 Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to Futurescapes and to our guest today, Dan Whaley, the CEO of Hypothesis. Hypothesis, if I get it correctly there, darn hard to pronounce but brilliant in action. And it's just hypothesis. There's no need to speak the punctuation. We get that a lot and we've actually taken to start shortening it in print form because it was meant to be clever but too clever, I think. Dan, just explain what Hypothesis is doing in the annotation space, how you came there 10 years ago, I think, and where you think you are at the moment in, which we say, creating a collaborative network. So our mission is to bring a kind of, is to bring new infrastructure for connecting people and ideas over the web over every page of every document on every platform known to mankind, overall knowledge. And I wish I could take credit for this idea because it's a really old idea. This idea goes back to Vannevar Bush in the 40s who wrote an article as we may think, which many people have read, which kind of imagines the web. You know, any of this stuff. This was kind of a sketch on paper, so to speak, imagining what might be possible with this kind of mechanical machine that would be the sum of all knowledge. And he imagined, you know, people would be able to collaborate creating trails and kind of shared journeys through knowledge over, you know, using lots of these interconnected machines. He basically invented the web and Wikipedia and annotation and a whole bunch of other things in a pretty revolutionary article and honestly, we're just now in the year 2021 still getting around to implementing some of the basic stuff that he, you know, and others like him, Dewey was another one, Dewey Decimal, but way way way back in the day. And, you know, Mark Andreessen, you know, Tim Berners-Lee calls that annotation in his, you know, kind of note, which, you know, kind of launched the World Wide Web, vague but interesting, I think was the comment of his PI or his superior. And Mark Andreessen built a collaborative annotation capability into Mosaic in the browser in, you know, early 90s, and, you know, we have had, and then turned it off after two months because, you know, too complicated. And since then we've had like 60 projects that have been come and gone and tried to do stuff like this. And so we are, we said, how come those didn't work. And, and took the findings from that the generosity of people who shared their, their experiences into what became the design inputs for hypothesis as a nonprofit. You know, it's got to be standards based, probably got to be a nonprofit to begin with. For profit can innovate on top of that but the hard part the standards making and getting the stakeholders together initially needed to be nonprofit. And, you know, stuff about browsers and design thinking and some other things but probably needed to be open source to begin with, as all of the major, you know, kind of implementations of browsers and things like that initially have been. And so we're 10 years in. We're just kind of getting started. We've, we've written a bunch of code people are using it have about a million users. Institutions are starting to use it to for you know bringing peer learning into the classroom journals are starting to use it to bring kind of post pub peer review and kind of community, you know, reflection over scholarly works. So, you know, Washington Post is using it, you know, over some of their pages. You know we have lots of people using the libraries, the software libraries to kind of implement their own stuff. You know, our goal is, you know, in in in another five or 10 years, you know that some of the most coistered walled garden, you know the apex predators of proprietary content platforms. Kindle. You will finally have to crack their spine and allow us to collaborate over the pages of this of the content that we purchased, so that we can have a little private book club in the margins of that book, so that we can see, you know, community layers of thinking you know things like everything from everything from like paradise loss to the Bible to the Korean to, you know, you know the newest Pulp novel that you're, you know, has a fan base and you know wants to have different community groups. And there's a there's a notion. If you take this to the extreme that I didn't point, but a very thoughtful early team member of ours did called persistent ambient awareness. And that is that wherever you are you have the ability. If you so choose to be aware of conversations and thinking and so forth of others that you follow. And maybe sometimes others that you don't but that you're in control of that experience. There's a lot of fire hose of spam patrols coming at you but that you can selectively kind of tune in to things that that might be interesting and I think the, the benefit of this long term the short hand of it is a kind of is to, you know, really leverage the surplus in society for for good versus versus, you know, kind of waste, I suppose, and, and secondly to to operate more socially more efficiently to get, you know, you think about this in in the world of science that the role of the preprint is to accelerate the metabolism of discovery. You know, it's, it's, it's a yeah I don't get peer reviewed eventually and you know, you know, close careful analysis will point out things that can be improved. It's a real benefit to for somebody who's working in that field to be able to see, even if it's just a shorthand sketch of some really key research that's coming out. This is particularly relevant in the coven world with, you know, the acceleration of bio archive, and its influence and and I'm going to stop stop you there just a second down because I want to go into more depth around that piece of future vision of the social benefit the the persistent ambient awareness issues I think that's that's terrific. But first of all I want to just tack back to the, the 10 years that you've been doing this. Yeah. Any surprises I was, yes, I was very convinced at the beginning that this would be the researchers best tool, but actually it's become faster moving in learners would be my perception than in researchers is that would you agree. Yeah, I mean there's just some very simple reasons for that. So surprises. And just to cut to the punchline on that the, it's really a cold start problem. And that that's, that's the basic and the benefit of a classroom is that the teacher can choose some tools, and they can bring them to the class and they can, in a sense, you know, not, I use enforce in a kind of gentle way but they can, you know, suggest that the classroom adopt the practice and then everybody does. And, and so, you know, it's, it's one of the, you know, one of the key reasons why we think education is a great place other than, you know, one sixth of planet Earth is in school. Everybody's in that annotation and pure learning our natural benefits to critical reading and learning and pedagogy. And, you know, and with then, you know, young minds that adopt these practices and tools can take them out into the world and, and, you know, spread them around so. You know, with the research community, you know, we, it is, you know, it is, it is a being adopted but some of the stuff that's in the works right now, I'm particularly excited about, you know, in in and around the preprint community and some of the projects that are working on fundamental improvements to kind of community review. And there's some really some great stuff in the works and, and I think, you know, good news is, is, you know, kind of standards based collaborative annotation is a great vehicle, kind of natural substrate for some of that and so that's, yeah, I think that's, that's hugely encouraging. The, and of course we have F 1000 we have all we have all sorts of open platforms now which are going to make this subsequent to to publication ongoing review. That's really important. Yeah. I mean mentioned surprises there's another one. You know, initially I kind of started this, my original itch was kind of a fact checking, you know the public dialogue and you know, news and events and you know kind of things like that. And so I kind of came to this as a kind of a fact in a fact checking frame. But my, my biggest earliest surprise was. Well, there's been a bunch of them but one of them was was how much this was really just useful as basic collaborative kit, in a sense, for a wide range of applications, of which fact checking as a teeny little slice. You know, a 1% type function in a in a much, you know, richer world, you know, you know, think how many tabs you have open in your browser every day all day long that are like Google Docs. You know, and, and equivalents. And, you know, a open, you know, based framework for that over all pages, you know, kind of opens just opens up a lot of possibilities. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and then just expand a little bit, if you will on this on the social benefits. Are you seeing those are you feel that people are reaping those certainly in the classroom I would have thought that was the case. Yeah, I think, you know, the, I think, solving the cold start problem is one of the challenges that these early folks had, I mean it was in some ways, the only challenge. Now there were symptoms of the way that they approached the implementation that kept them from solving the cold start problem. Not using open, not using standards and kind of being advertising driven in terms of their business models and some other things like that. But, you know, the, the, how do we introduce something in a right environment, where we can get it in front of a lot of people, and socialize them with a practice so that we can bring this kind of open framework and architecture to more and more verticals well for us education is that is that perfect vehicle for a bunch of different reasons and so in terms of the larger social benefit, I think, you know we're seeing a little bit of it and you know kind of discussion around in the sciences and folks are using this to as a deliberative framework for, you know, climate news and things like that but it, but the larger benefits will come from it being adopted and more and more, you know, kind of adjacent spaces by more and more people. And so everything that we're doing is really focused on how do we get to critical mass. Yeah, do you see the possibility and I've tried to concentrate future scapes around 2025. And I'd be interested in your in your thoughts about that as a where you might be at that point but also I'd like to know whether you see this breaking across into be to be areas. Yeah, if and if so do you see any likely targets. So I said the second question first which is absolutely, you know, the applications inside the enterprise and inside, you know, other kinds of commercial applications are just absolutely enormous. And, you know, those are, you know, natural kind of adjacencies for us. You know, just, and we see this as kind of the layers of the onion maybe education first research second. Third would be maybe private use of this by researchers inside enterprise. So, you know, imagine that you're a researcher at, you know, Genentech or something like that. You will have be working on a lot of private stuff, but you'll also want to be interacting with public communities and aware of public discussions around public research. And you want to be able to move between those contacts seamlessly, just, you know, flipping a, you know, a small user control like a group switch or something in your conversation viewer, and see private conversations that are maybe, you know, company confidential that are hosted on servers behind your firewall, at the same time that you can see conversations that are happening, you know, in public spaces. You know, the ability to kind of switch contacts almost like you were just tapping between two tabs in a browser, I think has a ton of peril of power. And, you know, having this be universal standards base kit for doing this that works with proprietary, you know, services running behind firewalls at the same time that it could listen to public conversations is, is essential for that. And, you know, that's an area that we think a lot about. But a huge event of engineering went into making that work. Yeah, and a lot of the good news is a lot of, you know, we've partly to some people may seem like our product roadmap has been quite long and slow. But getting things built so that they could operate like that is been taken a lot of work. And we've preserved, in a sense, that outcome and that endpoint in all the work that we've done and that that's just, you know, that makes it harder than, you know, if we've taken, you know, more expedient path. Another good example for us is, is government and law. So, you know, governments are sees governments are just the are the intersection of people and documents. So governments, you know, make tons of documents from laws to regulations to memos to, you know, briefings, internal external, it's all about paper. So having, you know, a flexible lens that allows people inside government to work and collaborate and people outside government citizens to in different layers with different focuses and different levels of expertise and agency to voice their communication in ways that are, you know, in a sense in a shared space and a shared mechanism is super powerful. And so that's another one that we're pretty excited about and have some ideas about, you know, how to get started. So, back to that 2025 issue. It's been five years. Do you do you have a sort of mental map of where you'll be. Yeah, I'd be surprised. Well, first, I will say that, you know, and I don't know whether it's us, you know, who, or be somebody else. But this peer learning social annotation in the classroom is coming at warp speed everywhere. And it's benefits are really clear students love it. Teachers love it. And it can really evolve a lot to do more and be of more use both to students and instructors and so forth. And so I think students kind of need their own spaces a little bit. And instructors need more powerful ways to share lessons and assessments and, you know, kind of pedagogies and so forth with each other, that they can reuse on top of texts. And the notion that, you know, that you'll just have to work with the text like, you know, almost going back when I was a student, you know, you'd like the paper textbook home. And then you struggled through it, you know, maybe somebody on your dorm floor happened to be in the same class and you know, get together, you know, compare notes but you were essentially alone. And, you know, trying to learn on your own then it would go to class and, you know, try to catch up and you know, maybe raise your hand if you felt comfortable with that getting, you know, a question answered. So, I think the cool thing is now with what's, what's coming is it, you know, you really be able to benefit from collaborating with others from others insights, you know, being able to drop that YouTube video that explains this concept right onto the page, right onto the sentence where everybody was having the same, you know, question. And, you know, people that are creating texts and creating learning material can benefit from knowing where people are struggling. And so this, this is coming, you know, at warp speed. And I would say by 2025. There will be few classrooms that don't use it in some way. And, you know, then, you know, we can start to, to, you know, really expand and magnify those benefits and in other ways. This has been a huge process as you said when you spoke of social benefits and indeed of the exploration of the ambient perception area. Now, this has been a huge process in pushing out the boundaries of what the network means to all of us in our daily lives. What's your, what's your feeling about that? Do you see this as a first stage of something bigger? Are there other ways in which we will exploit our network, our mutual network connections? Yes. I think one of the biggest opportunities for humanity is what I call, you know, forensic journalism. And there's a really interesting project, which some people have heard of, called Bellingcat. It's actually based in the UK. I don't know if people are going to be listening to this, but it's B-E-L-L-I-N-G-A-T or G-I-N-G-C-A-T. And, you know, these Bellingcat guys, they're the ones that figured out like exactly which, you know, missile launcher it was that shot down the, you know, the Ukrainian jet. You know, and they figured out the cell phone number of the Russian, you know, FSU or the, you know, kind of secret intelligence guy that was running the that poisoned Navalny, you know, and then called him up and interrogated him for an hour without him really knowing who it was. And just the way that they work together collaboratively over source material in a very fine grain way to, with a very directed end, which is nonpartisan and really focused on just understanding and teasing apart, you know, kind of what's going on. So, is this wonderful example of kind of a postpartisan world in which we, you know, the citizens can hold, you know, our agents, you know, our governments as to a much higher standard of performance and really really sidestep a lot of this just crap and noise that we deal with every day. That's a hope. I mean, I'm an idealist and I know humans are, you know, a creatively flawed lot. So there's always some new, you know, speciation of pain that we're able to find to inflict upon ourselves but I do think that we can, we can be better. And, you know, tools like, you know, kind of cooperative annotations so forth can be part of that solution but only if they're created in these standards based open ways where it's a Firefox browser, you know, it's really just there in service to you. And it stays out of the way and just stays in its lane and does what it's supposed to do. But through it, you have a powerful window under the world. That's that you can accomplish all the things that you that you need to do. That's a wonderful piece of vision, Dan. I didn't know that when I started this call with you this evening that I would hear the words post partisan, but my goodness they do give one a ripple of hope. That there may be a world which delivers what social media once promised. Yeah, was a, which we say and a noiseless exchange person to person. Everybody could be heard. Yeah, you know, I'll tell you my to the two big problems I see with social media. Number one, it's, it's a bucket of everything. You go to a Twitter or Facebook. You know, Twitter is, you know, it's one, it's one big channel, right. I mean, you have hashtags, but it's basically one big channel with one fire hose of, you know, hundreds of millions of tweets a day. And you try and you just getting blasted by a bunch of random shit. You know, Facebook is, you know, I suppose you could say it's people, people will scream in agony as I say this is it's marginally better in the sense that it's only your circle, right. But then it's got all the other issues and it's, you know, advertising driven and essentially it's basically a large arena, kind of like almost like a gladiator pit and what you are, you know, there, you're being tossed. You know, kind of add grenades at, you know, which would, you know, get weaponized and, you know, kind of used for all kinds of scurrilous ends, plus our familial networks are not. That's the wrong selection criteria to decide who we want to have conversations with right because it's basically just a bunch of random people people don't pick their families right or they're, you know, the people, they do pick their friends, which is marginally But what we need are layers community layers that are really purpose specific that are layers of expertise of people that are either formal or self organized that that are there to do work of a certain kind to do investigation of a certain kind. And where you can understand the relative knowledge of the participants with respect to each other. And that's where I think some of the, you know, kind of more focused effort of, you know, this kind of that we can see the kind of benefit from I mean I want, I want to, you know, choose my five constitutional or parliamentary kind of specialist layers and and follow them so that I'm when I'm looking at a bill in Congress. I can see what is careful analysis of like draft legislation or something. And you know because there's a PDF of some leaked, you know, Bill coming out of subcommittee and, and you know these folks kind of tear it apart right because Lord knows our legislators don't do it before they can vote on it. And, you know, and they point out the parts that you know are, you know, obviously jammed in there by some, you know, you know, lobbyist that the last minute and flag them. And so that kind of behavior becomes less possible to do. And without tools. It's difficult to kind of engage in that work. Well, thank you very much. I think we have our time now and I think we must see struggling you with questions anymore, but to have a conversation with someone with such a vision of connectivity and such a hopeful frame of mind is pure privilege. Thank you very, very much indeed. Dan is so welcome. And I wish you a good day with very many thanks from the Futurescapes listeners. Yeah, you're welcome. It's my pleasure.