The Good Web

Last year, we published our Three-Legged Stool white paper outlining our vision for the future of the social Internet. But the truth is, that future is already here. We’ve been calling it the Good Web, and we want to spotlight the exciting people and projects who are making it happen.

Our first step in that effort is programming a Good Web series on Reimagining the Internet. We’ve already run some great interviews with Cory Doctorow, Michael Wood-Lewis, Jessamyn West, and Charles Broskoski, and have a couple more coming this month too. We wanted to make this series a little different, so Mike (me, hi) has been conducting most of the interviews, and doing them in-person as often as possible.

These episodes aren’t just supposed to be a showcase of cool people, but resources that are available to anyone attempting their own Good Web project. So if you like what you’re hearing, be sure to tell a friend who might like it too.

The UMass Responsible Technology Coalition is looking for new leadership

Via lab member Harshita Snehi:

The The Responsible Technology Coalition is a student group focused on issues relating to responsible technology across academia, industry, and government. We are proud to collaborate with PIT@UMass. We host monthly speaker events, mixers, annual book club meetings and recently curated the first ever PIT X UMass exhibit featuring student and faculty work in the field of public interest technology and human centric design. 

We are looking for people to join our leadership team to help us plan and execute multidisciplinary, relevant events and liaise with UMass administration. We are also looking for marketing and communication volunteers. Email Oscar Youngquist at [email protected] with your resume and a few sentences expressing your interest in volunteering with the RTC.

P.S Come in for a meeting and score some very cool club merch 😎

The Field Guide to Social Media draft is in

Ethan and Chand just submitted a draft of their Field Guide to Social Media to MIT Press, and it’s around 100,000 words! Thanks for everyone who read Chand’s drafts, and especially to the folks who offered valuable feedback. Stay tuned for more updates on the book.

The Conversation: “AI companies train language models on YouTube’s archive − making family-and-friends videos a privacy risk”

Ryan and Ethan published a nice, accessible summary of their next wave of work on the YouTube/Tube Stats project in the conversation recently. Give it a read.

Congrats Chand and Kevin!

It’s bittersweet, but Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Kevin Zheng are both moving on from the lab this summer to pursue graduate work.

Chand will be attending law school at University of Chicago with the hopes of pursuing the legal side of the policy-oriented work he’s been doing at our lab on middleware and interoperability.

Kevin will be starting his PhD at the fantastic University of Michigan School of Information, where he’ll be continuing his work developing research tools to study major platforms.

These are two brilliant people and have been major forces in our lab the last few years. You will be missed!