Welcome to day two of AMRO 2022. I'm glad to see so many fresh faces here this morning. And I'm also very happy to introduce our first speakers of the day. And they're already sitting here lined up ready for their talk, I think. If you see anyone still outside and you can wave at them and say come in, come in, this will be the moment and yeah and we will start in a few seconds, perfect, thank you. And yeah so our first speakers today are from the GIA, from the General Intelligence Agency of Ljubljana, Max and Jan. They are a very young organization that is doing research about collective intellectual consumption and also production, and they're very interested in the topics of radical, democratic, and decentralized collaborations, which I think fits very well with what Servus is doing throughout the year and also what AMRO is all about. So I would say I give the floor to you. So good morning. Thank you for coming to our presentation. We're the General Intelligence Agency from Ljubljana and we started as a reading group. So the idea for GIA started after finishing Negorostanis, Intelligence and Spirit, which is a kind of heavy book, so we decided to do it as a reading group because it demands different backgrounds. And then we ended up with a community with people with different backgrounds. But we want to talk about the reading group today. We realized that despite the positive experience, something was bothering us about the format of a reading group itself. For example, it requires periodic synchronous meetings, roughly like today's presentation, so people have to show up. So it's a relatively long-term project, so this kind of event has to be repeated like for a year almost, which adds pressure to the motivation of participants. Apart from possible notes, it doesn't really produce a tangible product, nor does it have a specific relationship to any products that might appear anyway. It often tends to take the form of a lecture seminar due to various asymmetries between participants. So if someone is very good in some topic, they will just take over the meeting. This is not to say we are against long-form reading circles should they arise, but we think there's a lot of potentially interesting design space that's still unexplored. The idea and motivation behind the form of a reading group is collective intellectual consumption and eventual production within a safe environment that would encourage externalization of thought. Such a collaboration requires thoughts to be externalized. So in some way, we have to put stuff out in order even to think is our conviction. So GIA is meant as an abstraction or generalization of such activities with a view to solving the problems we mentioned above. How far we can go in this abstraction, of course, cannot be known before we try. Therefore, we decided to start and we also decided to expand the project to involve both research and design of tools and infrastructures. More on that a bit later. So we would meet these objectives as far as we can even understand them. If we think of intellectual work as a relatively sequential or multilinear pipeline, then we can analyze it and think about it, its needs or barriers and maybe possible innovations more concretely we started with three levels of cooperation that may cooperation that may overlap to some extent so we need an opportunity to externalize thoughts so that maybe people get ideas from others, but also the process of externalization itself is, I think, productive for thinking. So we want to make a relationship to the materials created by such externalizations, and we want to work on development of tools and infrastructure. Yeah, so maybe for a bit of background on this, pass it to Max. Yes, if collective intelligence requires externalization of thought, we at GIA want to create a comfortable environment for this, as we were iterating now. We see that in the academy and the arts and especially in the humanities and social sciences modes of collaboration not just theories are not what they could be and that if you want better theories and practices we need better modes of collaboration. So our first goal is not necessarily ideological consolidation or a perfect or better theory, but in a way starting from the bottom up and continuing with what we are already doing. Only then do we encourage the integration and optimization of existing thinking insofar as it is technically, computationally, technologically and media mediated. In the humanities it is tako še kot je tehnologično, komputacivno in medijsko medijano. V človeščini se je nekaj pomembnega, da se tako vzpomembe. Vseč zelo pomembne prijatelje, kot je Mark Sengel, Zela Zengitari in Krasoves in Bauer, To ni nekaj nekaj nekaj nekaj nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj, nekaj nekaj elsewhere we know about companies, think tanks and even intelligent services, not least DAOs in the crypto space which are signaling a reimagination of internet collaboration which is a hope that has been with it since the beginning. So we're kind of in this lineage in a weird way. However we felt that it was important to put our commitment to better thinking and collaboration first, without immediately subordinating it to an external and potentially contradictory goal. Collective intelligence requires the expression and actual communication of thoughts and ideas. This is part of behavior in general, which is becoming increasingly subject to technological intervention, which becomes at least potentially more malleable by software. Thinking about these elements makes it possible to think about the design of better cognitive tools. The match between the individual's interests in externalizing thought Vznik z zgodbo z zgodbo in zgodbo GIA, ki je vznik z zgodbo, je v tem času najbolj zgodba, ki ga lahko vseči. V principu, če je več zgodb, tako lep je, da se pomaga začetek. software helps. The mass of interactions with the Google search engine is also the source of its value, not least as a cognitive tool. GIA does not, of course, count on such a mass of people, so for the time being we have to think of smaller groups which also have their own advantages. For example, in terms of creating an environment for the safe storage of intellectually semi-finished products. Yes, so about these products. We noticed that a lot of times in the current social media or general cognitive environments, content just flows. So when we produce this kind of abstractions, nodes, they usually just go be stored on some computer like let's just call them products of intellectual work. We call them also abstractions or combinations of abstractions. And we're thinking here of like all kinds of paratext, even highlighting, commenting, taking notes. I think there's a lot of opportunity for collaboration and technical improvement that's not being taken taken care of by the contemporary ecosystem. So, related to this concept of abstraction is the notion of chunking from cognitive psychology and a kind of abstraction is kind of like a chunk that gets wasted if you don't come back to it. In a certain collection of concepts, one unit, so this chunk is like something you can hold in a unit of memory. That's what makes it useful. So yeah, this is an example from chess. Like a beginner will only see individual pieces, but the more expert you become, the more chunks you see. And even in time, chunks will appear to you. So if this is a fundamental process of learning, it is usually taken care of by schools or curricula and relatively random pattern recognition over the course of a lifetime. So if we link these two ideas, we see that when we say that, for example, a reading group has no relationship to its products, we usually mean that it does not care about the chunks it produces because there is often no system or opportunity to return to them in the otherwise overwhelming environment of information. So chunks like any element of learning are not maintained without repetition. Learning works because there are patterns in the world, but schools exist so that those that are not obvious in everyday life are not forgotten anyway. There are many reasons and many mechanisms outside of institutional productions to take care of this, but this is also perhaps the very To je tudi tudi vseeno vznik način istotnega skupine. Mislim, da je zato, da ljudje so tako malo pripravljeni na naši skupni, ker se jim vzpomagajo na svoje privatne inicijative, da se zgodijo o tistih kakšnih, ki so izgubili v skupni. To je bilo začetek GIA, kako lahko razpraviti tega problemu s bolj okoljšimi oblasti, ki niso prej zelo zgodne. Mislim, da je to lep začetek za automatizacijo. Da, in naša premisa je, da čakrti so kot kapital, ampak težje je izvaljati. Kaj je, da ustvarimo lup, ki jih površi. Svet to dovolj dovolj dovolj dovolj, pripravljajo citacije, ampak v resnici je konstrukcija čakrti naturno, če se delate v nekaj posebnem svetu. by encouraging citations, but in general the construction of chunks comes naturally if you are working in a specific field. But if care is not taken to preserve chunks, there will be losses here too. Of course, both forgetting and wasting these chunks is not necessarily a bad thing. It can have an important function, say, to keep the mind from being saturated. What we are interested in here, however, is waste in the sense of unintended and unwanted loss of value, as we have seen in reading circles, in faculties, and in the consumption of content in general. It is therefore necessary to look more closely at what this waste might mean. For example, in the design of construction projects there is talk of system waste as in this context of feedback loops, but also about untapped collaboration, different forms of collaboration breakdown. There is also a general problem that not all knowledge is readily available to everyone. So one of the objectives we have been thinking about is a set of tools, building a set of tools that will establish feedback loops of different points of intellectual production. Memory works in a similar way. What we remember from one day is practically random everything else has to be taken care of either personally, institutionally or as a part of some psychological warfare like propaganda or marketing but there's also dangers in creating not only tools but even this kind of smaller intellectual communities. Because let's say a small internet or real life community can quickly become epistemically fringe or even blind itself to reality. In open projects, on another hand, for example, it can happen that someone specifically saturates the whole channel with too much communication. This is a common problem in a lot of open situations, such as protests or questions after public lectures. I think that with some more or less controlled dissemination, this should not be a problem, but it might be a structural feature of communication in general. Rather, maybe we should be concerned about other problems like psychological or economic blockades that often prevent people from speaking out even though to put it paternalistically it would be in their interest to externalize their thought in addition let's say there are acute technical problems but there's also the question of broader trends, like opening up in science. That's not necessarily all good. So yeah, we're for openness, but there might be some problems in openness. So the question is how to be open, and we don't have a good answer at this point. So in the neoliberal context the opening up of scientific workflows is subordinated to the interests that are somewhat alien to our goals even if they address similar problems. Internet waves of promoting openness of course included open science but it had certain shortcomings. Science, however, despite this trend, science itself is becoming closed because of this wrong ways of opening up. So we see like opening up old institutions like universities has this reverse neoliberal effect of actually closing them and making them paywalled and stuff like that. So if the aim of neoliberalizationacije vključiti nekaj nezaprejšenega svetovnih logik na predvsem idiosinkratičnih prakcih inštitorjev, z vsemi internetni inovacijami, je tudi nek nekaj novih vzduhov, da se počutimo na področju, da se tudi autonomno predstavljamo to make a bottom-up approach, to somehow also autonomously determine the terms of cooperation without giving up the potentials of technology, which is a weird kind of contradiction between infrastructure and autonomy. And I don't know, usually this is either mediated through hardcore institutional or market logics, but I don't think we should close our minds to any of those ideas. I think, yeah, so how should we think about platformization without sacrificing autonomy is like a constant question that comes up and the the fact that there is a small community doing such work can be both a plus and a minus so if the first serious problem starts with systematization of content maybe we should just just import it into a common sheet and do some scripts and stuff like that. So we started to develop this app that would be kind of a prototype how to take care of these chunks we mentioned, how to engender opportunities to externalize, to communicate thoughts about intellectual consumption and production. So maybe we can go to the last slide. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so... Yeah. Should I continue? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, like, what is then the direction of GIA, and what are we up to? Yeah, what are we up to? And we think that our research can be divided into two orders of magnitude. The first order is what we are dealing with anyway, as we are talking. Mislim, da lahko naša razgova lahko pridruži v dve množine. Prvi množ je to, s katerim se v tem času prekvarjamo. To je kontekst, v katerem se ustvarjamo za dobro zanimljivo in uspokojno izvrščenje idej, ki se ne bi lahko prekvarjali za izvrščenje, na primer, publikacije. Drugi množ je tudi tačno, ampak je to nekaj, ki se prekvarja bol that relates more directly to the objectives of GIA. In the case, we thought of doing case studies of other organizations, i.e. reading the surroundings and not necessarily the text, which could help us build better GIA and find opportunities for interventions. interventions. If we bring the issue of locality and globality into this discussion, we can interpret the above suggestion as a relationship between subject and object. As subject, we can try to use locality for trust building, i.e. how to make this a safe space for externalization, and as an object to study Ljubljana. The problem is that locality in itself doesn't guarantee a safe space, nor is there a super special reason for our objects to be local, although we find it an interesting part of research and maybe also consulting if we ever get to that stage. As far as the infrastructure is concerned, we have Nextcloud and are a part of an open source hosting project. We can speak about that in the Q&A as well. As for the tools that GIA is building and that we will present here and more thoroughly in the workshop later, which we'll invite you in the end, we built an app called Content Matcher, the first attempt at building cognitive tools within our organization. Let's say that we all agree with the problem of content hoarding, actions like opening tabs, bookmarking, for example, signal at least a minimal interest, but often don't help us with the systematization and retention of this accumulated information. And now Jan will say more about it. Yeah, I think we're basically done. So we can go to the next slide. Yeah, so this was the first attempt. We built it in like a month, so's very buggy and the links below are relevant so you can find it there if you want to try it out. There's a Gitea repository if you want to submit bug reports and yeah we'll talk about stuff related to it on the second part of the workshop that's called How to Solve a Problem. It's a very humble title. So yeah, this was our presentation. We can move to the next slide. We will do a little Q&A later with everyone who is speaking in this panel, but I can imagine that, especially technically, there are maybe some questions. So maybe two, maximum two questions. Yes. There is the Library of the World project you probably have come across. And they are working on a system which is called SandPoints, which might be quite a good combination of what you're actually looking into, because SandPoints is actually looking to similar approach. It's sandpoints.org, and you'll find it on Git as well. So maybe I'll make it to your workshop. But let's see, we do also workshop next week. So if that's of interest to you, just ping me and see what's going on. Thank you. We'll check it out. We're very interested in all things related. Thanks a lot. So this was more like a remark, maybe a way for you to do further research. If there's no question right now, then I will just announce once more that between 2 and 5 today, you will do the workshop. It's downstairs here in AFO, and there's still some spots available, so if you want to join, you can register via the website, or in the worst case, you can just show up and join these guys. Thanks a lot. Thank you.