The residents of the virtual world Second Life have been breathlessly following the events around the Emerald viewer. There are some lessons to be learned here for open collaboration projects, for instance for the Liquid Newsroom.
The Emerald Case
For those who don’t follow Second Life or the Emerald issue, here is a brief summary. Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, allows third parties to develop and distribute their own user interfaces for the virtual world, called viewers.
Emerald is a very successful third party viewer, developed by a group of avatars. I say avatars, because they are only known under their avatar identities.
Everything seemed to go very well, yet another example of how beautiful Second Life is, with its staggering user-generated production. Until one of the avatar-developers launched something which for Linden Lab was nothing less than a denial-of-service attack. The attack was served through Emerald.
Linden Lab entered negotiations with the avatar-developers, asking for some of them to leave the development team. One of them refused so it seems that the project will be terminated. You can find abundant coverage of the Emerald case on the New World Notes.
One interesting quote from Wagner James Au on that blog:
With so many reversals and free-floating avatar names associated with this whole drama, it’s all become irrelevant. Somewhat ironically, the only party I trust at this point is Linden Lab, because, you know, it’s an actual company with actual names. With avatar-to-avatar trust so thoroughly broken in this case, I highly recommend you do the same.
And yes, I know by Internet standards, Keyboard Cat is an old meme. But I still find it funny. In any case, the assumption that anonymous Second Life avatar identities are as trustworthy as real ones is also an old meme (just here, hardly as humorous.)
Which introduces us to one of the more fascinating aspects of this case: the anonymity.
Credibility and collaboration
All this made me think about our collaborative news project “the liquid newsroom” and the issue of credibility. Suppose you’ve an international project, like running a story how a multinational company behaves in various places on the planet. Could one of the collaborators be known only by a (eventually funny but not necessarily authentic) Twitter name? What if that person contributes essential information which is for instance damaging for the company involved, without the editors knowing whether she actually checked the facts? What if the editors really have to rely on the information and have no means to go out and check for themselves?
Social media are a package, and often help us to identify people pretty well (especially if people want to be identified). I think persons in collaborative news projects should be identified, using profile pages on social networks, email and video interviews. They should at least be identified by their colleagues on the team. If they don’t want to be identified they can still contribute, but their information should be double-checked by the editorial team (whose members would have to identify each other).
If we want to be taken seriously with our social media and open collaboration, we have to think about identification and issues of legal responsibility. Suppose your collaborative platform runs a story, produced by various contributors, what would happen if something goes very wrong? Is it only the (hopefully identifiable) contributor who would be legally challenged, or the whole team (for instance for not checking the identity of the contributor or for accepting too easily the challenged coverage)?
It seems some legal advice is required here. All this may seem straightforward, but in fact it is no longer. We don’t talk here about journalists meeting each other physically in a newsroom, but about a geographically very dispersed team, interacting through social media – people who often never met each other face to face. It even is not that obvious which law would be applicable.
Checking the identities of those involved would be a necessary first step, at least for projects where it is quite conceivable that people could harm others, and at least for those who take responsibility for the collaboration.
Roland Legrand