Empowering Users in Online Open Communities

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an architecture supporting online open communities, where by open communities, we mean communities where previously unknown people can join, possibly for a limited amount of time. The fundamental question that we address is “how we can make sure that an individual’s requirements are taken into consideration by the community while her privacy is respected and the community’s ethical code is not violated”. The main contributions are: (i) a conceptual framework which allows to describe individual and community profiles, including data and norms that provide information about their owner and their requirements, and (ii) a decentralised architecture enabling interactions that leverage the exchange of profile information among people and communities to ensure that requirements are fulfilled and privacy is respected.

Governance of Autonomous Agents on the Web: Challenges and Opportunities

“…We diferentiate between a decentralised approach to norm emergence with implicit norms, where the norms emerge through the interactions of agents ś [1] is one example of such a scheme ś and various centralised approaches to the governance of norm emergence [101], which latter we classify by adapting the oversight terminology put forward by the High-Level Expert Group on Artiicial Intelligence (AI HLEG) [74, ğB.II.1.1]: (i) an external agency observes the behaviour of the population to identify patterns of behaviour and revise norms imposed by that agency to optimise for system goals (external agent/human on-the-loop) ś for example Morales et al [100] look at individual norms in isolation ś while the general case of revising a consistent body of norms remains open; (ii) agents propose norm revisions to an external agency, which then implements them subject to an assessment of how those revisions contribute towards system goals (external agent/human in-command), which also remains open; and (iii) agents propose norm revisions and system participants, which may include humans, use an internal decision-making mechanism to establish which changes will be implemented (internal agents/humans in-the-loop). The uHelp system illustrates some preliminary steps in this direction [104], but relegates software agents to a supporting role. The human-in-the loop, human-in-command, human-on-the-loop approaches are closely related to the diferent strategies that regulate persuasive dialogues [15], where commands introduce new obligations, whilst suggestions introduce new beliefs.…”

Governance of Autonomous Agents on the Web: Challenges and Opportunities

“…We differentiate between a decentralised approach to norm emergence with implicit norms, where the norms emerge through the interactions of agents - [1] is one example of such a scheme -and various centralised approaches to the governance of norm emergence [101], which latter we classify by adapting the oversight terminology put forward by the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) [74, §B.II.1.1]: (i) an external agency observes the behaviour of the population to identify patterns of behaviour and revise norms imposed by that agency to optimise for system goals (external agent/human on-the-loop) -for example Morales et al [100] look at individual norms in isolation -while the general case of revising a consistent body of norms remains open; (ii) agents propose norm revisions to an external agency, which then implements them subject to an assessment of how those revisions contribute towards system goals (external agent/human in-command), which also remains open; and (iii) agents propose norm revisions and system participants, which may include humans, use an internal decision-making mechanism to establish which changes will be implemented (internal agents/humans in-the-loop). The uHelp system illustrates some preliminary steps in this direction [104], but relegates software agents to a supporting role. The human-in-the loop, human-in-command, human-on-the-loop approaches are closely related to the different strategies that regulate persuasive dialogues [15],…”