 Hi, my name is Dan Whaley and I'm the founder of the Hypothesis Project. Thank you for the opportunity to apply for the May 2013 Fellowship. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote a famous article in The Atlantic entitled As We May Think. In it, he outlines the concept of a web browser, which he called a memex machine, that would enable people to blaze trails through the world's knowledge, creating links and associations and notes that others would be able to follow. Headingly, in 1993, Mark Andreessen built a collaborative annotation capability into the very first version of NCSA's Mosaic browser, which he subsequently turned off when he realized the scale of the service he'd have to run to support it. Since the Talmud first brought rabbis together to annotate their shared oral history over a thousand years ago, scholars, schoolteachers, and ordinary citizens have been writing in margins and sharing their thoughts with each other. We now finally have the infrastructure to bring that capability and with it the dreams of those pioneers before us to the sum of all knowledge. It's clear to me that we are at the beginning of an extraordinary transformation in our thinking, in our culture, and in our relationship with each other and with the planet we call home, a modern renaissance that promises to change nearly everything we know about life. It also seems obvious that this transformation is essential for our sustainability as a species. The seeds of this change have already arrived, principle among them, the internet, and the global shift in consciousness and power that it is already creating. But we need more, some core infrastructure, to catalyze the rest of what's possible. At Hypothesis, our vision is an open source, non-profit organization that will build technology and with it provide a service to crowdsource the world's best analysis, insights, and references on top of information everywhere. Exactly the idea of trailblazing that Vannevar first imagined nearly 70 years ago. Our goal is a revolution in how we derive knowledge from information, how we know what's credible in the world around us, and ultimately how we collectively make decisions about our future. Not as dictated by a top-down editorial bureaucracy, but as organically derived via collaborative peer review over time. We've brought together some of the leading minds in language, rhetoric, reputation, distributed systems, and internet technologies to help build an open source platform using emerging standards for annotation, together with an innovative reputation model and permanent data storage at the Internet Archive. We've partnered with the Open Knowledge Foundation and have assumed primary stewardship and development over their annotator project. In that foundation, we are implementing a new capability to surface annotations from potentially thousands of individuals or more on the same documents in a beautiful and elegant user interface. In addition, we're also now beginning implementation of the distributed peer review capability that will ensure that high-quality voices rise to the top. Others have tried elements of this before. In fact, we've counted over 50 different efforts over the last 15 years. Essentially, all have failed. We took a year and interviewed many of those involved in previous projects. Our research led us to key conclusions about why these efforts didn't achieve their potential. Among them, that they failed to implement an effective reputation model, that they didn't use an inline approach to annotation, that they weren't open source and weren't nonprofit, that they paid little or no attention to partnerships or standards, and that they didn't focus enough on the cold start. We're not just building technology, we also have to nurture the seeds of a global community of thoughtful contributors around the world's most important documents and important issues. Hypothesis has been conceived both technically and organizationally to address those issues. Our goal is to implement a global channel for collaboration around any content, to be open source, nonprofit and transparent, with strong protections for privacy and a lack of political or ideological bias. In the years since I first applied for the fellowship, we've gotten a lot done. We built a functional prototype of the annotation system, and thanks to the Sloan Foundation we brought together over 50 of the world's leaders in reputation design at San Francisco for a three-day workshop to help us design our peer review model. We've also partnered with the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Internet Archive, and have joined the Open Standards process, which has now become a W3C community working group. We've also raised over $750,000. The Open Knowledge Society you've articulated resonates strongly with my vision of a wiser world, both one that has a perspective and the capability to make decisions rationally and to plan thoughtfully for its future. It's the reason I started Hypothesis. It's clear that you believe that profound positive changes in our society are possible at the time when we most need them. It would be my honor to join such a fellowship. Thank you for your time. This moment is here at hand. We now have the means, I think, for everybody on the planet to know as much as he or she wants to about anything. But the way in which that's done has to be done on the basis of an evolving authority, an evolving set of connections, perceptions, views, and editorial processes that you folks are thinking deeply about, and not enough other people are. When we talk about moving the web forward and communication on the web forward, what we don't want to do is create another walled garden community. What we want to do is publish in ways that are accessible to everybody who wants to get on that bandwagon. That's what brings us to be involved in a W3C community group, to define an annotation standard for data exchange. And that's what makes our story really compelling to me vis-a-vis any number of startups doing some kind of web clipping sort of project. To me, I don't want to be sharing little snippets. I want to be sharing real references to real web content with URLs. That's the decentralization of the web that Tim Berners-Lee imagined when he set out to build it, and I think that's the direction that we should be going.