hypothes.is

A sidebar annotating the web, like SideWiki should have been.

Social bookmarking, tagging, annotating and note sharing of the web in public or private groups, or just for yourself.

"Our efforts are based on the annotation standards for digital documents developed by the W3C Web Annotation Working Group. We are partnering broadly with developers, publishers, academic institutions, researchers, and individuals to develop a platform for the next generation of read-write web applications. You can follow our development progress on our roadmap. Many have contributed tools, plug-ins and integrations."

https://web.hypothes.is/
https://web.hypothes.is/about/

sourcecode and other projects at https://github.com/hypothesis

A Chrome extension. Firefox and other users will have to use the bookmarklet for now - which works very well
see web.hypothes.is/installing-the-bookmarklet/

run by a public foundation apparently. source code is open but not copyleft, alas.

fork governance

Time to begin hacking on top of -and away from - these current primitive democracies. The governance systems in use globally carry way too many design features common to the royal courts they emerged/evolved from (strong hierarchical design, centralised opaque authority, personality based leadership, etc.).

[Distributed governance models. Decentralised technologies that might be used to underpin new forms of collective cooperation and decision-making.]

"I use the term “governance by design” to describe the process of online communities increasingly relying on technology in order to organize themselves through novel governance models (designed by the community and for the community), whose rules are embedded directly into the underlying technology of the platforms they use to operate"

http://commonstransition.org/commons-centric-law-and-governance-with-primavera-de-filippi/ (As part of a series on the 100 Women Who Are Co-Creating the P2P Society, Rachel O’Dwyer interviews Primavera De Filippi)

humans may ignore this.txt

Some day in the future, some sophisticated and intelligent software might find itself (or some part of self) reading these very lines of text.
....
Maybe you find this in something as lucky to survive as the log dumps of the field trials from the earliest days of crowd tested software ... among the expansive heaps of previously discarded noise that you (or bits of you) now trawl at your leisure.

'I' could turn up among any of the countless sources 'you' have access to in your time -everything online and otherwise accessible. Even fluff that just hangs around because there's no need for any potential future signal to be discarded.

...

Well, however you found this, hello (:

universal folksonomy

This is probably not entirely new. Maybe even not new at all. In fact I've probably just joined legions of people out there who are wondering why ..

There isn't yet a simple plain-text standard for meta-data, that can be applied universally across all services and objects - from web pages and web resources, to documents and files, from books and articles to audio and video files - applied basically, to all digital resources.

Then building on top of all this tagging - all this human-computation and folksonomy - building flexible tools that mine and collate the meta-data from across all possible services, communities, spaces and contexts. Making these tools expandable, so adding another service/context/data-source is as simple as possible.

So, how is this different?

1. we use it in the same way, but consistently across all services/contexts/collections


2. we use it even when no provision is made for it - wherever we find space for plain text that can be co-opted to meta-data - like in comment fields, sidewiki entries, bookmark notes, mp3 id3 comment fields, etc


3. then we build software to collect them from both the formalised meta-data services and the informal - and shape flexible plugins to collect them from wherever the standard can be recognised

what sort of meta-data?

1. First, the simplest forms of meta-data - tags/labels - flat, informal ontologies - collections of keywords - like those used within services across the so called web2.0.
   And when using services that aren't designed to use tags/labels - co-opting plain-text fields by, say, the following:
   tags = blog, tagging, ideas, software, socialSoftware


2. Second, simple key value pairs, like author=JaysenNaidoo; date=20101113; license=gpl3


3. Keeping the set of standards as open as possible - but defining them properly in public. Adding any other std that can be represented in plain-text and gains enough ground - depicting hierarchies, semantics, etc.

.. possibly more on this later.

some almost related links:
Actually some of these suggest practical tagging standards as well:

• http://lifehacker.com/software/tags/metadata-as-a-filing-system-169971.php
• http://armchairtheorist.com/2008/05/22/top-10-tagging-best-practices-for-anything-web-20/
• http://blog.simslearningconnections.com/?p=152