Sunil Abraham: Online Life

Sunil Abraham is a Bangalore based social entrepreneur and Free Software advocate. Currently he is Director Policy at the recently started Center for Internet and Society. He founded the software company Mahiti in Bangalore in 1998, which aims to reduce the cost and complexity of Information and Communication Technology for the Voluntary Sector by using Free Software. Today, Mahiti employs more than 50 engineers.

Sunil continues to serve on the board. He was elected an Ashoka fellow in 1999 to 'explore the democratic potential of the Internet'. He was granted a Sarai FLOSS fellowship in 2003. Sunil is also a sub-board member of Open Society Institute's Information Programme. Between June 2004 and June 2007, Sunil also managed the International Open Source Network a project of United Nations Development Programme's Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme serving 42 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Between September 2007 and June 2008, he managed ENRAP an electronic network of International Fund for Agricultural Development projects in the Asia-Pacific facilitated and co-funded by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

Sunil Abraham argues that an individual exists online because of transactions online, not because of having a webpage. You have to do transactions all the time to prove your existence in time and space. Records of direct transactions should be available for the public.

Trust emerges online in the social web of institutions and people. From this perspective credibility appears to be a transferable property.
There are two types of transactions. There are machine records of transactions and there are mediated witnessed interactions (editing of pages, public postings, making links, ‘I show I know you’). Digital witnessing contributes to the establishment of reputation and authenticity, through hyperlinks and records of transactions between humans and machines as well as between humans mediated through machines.

Presence and trust raise the issue of authenticity. Online there is hegemony of text. Existence on the Internet only occurs in the infrastructure of knowledge. This subverts existing authenticities in societies.

There are over a hundred versions of the story of Rama as they have been told over the centuries. Today on the Internet there are only two or three. Normally people online can judge real from fake, especially in a series of transactions. However people with a lot of smartness and who take a lot of effort can ‘con’ a community.

When tuning one’s presence when one is about to become each other’s witness, this tuning is actually a testing of the boundaries of the social contract. Like the handshake is a tuning, as are two modems connecting. There are no universal rules for handshakes in an online community.

The community will correct each participant, through comments and remarks of other people, till everybody is equally uncomfortable. Complex dynamics characterize such tuning moments. Who is the boss? What is the right tone? How to fit in? And these are also influenced by expectations, which are the result of previous experiences in real and online spaces.

When discussing the different tones in mailinglists it can be concluded that the same system is different in every context and is defined by many variables: level of English, use of the Google translator, political context, culture in certain ‘scenes’, whether people know each other IRL, how people know each other online and/or IRL. When tuning one’s presence in an online community one can read the history of the community, lurk for a while and decide how to pitch one’s presence.

Young people experience ‘giving data away’ as establishing authenticity online. That is how one exists online, by opening one self up. Older generations do not experience this as such yet, younger generations do.

In the offline world one can live with different identities in different worlds. In the online world one has to find one’s own lowest common denominator between the varieties in identities one has, to be able to keep as many people happy. In this sense most people loose the multiple nuances of their identity.

The impact of having a life online causes that one knows much more stories, direct and first hand of others people’s vicarious experiences. This gives multiple perspectives, more relationships, more understanding. One becomes aware there is not 1 single truth; more empathy and understanding emerge for personal issues and a deeper understanding of political issues as well.

Sunil Abraham is deeply involved with the open source community. He defines open source as follows: to ensure that intangible goods will have the same properties as tangible goods when acquired for free or for a fee: to use, to study, to modify, and to share.

Open Source is a license, a specific way of social organisation and a specific way of publicising. Witnessing of each other is a profound mechanism in the Open Source community. Open Source communities are hierarchies under constant negotiation. The hierarchy is more dynamic than IRL as well as more contextual. The hierarchy can change dramatically depending upon the subject at stake.

Trust in the Open Source community functions on different levels:
1. Legally, the licence itself establishes the terms of access and ownership to create basis of trust in collaboration.
2. Socially open source communities have the social fabric of a meritocracy with a benevolent dictator who is responsible for establishing trust and authenticity, makes space for other ego’s in the limited space of a virtual community, arbitrates abort behaviour outside law and legal situations
3. Open source is a publicized social contract and therefore it can generate global trust

The building of software is all publicised. Therefore in an Open Source community one works for an audience. Failed performance towards the deadline of a release date damages someone’s reputation and generates a loss of credibility. Who has previously contributed successfully to the documentation, the bug report, the patches or to the CBS archive, will be more easily believed and accepted.

One can conclude that the contributions to an Open Source community are acts of performance within the legal framework that defines access and ownership. The hierarchy of trust and authenticity is based on current and earlier performance in the community. Emotions evolve in relation to the performance: to be recognized, to fill the space etc. Benevolent dictators of the meritocracy orchestrate and mediate these performances, emotions and relations between the participants in the community.

Abraham argues that Autonomous Systems consolidate human behaviour and change human behaviour. They can only emerge out of a practice of reflexivity. For example Google gives credibility to a page because real people give value to the page.

The more links to a page, the more credible it is rated. And people can debunk it. A good autonomous system mediates human behaviour with its algorithms. Because the machine mediates human behaviour, it is becoming implicated in the business of authenticity and trust.

Authentic machines can organize their own destruction or defeat. Only in such a case an autonomous system acquires authentic presence. Like human being’s presence, systems should be capable of steering towards well-being and survival or not. An autonomous system should be capable of gaining or loosing authenticity. This is dependent on who has access and on who controls the system. In this respect there are two kinds of systems people use: systems under their own ownership and control, and systems not under their own ownership and control. When a system comes into being, branding and social context create its credibility. When a system is established, its moments of crises and celebration will move its credibility in one way or other direction.

When downloading an Open Source patch, trust is mediated through open source software, open communication and trusted encrypted download protocol that has not been hacked so far. One only needs a limited amount of time to download and this happens between independent actors on the Internet.

When all is connected and the transaction is happening, the network behaves in an autonomous way. This is network reality. In other contexts, not using open source software, trust is established in different ways.

Trust in transactions in the network reality depends on the following elements: the steering of actions from one’s own machine; using publicly audited reputation (like open source); open communication; specific encryption for transaction; a network of independent actors; transactions only use a limited amount of time. However, there are many intermediaries (ISP, local installer, gateways etc.). Trust negotiation happens all the way to the last mile to the home.

Human beings give trust to systems and base their trust on systems as well. This can be false. A lot of trust is based on ignorance and perception instead of on reality and analysis. Trust is a hugely important question, no simple answers like more databases etc. There are a lot of irrational components to the design of trust.

And when already we left the building Sunil added: the best way to establish trust is by smiling and making people laugh….

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