Discussion
Up for day 3 (and final day) of #BuildPeace2026, hearing about Origins and Diasporas, and the very different causes that lead to migrations and displacements around the world.
Panelists are migrants and refugees, journalists and data scientists and lawyers. Born in Myanmar, Afghanistan… wow. Really puts a stark light on the privilege of living a life in peaceful countries.
Talk 2 is about building a lexicon of harmful online speech. To combat it.
This one is SO SO SO important for our Fediverse, y’all. (Cc: @iftas )This work is coming from global majority participants who are woefully under represented in our moderation and community leadership roles.
Speaker told a story of “Andrew”, the king of toxic masculinity. Everything she described had all the white brains in the room thinking “Tate”.
The name to know is “Kibe”.
The platform is kictanet.or.ke
Next up: Void of Voids, a digital graphic novel by Iranian exile and Perimeter Institute cosmologist Encieh Erfani.
She resigned her professorship in Iran in 2022 and became an exiled scientist. Woman. Life. Freedom.
Her book is about the women academics displaced by conflict in our 19th-21st century history. Scholars estimate over 1.2 million scholars are displaced in the world today.
Next: Community Radio in Kenya.
Also rather relevant to the Fediverse, in that there are lessons here as to the double-edged sword of community-owned information distribution. We have some advantages, and some disadvantages, compared to a network of small, local radio stations.
Kenya National Commision of UNESCO is working to create a coalition of these community broadcasters and provide training not just in broadcast tech but journalism and information security/integrity as well.
Amazing engagement of youth in the communities - young people as information analysts are deeply concerned and extremely effective about surfacing mis/disinfo online and in communities and the broadcast nodes work to reshape the information sphere for de-escalation.
Wow - next, another Iranian exile presenting on her program of amplifying unheard voices, and bringing to light what is really happening in Iran. She likens the closure of the internet to building a brick wall between members of families, and between the two halves of herself.
Very heavy work being done in this space. Technologists and open technology could surely do more.
Closing this session with Sarah Noble presenting remotely on the incorporation of creative storytelling in peacebuilding.
Hah!!! Amazing callback to an experience I had earlier in the year when I realized the importance of listening wholly to the story*teller*, beyond just the words of the story. It is a relational experience. The scientific term is “neurocoupling”. The telling of a story builds the story, the teller and the listener.
Afternoon sessions start with short workshop, then long (1/3 hrs). Learning about UWs office of conflict management, and an online VR tool called Ovation for practicing/rehearsing communication in difficult situations.
I am skeptical, but curious. It does seem to be a learning tool, not a data collecting tool (but you know what questions I will be asking ). 😜
Sidebar: can I just say I’m delighted that two years after the actual filming, HTTPS://cigionline.org still has these etchings on the glass of their courtyard doors.
Hrm. Ovation is not an in-house program, it’s a US-based startup that UW has a very limited subscription to. The VR headsets are not available to staff (it was VR-first, later offered desktop and mobile apps).
Calls into question the assurances that user data is secured and protected, at the same time that Ovation acknowledges that “data is processed by OpenAI, Speechmatics and ElevenLabs”.
It costs $400/month plus AI credits for 5 users????
Sounds like it’s being subsidized at that. Heh.
Concerned about how this might be justified to replace services that should be delivered by HR specialized humans. Concerned that there is no post-deployment monitoring for either direct feedback or user wellness.
Also, this looks to be yet another bog-standard public-level LLM, run through a chatbot interface which receives its input from a speech-to-text engine and returns its tokens arranged through a text-to-speech layer with a choppy VR room held up in front of you.
Looked up OvationVR. It’s a VR Toastmasters app, really. Whole lotta layered-tech nonsense and frontier model token burning to replace going out to a social club with actual people.
There are now two “12/##” posts in this thread in a weird arrangement in my client, sorry. Backing up one to continue.
Beautiful unexpected bonus at this event, a gallery exhibit of traditional textiles works from various Phillipine communities.
Very heavy panel again. Humans are amazing just for how they thrive when conditions seem set up to destroy everything.
Hour 2 is today’s short talks. Starting with a visual artist whose current work is a study of border barriers built in the 21st century. Syria, Afghanistan. Artist works from online research, not just working from images but stories, conversations, lived experiences and attending conferences. The work is produced by printing from dry point etching on acrylic (plexiglass).