As we keep building a new web of trust, we need to remember that the needs of marginalized groups are often not heard. It’s easy to talk about access just in terms of disability, and while it is one aspect it’s also important to remember that there are other marginalized groups who are not heard because they are a minority, or they are oppressed in other ways.
There has already been some papers which bring up a situation with refugees (Joram 1.0.0), and while Joram and Amira are both very tech-spec focused papers, I do believe that there’s space here for a less technical approach in order for us to help grasp what aspects and angles may still be missing from our current conversation.
One of the many problems plaguing change is that we forget certain voices, we may only listen to or invite the privileged few, but what we actually want to do is listen to and see the ones who are not represented by the majority. Different minority groups have different needs, and they can’t all be addressed with one simple solution. What we need to do is find a way to address those needs, in their own time and space. And this paper wants to begin by mapping out some of those issues, so we have base to stand on and continue working from. Tech in general is a space that tends to be very centered around white men, even if it’s not intentional it is often the outcome. This is a problem when this simply means that we can’t access knowledge from other groups because that knowledge simply doesn’t exist in the realm of knowledge of these people, so they don’t realize they are missing it, even when it’s pointed out to them. A web of trust could, and maybe should, be a social solution to a technical problem. We’ve tried to address some of it with PGP in the past, and exchanging of keys in the physical space. [Can we really trust people we haven’t met, or are people we’ve met really the most trustworthy?]
Or does it require you to be part of a majority group in order for it to work properly? This question would require us to map out how many people are required to trust an entity for it to be trusted. Will a minority be less trusted automatically because of fewer numbers, or will the numbers for “Trust ratings” not matter as much as the average score? (if that’s the route one would take) Here it actually helps to ask: Is the web of trust likely to work on a personal level or institutional basis? Or are we looking for different solutions for different aspects of it but only gathering them under the same umbrella.
There are some obvious reasons for why it would possibly not be reliable for minority groups, and that is if you are reliant on being “approved” by the many in order to be viewed as valid within this system, or by an institution etc. However, there are other sides to it, where maybe different minority groups can trust and support each other, and that help build a solid support network on say a social network.
If we take the time to identify how/if a Web of Trust automatically carries the biases of structural racism/ableism etc. we can also start talking about how we avoid exacerbating these biases? How do we ensure we hear and see women, disabled, queer, and BIPOC (Black, Indiginous and People/Person(s) of Colour) in these development processes? Which advantages to a (Rebooted) Web of Trust for minorities may not have been identified yet? We would need to take a look at current implementations and solutions which do take into account these issues, as well as bringing in people from these different groups to join the conversation in order to grasp nuances we may not be able to see ourselves.
You can say that decentralized social networks are already utilizing a web of trust. Even when they are allow-all as the default, it is still (at least in the way that Mastodon works rigth now) a trust level as your home server will mostly only see posts from people which are trusted by your users (by following or other interactions). Here you tend to distrust specific servers by deciding who to block, instead of who to communicate with. There is also work going on in this field about which is slightly different and outside of the allow and disallow realm, which may or may not be relevant to this specific paper. (And that is OCAP https://blog.dereferenced.org/what-is-ocap-and-why-should-i-care )
Through writing this paper other questions will pop up, and it’s worth recognizing which do not fit into the form of this specific paper, but which questions can be used for another paper, or to continue the conversation elsewhere. It’s important to remember that people aren’t always able to access these conversations (especially this type of events), due to high bars of entry, how do we invite them to this very important conversation?
by Marie Axelsson