Questions about Free, Fair and Alive
The attempt of a commoning digital twin
As an enthusiastic commoner and software architect, the question for me is how we can transfer the values of commoning — such as community, trust and sustainability — to the digital world. This article takes you on a journey of how a digital twin for collaborative action emerged from the philosophy of the book “Free, Fair and Alive” by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier — and why it is important for Commoners to create their own space that is free from the “knowledge bias” of commercial thought patterns.
In this article, I'll tell you how I created a chatbot for the book 'Free, Fair and Alive. ' Learn, through my motives, challenges and insights, how we can transfer the spirit of commoning to the digital world.
What is commoning?
People organize themselves on equal terms in order to get along well with each other and to produce useful things for themselves and others in a self-determined manner.
From card set: Model language of commoning
What is the commoning digital twin?
As a software programmer, I am inspired by these diverse methods of commoning. They're all applications that I want to pour into software right away. But the first thing I had to do was ask the question of how we can even digitally grasp the spirit of commoning. So I just wanted to start by asking this popular saying ChatGPT:
Is that the language of commoning?
These answers from the chatbot seemed very strange to me. Many terms are used that do not conform to the commoning vocabulary and come more from a commercial and political mindset. I couldn't even relate some of the answers to Commoning.
It is due to the text corpora on which these Large Lange models are based. These are pulled from the Internet in an undifferentiated manner and cause this distortion of knowledge. It became clear to me that I had to find a solution to digitally authentically represent the spirit of commoning.
My solution: A RAG system with trustworthy text corpus
To avoid the knowledge bias, I decided to develop a chatbot based on the architecture of a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system. The decisive difference to a GPT: I was able to define the text corpus myself, which I also trust. In this way, I was able to ensure that the chatbot's answers authentically reflected the values of commoning.
Chatbot with the text I trust
And there is a main Commoning work “Frei Fair und Lebend” by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, I chose this work when I selected the text corpus for my chatbot.
Although the chatbot can only answer specific questions about the content of the book, it uses OpenAI's powerful language model as a translator and text writer. This offers a particular advantage: The chatbot can adapt to different cultural contexts of users, whether for children, language learners or even for other languages such as Italian. This makes it possible to make the valuable content of the book accessible to a wider audience. For example, simply enter in the chat: “I am 8, can you please formulate the answer so that I too can understand it?”
Link to the chatbot: https://app.bcommonslab.org/FreiFairLebendig
View of the chatbot with a few questions and answers.
Question to my chatbot: What are the values of commoning?
I was interested in answering the question about the digital twin in the language of commoning, but this topic is not addressed in the book. That is why I now used an empirical bridge, my experience as a software architect and humanist, to place this message of commoning in a digital context. First, I interviewed my chatbot to explore the values of commoning.
Question: What are the most important values of commoning?
answer:
- Community: cooperation and mutual assistance.
- Trust: Trust in the abilities and intentions of others involved.
- Reciprocity: Give and take in a balanced relationship.
- Sustainability: Responsible use of resources.
- Inclusion: Inclusion and appreciation of diverse perspectives and contributions.
Chat with Free Fair & Lively
With my experience as a software architect, I have reflected this answer into the digital context. This enabled me to answer my original question about the “digital twin of commoning.”
My Answer:
Question: What is the digital twin of commoning?
Answer:
- Community: A digital expression of our connectedness — created by people for people.
- Trust: Sources with a human identity — a leap of trust that promotes solidarity.
- Reciprocity: A facilitator of ideas and thoughts — an invitation to unconditional cooperation.
- Sustainability: We are the network — a conscious use of ourselves and our resources.
- Inclusion: Everyone can contribute — with appreciation for the diversity of perspectives and experiences.
And so I came up with a completely different answer than the original one from ChatGPT. That's just my empirical answer, but I trust it more than any global collection of texts.
open source
If you are interested in taking a closer look at how the application works and tinkering with it yourself, this option is also available:
https://github.com/bCommonsLAB/ChatWithFreiFairLebendig
You can try out the chatbot here:
https://app.bcommonslab.org/FreiFairLebendig
Call To Action
How about we integrate more texts about commoning into this chatbot? Would you be interested in adding scientific texts to a common directory under a Creative Commons license? In all languages of the world? Together, we could expand our knowledge and build up a comprehensive archive.
