 Well, to start off, guys, in the program, the official title of this presentation has to do with my work with Bridget and CrowdFact, which I'll explain shortly, and essentially our role in approximating truth through a crowdsourced fact-checking tool. And I've been in Europe the past couple months with these projects and having a lot of conversations in groups like this with thinkers like all of you. And especially when it comes to the crowdsourced fact-checking and how we make that work, something always comes to mind, which is, and I also helped ask this question, which is, who am I working on this project to be the person approximating truth in this sense? You know, if you think about algorithms, you think about people making these fact-checks and you're trying to prioritize them, you're trying to do quality control, you know, you almost immediately get to weights involved. And for some things, for some concepts, for some subjects, that can be straightforward. We have a more precise sense of what is true and what is not. When it gets to complex issues like immigration reform or economic policies or climate initiatives and distinctions between, let's say, certain publishers, so who am I to weight the Guardian or the New York Times differently, or how does Fox News or Yahoo fit into that? So really, I started thinking about the role each of us play in terms of defining what these systems will look like and really how big of a responsibility that is if this space and this annotation layer will grow forward. So when I was thinking about that responsibility in terms of this conference and what would be interesting and add value to people, I really started thinking about our collective stewardship over the annotation layer and that space as a whole. So this is a presentation which we'll eventually get into about thinking as the annotation layer as a commons that we all need to kind of take care of together. And later, I will be demoing Bridget and CrowdFact, so I'll give a brief introduction now and if you're interested, we can go into more depth then. So what are Bridget and CrowdFact? Bridget is a Chrome plugin to build bridges which are bi-directional links in the annotation layer to create contextual relationships between ideas and content across the Internet. So it's essentially an annotation but built into the annotation structure is a link to a separate piece of content somewhere else. CrowdFact for crowdsource fact-checking is a project to utilize bridges in that way. So in one step, you can flag a piece of online misinformation and in the structure of that flag, you are also bridging it to evidence that refutes it or professional fact-check somewhere else. Now why are we doing this? In the words of our founder, David Benjamin, who would have loved to be here today, one of his thoughts or perspectives on this is to answer all of the existential crises facing our planet, we need an evolution of human consciousness. And you can think about those crises being everything from climate change to threats with nuclear weapons to the growing threats of AI. All of these different issues that if you really think about them can keep you up at night. I would just make one caveat there, the words of Greta Thunberg, in terms of all of these crises, we actually have a lot of the solutions for climate change and it's up to us. So that's a little personal comment throwing in there. But why is hypothesis doing this to connect the world's knowledge and I'm sure that's a shared motivation ambition for a lot of us. And it reminds me of a similar ambition from a group probably not all that unlike us some time ago to make the world more open and connected. If we could just do this PowerPoint annotation of that, that was the ambition of Mark Zuckerberg and you can actually take that quote back for a while, Facebook gives people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. And even 2004, we're connecting people through social networks. And today in the past couple of years, we see, well, connection didn't work out so well. Actually we can end up a lot more isolated and I don't need to talk about that because I think we're all aware of those issues and in our everyday experiences. So what is the point? Sometimes when we have these ambitions, they don't go quite as planned. So I'm going to kind of show a couple different groups that had ambitions similarly and what they were going for and how it worked out. So you have bacteria in a Petri dish trying to reproduce, you have the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia trying to expand and you have Facebook trying to connect people. What was their mechanism to carry out that ambition? The bacteria consumed, it consumed available resources, Mesopotamia introduced agriculture and irrigation to feed its people and Facebook introduced social media, the idea that we could all share these things that would connect us. What were the consequences of these mechanisms and how they were used? So with bacteria, you had feast, which led to the consumption of all the resources and then famine and a drought, you had nothing left. With Mesopotamia, you had a surplus of food, but the way they structured their irrigation systems actually meant that it left these major salt water deposits in the land which poisoned the soil, which means they couldn't use it to create more agriculture. And the social media, it created such an abundance of media itself that we had to move to curation because you think about your feed, it was so filled with content every day and you think about all of the other ways it enabled us to access content. Curation was a natural step forward or else we would be spending all day and many hours to go through all this information. And what were some of the results? So bacteria, you had a mass die-off, opposite of reproduction, Mesopotamia wanted to expand, you had civilization collapse and Facebook wanted to connect people led to isolation. So all of us here at iAnnotate, in broad terms we're here trying to connect knowledge with all the different projects we're working on. Our mechanism is social annotations in large part and kind of creating the space where people can annotate together. What is going to be the consequence and what is going to be the result when we look back at this 10, 15 years down the line. So this is why I just wanted to talk and this might be a familiar concept to some people here about the annotation layer as a commons. As actually a shared resource that's accessible to all members of society and they're held in common, not owned in privately and it's something that we're going to govern together and kind of take care of together. And some of those resources specifically applicable to the annotation layer include the actual digital plane so it's almost easy to imagine a frontier type way, right? We're building portals to access this new plane and we're giving the tools to develop it and the other resource that's involved on an individual level is human attention, right? Like every annotation that somebody accesses is an instance of their attention. So what are the consequences if we mismanage these resources? The resources being this digital plane of information and also the human attention. So one thing we can think about is ubiquitous advertisements. So you open an email or a text message and there could be keywords in that, Gmail is still free but there's keywords in the email that are annotated with advertisements right on top of it. And that's probably an outcome that not many of us are interested in and not why we're here. A deeper level of surveillance. So if you open an article on all of our phones there's a curated list of articles that are specifically geared to us based on what we think will be interesting. And that's based on articles we've clicked through and seen in the past. But now if you can collect that same data and information from the annotations themselves it's a more intimate piece of where our attention is at. But if you just see what article I'm reading you can't see where my attention is actually going within that article to a certain extent. If you see what annotations I'm looking at and where I'm clicking them you can see exactly where my attention is going and exactly what context is driving that. And then from there once you have that information I think it's a short step to end-to-end curation which is all of our different projects. And it's really amazing to see we're all talking about interoperability. I feel that's very important. But if we all have projects and we all have communities where everybody's annotating and the space grows as we expect it all to and we all see it will. We're going to be curating annotations and we're going to be selectively exposing annotations to people otherwise it would be too much to go through. So if you think about the analogy from what we have today and if you have this personalized content you take it once up further and if you have personalized annotations on any content you're looking at that's a personalized sense of understanding a piece or a personalized sense of understanding and in a way it's just a deeper level of this curation that's caused a lot of the problems. If you think about an echo chamber in that sense where it's not just the content that's being fed back to you in a positive feedback loop but it is every associated idea with that content and it can really guide your attention and your perspective in ways that may not be productive for us as a society and may not be healthy as individuals. So if we go down that road you could have annotation and then the curation of annotations like we've seen before. And what could be the possible result that we'd all love to avoid from that would be again isolation. Instead of connecting knowledge it's people getting personalized information streams and being in their own little worlds. And if we're all going to be plugged into virtual reality systems and maybe lying in warehouses somewhere in Nevada and just totally in our own little virtual worlds maybe that's not a bad thing. But if we still need to come together and collaborate as a society and make group decisions and functionally cooperate that could be disastrous. So how can we sustainably manage and govern the annotation comments which we all have responsibility over. Sustainable development. So looking at our communities themselves and this is maybe not for today and maybe not for the people here but as this space grows and new actors come in what are some of the principles that are really important. So sustainable growth of the communities themselves and make sure when they are at smaller scales and we can actually have a more realistic feedback channel. We can solve problems at that small scale and adequately prepare for larger numbers of people. An example that really excites me is a group called Open Book in the Netherlands. And they're basically building an open source Facebook, that's their idea. A human centric one and they've had a waiting list for a while of dozens of thousands. They're being very, very slow about how many people they let on to the platform. And they have an open Slack channel with every single user. So they can truly and authentically engage with their early users, try things out, take the community's feedback into account and address the problems before they have 500,000 people. And they're being very diligent and they're being very responsible and they're for going short term rewards in favor of long term sustainable development there. And the sustainable development on the tech side as well. Some of you guys might be familiar with this concept and I couldn't quite, it would have been a great time for an annotation. I couldn't quite find the name of it. But it's the projection that by 2040, if the trends continue as of today, the total amount of energy consumption purely by computation will meet all of today's existing energy demands. Think about all of the energy that's consumed today and you think about all of the data and all of the computation and all of the technology that we're building. By 2040, everything just via computation will match the rest of the world's energy demands. And with renewable and everything else, I mean that might be delayed 10 or 20 years. But that's a serious issue. And so when we're thinking about millions and billions of annotations and all of the data that can be run on that and all of the computations and all of the storage, sustainable infrastructure and sustainable software and doing that in an efficient way, that becomes important as well. And then resilience through diversity and this actually ties into Big Blue Hat's presentation I think. So if you think about ecosystems, if you think about a forest, the number of species within it and the diversity of their different skill sets, their survival strategies, what they can contribute are things that make those systems more resilient to shocks and stresses and everyday issues. So in the annotation layer, if we do move towards curation and we're selectively exposing annotations to people, maybe if we provide a diversity of disciplines and perspectives and ideas, instead of just feeding people what we think will keep them staring at the screen the longest and monetizing their attention. Maybe it can make our connected knowledge system and all of the nodes within that connected knowledge system, all of us, more resilient as well. And then in that case, maybe we have sustainable curation that makes the system more resilient in that way. And maybe we actually do end up connecting knowledge and avoiding the fate of a lot of these ambitions from before. So just one more thought there is it's just I think long term thinking in this sense is really important. Again, I'm not so concerned with this about the groups and the people and the projects here today. But as this space grows and as there's more opportunities within and as more people come inside, I just think it's important to keep perspective of why we're here today, what our purpose is. There's a lot of things we could all be doing and we're here. And think about as a community really stewarding this opportunity to connect the world's knowledge and building a better future. And ultimately if we treat it as a communal opportunity and it's not just one project and one project and one project siloed. But as we've discussed interoperability and making that work, given the potential challenges and given the potential pitfalls ahead, it can be really bright and we can do a lot of good. So if anybody has thoughts, comments, questions, happy to hear them and thank you very much. Stop up and use the mics, please, that would be great. Hey, that was really interesting. Whenever you talk about the- Can I be yelling? Yeah, I think that was the auto shut off thing. I'll try to speak close to it. Okay, so you're talking about the commons and whenever anyone talks about the commons, it makes me think of the Eleanor Instrum concept of the commons. So in parallel with your fisheries management, I mean with your, sorry, like development of the species or the bacteria, the corresponding concept from that would be like fisheries management. One of the key things that they found, that she found in her work with the commons is that they actually don't scale beyond a certain level. So when we're thinking about the problems induced by scaling and when you get to the scale of a Facebook or something like that. Those might be unavoidable aspects of a system because you don't have the local government. You don't have the local knowledge you need to be able to actually govern and regulate it a little bit. So you mentioned management and governance, but I thought maybe you could talk a little more about how you see that governance piece happening and not just the spontaneous emergence. That is a really good question. And I would say that something I'm really happy about is that you asked that question. And I actually don't have really good answers there. Beyond, I mean, governance is something I meant more in terms of kind of community ownership, not necessarily policy, but just the way that individual projects even in how we kind of collaborate together with things like interoperability and things like standards. We'll make it a kind of resilient and sustainable system going forward. So I don't actually have exact answers, but I hope people in the room and colleagues of people in the room do, and we can start talking about them. Thank you. Yeah. Any more questions? All right, another round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.