2010 code of Kybe
ria’s engine was released on GitHub under AGPL and the community
was expanded into Czech cyberspace, where a parallel community was
launched on the kyberia.cz domain.

In over ten years of existence, Kyberia has transformed itself from a
science and hackers’ community into a more mainstream communi-
ty of thousands of active users discussing myriads diverse topics in
more than seven million parallel forums, blogs and/or data nodes. One
of the most characteristic features that, we believe, transformed Ky
beria into a social body with a collective identity is that Kyberia has a
semipermeable membrane (which means that any registration appli-
cation of a new user has to be approved by at least five members of
the kyberia.sk Senate), a upvoting system implemented years before
Facebook’s “Like” button. Other features worth mentioning include a
flexible (node-specific) system of access right attribution, an internal
bookmarking and mailing system and API templates. These were inno-
vative in the period when they were released, although today they are
common in other social networks as well.