Hypothesis quick overview 2011-10-19

The Internet. Peer-reviewed.

The best minds and the best partners…
Leading experts on web reputation, language and rhetoric, distributed systems, web architecture
The Internet Archive (archive.org)
Led by the founder of the web’s first travel reservation system
Are coming together to solve humanity’s biggest problem:
How to objectively know the credibility of information we consume, at the point we consume it.
Crowdsourced peer-review for the Internet
With a new open-source, distributed framework under a non-profit organization
Prototype in first half 2012, beta in late 2012.
It’s called “Hypothes.is”
Only have time for one slide?

Improving the credibility of the information we consume is humanity’s grandest challenge.
Why?
Because bad information enables and exacerbates poor choices—around monetary policy, military intervention, energy, climate, food, civil liberties.
In short, everything that matters.

If as we encountered new information, in text or video, we could easily know the best analysis and insight on it—sentence by sentence, passage by passage.
What if we had confidence that this analysis truly represented the combined wisdom of the most informed individuals in those domains—not as dictated by a top-down hierarchy, but as measured objectively and transparently over time.
And what if the knowledge of that capability created a powerful incentive for authors to take extra care that their work met a high standard of excellence.
What if it became very difficult to publish information which was factually incorrect?
Imagine….

This is not a new idea.

2011 1997

Why these have failed (or will)
Many different reasons—but these are common to all:
Failure to overcome cold start / Ineffective launch strategy.
Didn’t create Internet-wide functionality. Weren’t thinking broadly enough.
No model for reputation/moderation—poor quality participation, many “broken windows”.
Not open source / open API / non-profit.
Didn’t effectively partner with key organizations.
Failed to nurture great commentary, dialogue, debate that people wanted to listen to.
Didn’t articulate a long term vision for archiving.
Didn’t work with evolving standards for annotation.
Not aware of location, context / Allowed annotation of content that is not stable.
Poor product quality / execution.

And—why comments don’t cut it
They’re isolated from the text. Below the fold.
No implementation of stance. How does the comment relate to the text?
Either moderated by the content provider, leading to conflict of interest, or poorly moderated, leading to quality / noise issues.
Similar to the above: Comments are at the grace of the content provider. (NYT disables comments on >10% of articles … “lack of staff to moderate” … really?)
Are comments “ours” or “theirs”?
No distinction between analysis and chit-chat.
Balkanized systems.
No stable identity / pseudonymity across sites.
No long term vision for archival preservation of contributions (digital marginalia).
For-profit nature of existing solutions means acquisition / changeover of one system for another creates disruptions, lack of continuity.

vs. The NY Times turns off comments on > 10% of all stories!

When what I’m talking about is up here … ? ! Why should I comment down here… and here… and here… ! !

Facebook replacing Disqus… but who will replace Facebook? Who cares to preserve our intellectual contributions for the long term? The solution must be open and archival!

Hypothes.is: An open-source, distributed platform to enable sentence-level, community moderated annotation of news, blogs, legislation, scientific articles, books, video, etc. without the consent of the target.

Plug-ins URL Website API Links from pages / Reveals A diversity of interfaces http://hpt.is/TzLv

Submit Highlight Annotate

Heatmap View Annotations Moderate

Be open source / API
Be not-for-profit (though financially sustainable)
Be auditable & transparent
Think long term
Strong protection for privacy
Favor no ideological or political positions
Build the best team, remain humble
Design Principles
Implement a global feedback channel for any online content
Work without consent of underlying document owner
Work inline, at the sentence level
100% Community moderated
Context aware
Pseudonymous identity
Multiple media types: HTML, PDF, books, video

START SMALL FAIL EARLY FAIL OFTEN LISTEN HARD FIX

Internet Archive (archive.org)
Long term archiving vision, commitment & mentality
Archiving infrastructure
Digital text expertise, Open Content Alliance
Leading reputation experts
Paul Resnick / U Mich
Founders of Slashdot
Emerging Standards
NISO / OAC
Hypothes.is is part of the working group on annotation standards
Initial Partnerships

Advisors (partial list)
Mark Surman
Mozilla Foundation
Andrea Lunsford
Dir. Writing & Rhetoric Program, Stanford
Steve Hazel
Fmr Dir Engineering, Bittorrent
Paul Resnick
School of Information, Univ of Michigan
John Perry Barlow
Founder, EFF
Charles Bazerman
Chair CCCC, Professor UCSB / English
Kaliya Hamlin
Co-founder, Internet Identity Workshop
Sam Zaid
CEO Getaround (2011 Techcrunch Disrupt Cup Winne
Nate Oostendorp
Technical co-founder, Slashdot
Drummond Reed
connect.me / XDI
Brewster Kahle
Internet Archive
Adam Christian
OSAF / Sauce Labs
Garrett Camp
CEO, StumbleUpon
Mikeal Rogers
Yammer / Node.js
Phil Bourne
Editor-in-Chief, PLoS Comp Biology / Founder, “Beyond the PDF” initiative
Rufus Pollock
Open Knowledge Foundation

GetThere (originally Internet Travel Network)
Launched online travel industry in 1995 (first flight ever booked over the web).
Founder, wrote initial code, ran engineering team of 100
First large scale complex web application
1999 IPO, Sale to Sabre, Inc in 2000
Director
Getaround (2011 Techcrunch Disrupt Cup winner)
Sauce Labs (Leading cloud-based functional testing framework)
Dan Whaley

Timeline / Milestones
1H 2011
2H 2011
1H 2012
2H 2012
Concept
Fundraising
Team Formation
Design
Coding
Iteration
Prototype
Alpha
Beta
Launch

http://www.readwriteweb.com	2877
http://skeptools.wordpress.com	624
http://readwrite.com	79
http://feedproxy.google.com	30
http://feeds.feedburner.com	19
http://paper.li	15
http://www.outloud.info	14
http://p2pu.org	14
http://semanticweb.collected.info	8
http://www.newsblur.com	7
http://translate.google.com	6
http://cloudcomputing.collected.info	6
http://www.hanrss.com	6
http://techandstuff.collected.info	4
http://digitalapprentices.collected.info	4
http://newshub.wawd.nl	3
http://mobilemarketing.collected.info	3
http://www.seofacts.biz	3
http://www.readingshq.com	2
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	2
http://ideafarming.collected.info	2
http://alexanderchalkidis.com	2
http://127.0.0.1:8795	2
http://forum.snstouch.com	1
http://knowallthat.com	1
http://tech.collected.info	1
http://aitao.collected.info	1
http://ramesh.collected.info	1
http://digitalscene.collected.info	1
http://www.undesign.com.au	1
http://techmediaweb.collected.info	1
http://www.gotubo.com	1
http://rss.qoli.de	1
http://websitestech.collected.info	1
http://www.lankaweekly.com	1

Hypothesis quick overview 2011-10-19

by dwhly on Jul 10, 2011

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