Trustability of AI community: baseline guidelines on how to handle shutdown of online AI forums

[fititnt]

I'm drafting a repository, at this time is called "A/IS Ethics Open Groups" and is available at https://github.com/fititnt/ais-ethics-open-groups, and with a short description:

[work-in-progress] Curated list of Open Groups (accessible to persons who are not yet experts and do not require association with an institution) to discuss Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (A/IS)

While I was looking for online references to be listed, a problem caught my attention with a community that, at least when I first started to approach the artificial intelligence community, seemed to be a potential reference. But this community was closed. Some links on the topic:

• Discover the status of discuss.openai.com in 2019 fititnt/ais-ethics-open-groups#1
• https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/10282/status-of-discussion-forum-discuss-openai-com-in-2019

This issue is open for me to consider discussing with people in the community suggestions for ways to manage online community shutdown so that at least it allows for continuation (if there is interest from others in moderating) and not inspire mistrust in future projects for past mistakes.

Yes, it's a harsh topic.

[fititnt]

I'm thinking about open a topic on https://ai.stackexchange.com/ and, since maybe there do not have people with experience in forum moderation beyond the 3 moderators themselves, I think if I make the question, makes totally sense also make a answer (see It’s OK to Ask and Answer Your Own Questions from Jeff https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/07/01/its-ok-to-ask-and-answer-your-own-questions/).

I will use as drafts the nexts two comments on this issue here on github. I think I would push these changes to AI SE on next days, but maybe it will take more time.

[fititnt]

Draft of question to ask

Tags: ai-community, ethics, digital-rights
Title: Trustability of AI community: baseline guidelines for curators on how to handle shutdown of online AI forums

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TL;DR: for an online discussion forum or equivalent where volunteers users asked to interact with others on topics related to AI, witch principles the curators (the humans who make the service online; the moderators) can assume to, if in the future the service have to shutdown, it will have a graceful shutdown and give a change to others to organize themselves and potentially assume the responsibility to keep the community, in a way that both the community itself and (potentially everyone who make new online forums on the AI topic) could avoid harm and be harmed by actions of others when dealing with user generated content?

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Extra information

I will share some of my research.

Comparation to 'moderation' issues

To keep this question very focused, the focus here is only about shutdown.

Comparation to 'shutdown' Open Source projects

When we have open software and the original developers lost interest in keep in maintained, in addition to the license (that in case of open source softwares means that they already allow be maintained by someone else), we even have some organizations that can "receive" ownership of a project, for example the Apache Incubator https://incubator.apache.org/.

This question is not about open source software (as it is a different topic), but these baseline guidelines asked here, could be equivalent to some type of license (or moral commitment) of maintainers on the very specific case of when they have to shutdown.

A big difference is that online communities (depending of underline software) to change maintainers could be as "easily" as change the admin on a Facebo

[fititnt]

Draft of answer to the question (maybe release as "community owned" instead of stay with my username on AI.SE)

1. Notify your audience in advance; be open to constructive feedback that allow less disruptive changes to your users and still meet your issues
2. Be open to pass the curation of the service to a different organization or group of users with a good past
3. Do all measures you could do to allow individual users have their content as last resort.