IOSP Talk: Speaker Notes

draft speaker notes for practice, 2026-10-11.

Five minutes: about 489 spoken words at 130 words per minute, roughly four minutes, so about a minute for questions. Seven slides. The closing line is meant to be remembered:

Don’t trust the person. Don’t trust the number. Read the trail, and judge for yourself.

Slide 1: Intro: computational trust

Computational trust: how can a person, a community or a machine tell whether to believe something? I drew it as a graph twice. The first time I drew the wrong thing: people as the nodes, a wallet at the centre, the token balance as credibility. A token does not remove the gatekeeper, it moves the gate to whoever decides who holds tokens. So here is my question: what if the nodes were claims, and the edges human-made connections between them? Could we then compute trust from atmospheric evidence, meaning social data from the ATmosphere?

Slide 2: Attempt 2: nodes are claims

Breadcrumbs flips it. A node is a claim: a signed record that says this happened, here is the evidence. An edge is a typed connection a person signs: supports, opposes, evidence. Identity is demoted to who signed it, and it lives in their own repository. Subsume, don’t replace: badges and affiliations stay as the base layer and claim nodes go on top, so nobody needs permission to add one. Metrics are graph math over the claims.

Slide 3: The station: add locality, and the ask

This is how claim nodes get made. At our station you do something real: stream a sensor reading, play a synth note. The signed record streams live, and a badge can validate that you did it. But a record alone does not prove you were there. So we add a tap: an NFC tag or QR code on an object, self-minted as a claim in your own repository, attesting one thing, that you were there.

Slide 3b: Locality first: a crumb at the station

These are the objects: the two station magnets, an NFC keyring you can take home, wood disks, and glass cabochons with a QR code inside. The cabochons are a live test. When you finish a station, the box at the end of its worksheet section has a QR code: scan it, log in with your own handle, and the station joins your own trail.

Slide 4: Then you build the evidence

After this talk you go to the stations and make atmospheric evidence yourselves. Play a note on a Wemos synth: it is a signed record. A Wemos with a sensor streams live readings. An airglow automation relays events onward. The toon board is where they all arrive as one fabric. Your records are the real data.

Slide 5: What counts as credible?

What counts as credible depends on the metric you choose and the graph you compute it on. With wallets, the human judges a person. With claims, the human judges a claim, and sees what connects to it and who signed each link. Metrics can describe a claim’s place in the graph, but only a human can judge what that position means. Our bet: claims support human judgement better, because the math is the same but the links are readable, typed and signed. My aim is a model of human judgement, not a replacement. So, can we compute trust from atmospheric evidence? We find out at the stations.

Slide 7: Closing mantra

Don’t trust the person. Don’t trust the number. Read the trail, and judge for yourself. Then questions.