David CarrollFor #AcademicToots #AcademicMastodon I’m wondering if universities established dot edu masto instances that we adopted, this could supplant paid #BlueCheck #BlueTick verifications as a de facto employer verification in the #Fediverse, at least for our sector.
Michael Veale@profcarroll i thought about this, and some do (there's an MIT instance for example, but for some reason it doesn't allow me to federate with it.) But do you want your employer running this infra? Also, a institutional timeline v a field/disciplinary local timeline? lots to consider
Tim Chambers@profcarroll I am mullng over if an instance created and supporting only mainstream press would also be a viable idea.
Open Science Feed@profcarroll An easy way to show who is your employer would be if they own the domain. For example https://social.unibas.ch or
https://social.ucla.edu
For now, if you have an academic homepage, you can link to it in your bio. On your homepage you can then add a rel=me statement to confirm that that homepage and the Mastodon account belong together. https://indieweb.org/rel-me
If you add the link in the metadata section of your profile, Mastodon will show it in green.
Joseph Kohlmann@profcarroll There was some related discussion on hci.social yesterday: https://hci.social/@andresmh/109257972125785313
@profcarroll And I’m sure there’s more where that came from // @andresmh
Craig Saila@profcarroll Really like this idea — and could easily extend to #journalism, too, as means to verify staff reporters through their employer and builds more value into @Danhon’s propsal from a couple of days ago https://mastodon.cloud/@Danhon/109247439988874860
Dan Hon (@[email protected])
First news organization to stand up its federated Mastodon server with a trustable domain (e.g. http://follow.washingtonpost.com) and accounts for its staff for people to follow gets a prize. Also, proposal for a standardized domain for news orgs, e.g. follow.bbcnews.com, follow.nytimes.com, and/or autodiscovery of a mastodon server for a parent domain e.g. a socialnetworks.txt #mastodon #media #news #newstech
Dan Hon@saila @profcarroll Yep - I included academia as a use-case in the writeup in my newsletter on Friday:
"Your university or college wants you to have a social media account? Sure, you can have it hosted at following.ucla.edu."
https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s13e17-a-proposal-for-news-organization-mastodon/
@Danhon @profcarroll A ha! Thanks for sharing that (& I'm now starting to feel more confident I'm able to wrap my head around the opportunities here, too)
@saila Put it this way: you want your academic organization to do it before Reed Elsevier does it :p
Nadin Kökciyan@profcarroll well the idea is around decentralization, such an instance would give more power to institutions again to monitor their employees’ activities. They do control our email, work messages and so on, please let’s keep the social media to ourselves :)
If the goal is to show that we are an academic (or verify an account that we really belong to somewhere), the homepage URL could be verified easily and individually.
@nkokciyan I feel sad for Universities that they are not trusted partners in this moment. If only their leaderships could realize the harm this particular loss of faith and trust will engender in the short term while hampering any long term vision of academic viability. Universities used to be safe harbors, places of true exile.