 So I just wanted to say welcome to the community chat reclaimed community chat and this is August we haven't done one for at least a month or two because we've had a conference on top of a virtual conference on top of travel. So it's nice to be back in the lap of community luxury. And we have a special guest today that we brought on after going to WordPress campus. Myself and Lauren went to WordPress campus in New Orleans in the dead of July and it was actually wonderful, even the weather as hot as it was on Sunday I walked around I really enjoyed the city in sweltering heat so it was a great time. Yes, I agree and we actually heard Bonnie talking about some of the work they're doing at Michigan State University at the mesh lab to kind of rethink social networks in the age of activity pub. And I was compelled as many were. And so I asked Bonnie to join us today to talk a little bit about the work happening there, and hopefully for us to have a conversation post facto to talk about some of the impact of that and what that looks like so Bonnie, welcome, and feel free to introduce yourself to talk a little bit about the work and then share, talk, dance, whatever. Yeah, nobody wants me to Dan. So I'm Bonnie Russell. I am the product manager for humanities Commons and the project manager for mesh research at Michigan State University. I have library science degree. I have a library science degree. So my background is in libraries it's also arts based my bachelor's and is in film studies of minor in theater so I come sort of from a varied background. I spent 10 years in scholarly publishing as well. So I also have an eye to the publishing and that's something that that I can talk about later. So in 2021. The Michigan State University took over the Commons from the Modern Language Association in 2020. In 2021 our tech lead our project director Kathleen Fitzpatrick and I were talking about the next generation of the Commons to give you a little background on the Commons, we have about 52,000 members across seven nodes. When I say nodes, the Commons is a multi site multi network. So not only are we a network site but we have networks within the network. And that enables us to allow MSU and MLA to have the ability for users to spin up their own WordPress based sites. So if you joined humanities Commons today you can fill out your profile, you could spin up a WordPress based site and for a project for a class for just a personal portfolio. You can deposit work in our open access repository and you can create a group or join a group to talk about things that interest you. So in the in the course of discussing this mic had brought up the activity pub standard. And all of us were familiar with it, you know we I've sort of played with mastodon here and there and I thought about some other things and the more we looked at it the more we realized that as our multi network site. So we joined members and content we were starting to run up against really the sort of natural limit to how much WordPress can handle in a single installation and thought about Federation. And so what we've done is we've secured a grant we've got a grant from the Mellon Foundation and a second grant from the National Science Foundation to go ahead and build the next generation Commons. And what we will do is we're currently in the beginning process of this mic is working on an API. And we will start the build of the actual next gen Commons probably by end of the year. I do have a few slides. And so I'm wondering if I can see. Yeah, let's see if they share if there's any issue and you want to like shoot them over to me, let me know. But let's see. I'm issue sharing window. Oh, it looks like I'm going to be able to write. Yes. Can you see my screen. Yes. Oh yeah. Okay, so this is what I just talked about. We have seven nodes 52,000 numbers we also have an open access repository with 22,000 deposits and 33 languages. That stat was from earlier this year we may actually have more than that now. And we are gaining deposits in multiple languages regularly. So this is our current site architecture. It's a single multi site multi network installation. The great thing is you can run updates on one site, your user permission sit in one place. The bad side is is that we're responsible for all the matrix maintenance and administration and it's really hard to scale. So plan site architecture. This is what we're moving to sites will be split into separate instances. You know what I'm going to do a little actually that didn't really did that work. That didn't work. Oh, great. Okay. So basically what this is is that users would have their home comments so you might be a member of Humanities Commons you might be a member of MLA Commons. These commons is will be able to then choose who to federate with. We're bringing on stem and plus commons in 2025. Plus commons will be for educators. But also looking for collaboration with people from the arts with humanities and things like that. Activity pub will be used to interact between sites and other activity pub compatible clients. So that means mastodon pixel fed. Let me any of the other sort of activity pub compatible clients and it allows people to control their own instances. And really what a federated open commons promises is fundamental change to who participates in the creation and dissemination of knowledge. How they do so and where the power in those relationships lies. So for instance smaller instances would require less powerful servers so for institutions or organizations that don't have a lot of funding. That's a plus and larger instances experiencing a lot of traffic wouldn't actually slow things down. And the nice thing about this is all of those instances will be able to connect to our open access repository for their members to be able to share their work. So what's next. We're building the commons API now that API will actually work for others as well so we're looking at we've got librarians who are interested in pulling information from our repository. We've got others including orchid that we're talking with to be able to allow the information to go back and forth so people don't have to re re re re key in all of the information from their profiles. Our groups and profiles will be rebuilt using the active activity pub protocol. So you'll be able to have conversations where people are. And then this particular model is going to phase in over the next couple of years. Building dot h commons dot org is actually Mike thick our tech leads blog and he is actively talking about the very technical details of this. And I would recommend anyone who's interested in the real technical details and the information about how we're doing this to follow that. And then this is my email. I'm on mastodon at bats and lavender h common social. And please feel free to reach out. And if you want information on the team site governance and vision and mission statements sustaining dot h commons dot org. So let's see now. That was very efficient Bonnie. I have to say I was going to say I really try a building that h commons dot org. That's awesome. Yeah that knowing that there's a blog where that's being documented is amazing. So let me ask you this seeing your overview slide and knowing something about WordPress multi site and that multi networks with this new activity pub. Will it still basically be a WordPress site but using various WordPress federated instances. Yes. And then people can share there as ever they like using RSS using you know mastodon like what does it look like practically. So practically the plan is we are based. We are a forked version of commons in a box which was developed at CUNY. We have made our commons code available to others so people can spin up a commons whenever they want right now. What we're planning on doing and what we're currently doing for in Venio which is the open access repository that we're implementing which was the platform was developed by CERN is we're actually contributing plugins to that particular platform. The plan is to do the same for WordPress. So we are developing the API. We will develop the plugins and I know that WordPress I did have a discussion at WP campus with one of the WordPress representatives that were there. They're working on integration with activity pub as well on the WordPress side. I think that we may be a little ahead. And so we're planning on writing plugins to allow this to happen. And so Mike could answer the specific technical areas but there is some information on building the commons about this. But the plan is to make that available to everyone so that you know certainly our participating organizations and I should probably stop and explain what a participating organization is. The commons is currently grant funded but we're moving toward a plan for sustainability. One of the things that we're doing is where we've got participating organizations who essentially underwrite the ability for us to provide all of our tools for free to individuals. So any scholar any student any interested person can join the commons make a website create their profile publish their content and do that all for free. That is intended to continue. We intend to provide these tools for free to anyone who comes and the participating organizations are part of that. What the participating organizations will get then is their own commons. That will federate with the nodes that they choose to federate with, including the main commons which humanities commons is sort of the main hub of the site now that will transition to interdisciplinary space. And then humanities commons will be one of the nodes. And so that interdisciplinary space will sort of be the hub node. And then you can choose to federate you'd federate with the hub, right, and then you can choose to federate with any of the other nodes. What that does it will allow people, much like I think I've been thinking about it kind of the way that lemmy and cave in work, where you've got the ability to have your magazines on cave in which are on your instance. But then you can also follow other instances on lemmy you can follow, you know topics on lemmy you can follow things like that. So that that is the intention. So MLA may have some public and they do have some public groups that anyone can join as long as they're a commons member. Those you could join in this model, but the information would be in activity pub would be moved by activity pub. And so one of the things that we're also looking at with the open access repository is we are also looking to eventually incorporate some peer review. We have a number of open access journals on the commons they've been interested in this. And some scholars just want to do open peer review Kathleen Fitzpatrick has done open peer review on her last two books. And so the intention will be that the comments that are made would also be facilitated through activity pub so you could actually post to mastodon and have conversation there that would then appear on that deposit page. So that is the plan, and then you could also then syndicate that out. And because of the integration with WordPress, you could potentially put that into a page on your WordPress site, and then have conversation there that would then reflect back. So that's the plan. So with in this, I'm not going to get too technical, but I'm interested like with each school that does run one of these federated instances. The idea is you get all the plugins and stuff for free, but you have to stand up and host your own instance. Correct. And so that in some ways liberates you a little bit and then they'll all have standards that they have to follow in order to be part of that Federation. Gotcha. We all have standards we have so if you look at our, our mastodon server we have very clear policies. I was actually the person that brought those policies so if you have questions on those I can answer them. I use them for DS 106. I literally stole them. So thank you. More power to you I'm happy when things get reused. And I think that that's something that we intend to continue to offer, you know, participating organizations additional support. So they get support for their comments. So certainly if they were to enter in as a as a participating organization, we would offer them the service of some additional potentially help with figuring out Federation help with some of those things because the intention is to continue to to provide that in order to raise money to provide the tools for free to everyone. What this opens up though and what we're seeing is about 20% of the Commons membership is outside of North America and Europe. We've got a ton of members from the global south we've got a ton, a ton of members from organizations and from institutions that don't have a great deal of funding that can't afford an open access repository can't afford to domains domain of one zone. In fact, I have two projects that are on domain of one zone here at Michigan State. And so what we're looking at is the ability to empower these institutions and organizations that don't have the funding to essentially spin up the Commons on somewhere like Reclaim or on somewhere that you know even if they have hosting at their own institution but they don't have tech support wordpress is one of the I think it is actually the top CMS now being used on the web. And so by the world. Yeah, by utilizing wordpress. Most people are familiar with it. It's pretty easy to stand up. Yeah, and then we're we're providing the plugins and the underpinnings to be able to do that. So it's interesting. And I know other people want to talk but I'm not going to let them talk. The other thing is that we have we're spinning up something called Reclaim Press. I'll be talking about that but what's got me thinking of kind of like we did with C boxes you have an installer. And so you could have a custom template which has your stuff and people could say this is how much it would cost to run a instance. And my questions around costs and sustainability really links back to so there's now the institutions kind of absorb absorb that cost for all of those people and what allows people to get on some because for me the humanities Commons seems linked with MSU, but at the same time, independent of it, is that true and how would that work for different nodes in the Yeah, so humanities Commons is really independent in terms of where we're supported we all work for Michigan State. And, you know, I'm on a couple of other projects within Michigan State. But, you know, humanities Commons is not a Michigan State instance. We have MSU Commons, which you can it's commons.msu.edu, and we collaborate with the library the library hosts that particular comments. And so that was our proof of concept of how do we spin these up and have them be independently hosted but still continue to interface. So they're they're hosting quite a bit of content on there. So we've done the proof of concept for this particular one and we continue to kind of that that will be our test case as we roll out these plugins to kind of work with our internal MSU folks who are very interested in this to be able to make sure that yes this works and then we'll roll it out to the nodes, and then we'll start rolling it out to the wider community. And so that's basically your pilot test case for all these plugins that you're developing. And then you can use that really thank you for the deeper dive because I was trying to understand like, is it mastodon replacing wordpress but essentially it's not it just provides, you know, anyone who has a mastodon instance as well to pull that all in or do it from there etc. It's really awesome. Anyway, I'll shut up, let other people talk. By re architecting the groups, which are sort of our hub of discussion and collaboration into activity pub. What you could do then, as you could follow those groups with your mastodon client, or pull those into another instance. You know that that is the key. One of the things that is incredibly important to us is making information open connecting people not just across institutions but across countries. And on the roadmap, we have I mean this is aspirational but on the roadmap we have potential translation tools to allow people who are working on the same types of work or the same disciplines or the same topics to be able to come together, even if they don't necessarily speak a common language. I mean that's far in the future, but that's where we want to go is to be a connector so that people are people who are working in stem who are looking for arts help in terms of communicating topics to non scientific people. That's what stem Ed plus Commons is starting to do. We're working with Julie the Barkin, who's a stem educator here. She's a geologist who is looking at you know how can we make science more accessible by using sculpture, theater, different ways to communicate these concepts and so I think that that's something that we intend to do and I feel like the team feels that the more we open this up and allow people to kind of choose who they're federating with choose that information, and maybe turn on that fire hose you get some really interesting opportunities for collaboration and for new scholarship that haven't been seen before, because these people don't know that the other exists right got a scholar working in Japanese on a topic and you've got another scholar in the US who's working on a similar topic. They don't speak the same language they haven't read each other's papers. But perhaps we can connect them and have them, you know, see where some commonalities are so I think that that's the ultimate goal is really to facilitate that communication worldwide. I think you're muted. Yes, I am muted. I had a kind of quick question, potentially buddy. I was curious. I'm always kind of thinking about like, I think in some ways the folks that are attending this community chat, and maybe you're watching the recording later are a little bit the choir here of like, a lot of the folks coming to this are like in on open stuff and decentralized alternatives to to traditional social media and stuff. I'm everyone but Chris, I'm curious if you have experience or like a go to way you like to sell this on folks who maybe have like literally no idea what activity pub is or any of these and are like, why wouldn't I just tweet to the community of scientists that are in my field. How do you, how do you talk to people about that. That's exactly my example. The reason that humanities comments was created was that there was a group of scholars at MLA Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who, you know, is is pretty well known in humanities, very well known in humanities circles, let's face it, has maintained for a long time and I think the entire team agrees with her that the problem of corporate own tools is that you are at the mercy of that corporation. When they make a very drastic change for the bottom line to please I mean Reddit just did this right with the whole issue I was a very big Redditor and now kind of mad at them and experimenting with cabin and let me. And, and when you see the state of academic publishing currently in the corporate publishing and the terrible fees for journals and access that there needs to be an academy own solution. There needs to be a solution where and let's face it if humanities comments cease to exist after this model launches. The wider Federation would still exist. The infrastructure that we're building is not necessarily once we release it entirely dependent on us. We realize that somebody asked well aren't you engineering yourselves out of work, and the answer is, But I'm not sure that that's a terrible thing for the wider good of providing access and disseminating information and kind of bringing some equity. We see a lot of people using the comments we've got a lot of universities in fact the University of Kashmir or Kashmir University I guess it is in India, just joined and they have students creating WordPress sites as part of a class. We've got the University of. There's a Ecuadorian University that it similarly is using our site to help students learn how to use WordPress and learn how to do some of these things. And we've got scholars who don't have access to traditional publishing. And that's the reason whether it be author fees or just they're at a less prodigious institution prodigious prestigious institution who don't have access to sort of being published in in the top journals. And so I think that we make the case of being values led we make the case of being equitably governed and governed by the participating organizations and eventually when we get larger it'll be a group of representatives from the community. That we're nonprofit. And so that's the argument I make from a technical standpoint the activity pub standard makes sense because it is a standard. It is growing. You know we realized that it was something that was growing previously and we're on another initiative called core notify which is part of the coalition of open access repositories, using the activity pub standard to move information and comments between repositories, allowing for journals let's say to request inclusion in an overlay journal to request you authors to request peer review, etc. Yeah, it is a little bit of a clunky standard Chris, I do see that but I think that we're seeing momentum build. I think that you know Mike has done a lot of looking at that and he could talk better to that piece of it. But I think it's time, and I feel like there's momentum in terms of people understanding that we can't rely on corporate infrastructure and Twitter slash acts is a great example of that. And had a question in the chat. I don't know if he'll, he'll ask it or if he wants me to read it. I do pretty good dictation to so if that's necessary. But add. Yeah, so you know I wrote in the chat but there's so many people right now, looking at activity pub thinking about activity pub. You mentioned kind of like oh I think we're ahead of WordPress I think we're ahead of buddy press who are all, you know talking about activity pub and implementing it. Do you see this as a duplication of efforts. Do you think you're making different choices or different goals and what do you think you're doing differently than some of these other organizations that are also interested in activity pub. I don't, I don't think that we're, we're duplicating I think we're making choices based on the communication that we're trying to facilitate. I did talk to WordPress I don't know that we're ahead of WordPress. I know that there is a native plugin that we're actually using currently on the site. In terms of buddy press, I haven't talked to anyone at buddy press and we probably should. But I am in the WordPress, I have five developers that are keeping us going and we know them. I think I think it's very small community. Yeah, but we one of the reasons that I have presented at WordPress campus and we're starting to present this is that we're actively seeking out people who are doing this work. We know they're out there to start to come together and talk about it and talk amongst ourselves. Because we're looking for collaborators and also for people who are already doing this work and going oh yeah we could use that and we're building this and they say oh yeah we could use that. But again we're planning and making all of this completely open source completely available to the community this is not something that we're planning on building some big business of proprietary plugins. And so I think that is a little different. And especially you see in the world, the WordPress community, WordPress has to pay their bills we do too. But that's we're nonprofit, we're not for profit. That's a slightly different thing. Buddy press certainly has paid plugins and services. So that I think is different. And I think this is very new right like we just literally got to the point of a year of planning and now coming out and talking about this and saying, this is our plan. Our hope is that we can come to WordPress campus next year and actually do a follow up presentation and say, this is where we're at and this is what we learned, because we're we're fully aware that not everything will succeed. We're fully aware that we're going to run into things we didn't anticipate. And so I think that's what makes this exciting and also terrifying. But if you submit an application to host WordPress campus next year, we could probably fit you in the schedule. I'm trying to actually I'm trying to talk the powers that be into that Michigan in July would be a lot better, maybe weather wise. So we have had some terrific, and I mean that in a bad way, storms. So we're seeing the sort of the storms, you know, we always have thunderstorms. It's not unusual here. The severity of them has gotten more intense. So that's a thing. But yes, in general, Michigan is beautiful in July. But yeah, I think this is, you know, we're literally just in the beginning stages of building this. And one of the reasons that we're being now very loud about it is, hey, we're planning on doing this and what are you doing and let's talk about it. Has there has there been any discussion with the folks at CommonBox and open lab to be like, hey, you know, do you have ideas that we could integrate this because obviously we're seeing at reclaim a big push in interest in CBOX. And that's, you know, I wonder if there is. That's an open source project similarly with Matt Gold and Boone and all the folks at the CUNY mafia doing that for so long. Like, I know there's probably legacy stuff, but there's also probably they got the grants, they understand how that work goes similar to what you all are doing and that's that sustainability question. They're trying to build it into an open source office from what I understand around CUNY to actually make it institutionally funded, which gives you all the freedom to do some of this experimentation, which, you know, a pure for profit company won't have or do. We talk regularly with Matt. So Matt Gold is someone who's been in conversations with us for the last two years on on a, we have a sort of group that's centered around sort of Great Lakes institutions who are doing open access platforms so we have University of Michigan with Fulcrum University, Minnesota with manifold. So we're also talking to them about how this how this works and so there's there's more conversations happening but yeah Matt Gold is absolutely a part of that and I mean we were based we're based essentially on So we do have those conversations we've had multiple conversations with Boone. And so, you know, we are hooked into that community and and I just recently talked with a couple of people in, like I said New Zealand with OER, OER foundation, Wayne McIntosh who's also looking to do this with OER. And so that's a recent thing and we've made essentially an agreement to say we'd like to get our tech folks together to talk more about what we're doing so that we can potentially talk about ideas or different ways that we're handling things. So yeah, those conversations are happening. Yeah, because Dave Lane, I think who works with Wayne does some really cool stuff with Matt and Don and has been really so that's that's exciting I mean maybe there is a groundswell of folks and the fact that you're doing this as an outreach to be like join us help us figure this out is absolutely brilliant I love it. I mean we are, we are committed to being open access, we are committed to providing our tools for free to individuals and so we will need other collaborators and other people who are interested. But also just thinking about, you know, we joke about wanting to kind of completely turn some of this scholarly communications and and the sort of dissemination of knowledge on its ear. And we clearly can't do that on our own but we can what we can do is provide opportunity alternatives right like we can continue to say we're really thinking about this, and we're trying to put the hands, the tools in the hands of the people that are doing it. And one of the things that Federation allows us to do if you've got a server in a country that doesn't speak English. Right now word humanities Commons is in English, right. Someone could have a common server in their own local language they can have the server in Spanish they can have it in French they can have it in Japanese, but still federate. And so I think that those are the kinds of things that allows us to do. That's, I mean, great other questions and I don't like I could keep on going but I do want to make sure other folks who do have questions about any of this. I guess, one of the questions for me would be like, as you're doing this and as my thick I think the name is the one who's talking about my thick is that right okay as you're all building this and as you're framing it like, what's the path in terms of like reaching you're reaching out to other schools but like do you have folks who are essentially working through some of the difficulties with you some of the setting it up some of the instances or is it really just a three person four person group, figuring it out. So our team is currently, what did I say the other day 12 people 12. So we've got 12 we've got two full time developers we've got a half time infrastructure developer identity management that's half time currently shared with our college. We've also got a community team of three people. And that includes a GSA. And so we're actively thinking about it we're also working with our participating organizations so MLA presses, our research librarians. Those instances they are very on board in fact, the university presses are very interested. Michigan State with the MSU Commons. We've got a number of institutions that are interested that we're currently talking with that I don't want to name. But we've got four different institutions that we're talking to right now. Plus we've got our partners at University of Michigan University of Minnesota that are actively looking at this hooking in with things like manifold and fulcrum. So we've got a number of people thinking through this not just about the core Commons functionality, but the ways in which that these other platforms also might think about this, which is really the magic there because you talk about it's not just wordpress it's it's pasted on it's, you know, you could use manifold you could use lemmy you could use pixel like you have now a kind of explosion of potential tools that syndicate and be used for this, you know, textual like idea of we are which I always think has been one of the great limitations of that idea. So, yeah, that's super exciting. I love it. Other questions. Issues. I did want to say so I brought up librarians, and I will say, as a librarian for one, I'm super excited to see the number of librarians who are interested in this, not just in our open access repository but in this sort of opportunity for we are for open access journals. So here we have a number of open access journals that have made their home now on on humanities Commons, and thinking about the ways in which library publishing could also hook into our tools for those libraries that don't have the funding to be able to create their own space, you know, Michigan State is lucky we have a manifold instance we have support for press books right so there are plenty of ways that people can publish. And some institutions have that either. So, you know, and thinking about getting work out I just published, I'm a co author on an OER that just published in January, for example. And, you know, and thinking through where to put it, I ended up it's it's on reclaim. It's on my domain of one zone account. But yeah, exactly. And, you know, it's hard as me I'm a librarian, I've worked in scholarly communications for, you know, 10 years, and I had a hard time figuring out what to do. Right. So that's the other piece of it that we're really working on is thinking about how to hook in with other groups how to hook in and I haven't talked to anybody at University of California in a while, I've talked to them in the past, but not in a while I've talked to the scale our team as well. Some of the other open access publishing platforms that are out there. We're kind of involved with Agicopia and talking with the different institutions involved in that. But I believe University of California managing them with a homegrown, but it could be wrong. Are they because they made a big splash obviously when they were like we're not going to buy any of it we're going to host all of our own stuff. I think it's homegrown, but I can't say that for 100%. Yeah, that would be interesting and it would be interesting to see if it's homegrown their chances there may be interest in, you know, federating their own grown stuff. Yeah. And that's what this allows us to do right if people adopt that standard then there is the opportunity for Federation and the nice thing about it is it's not. There's no gatekeeping there's nobody holding anything hostage it's an open protocol it's an open, you know, I think the biggest frustration that we have and that we're seeing is the sort of corporate holding and people make decisions based on the bottom line and you know we aren't immune from that we're grant funded we have to be very careful and how we, you know, continue to move forward. But I think that there's the sense for our team I think there's a tremendous sense of the public good that drives us in a way that obviously corporate folks aren't driven. Yeah. Can I ask you a question about the infrastructure and how you envision it. Are all of the different activity pub. Like notices being filtered like as a spider web through a central hub. Is it more decentralized even than that. And the reason I ask that is, you know, for a place like California or for a place like SUNY has one centralized open access repository. It's called the space. It's also open source. But moving it would be a larger issue than I think we could ever do. And so I'm wondering is, does d space need to federate in with your way of thinking, or does d space just need to communicate with the WordPress hub, which would then federate with all the other ones like what what does the flow look like. The space would federate with the WordPress hub. And then the WordPress hub, you know, SUNY is, you know, future WordPress hub would talk to the humanities commons, all the other commons. Really nice. That that is the current plan. Make it easier for like with for like what you're talking about with California. It's not that you need their system to fully integrate with everything that you're doing, but their system does need to talk through an API to the WordPress. Yeah, if you want. So if you want to participate, let's say in our groups, I think, you know, you would need to stand up a commons. If you want to pull that information into your own system. That's a different thing, but I think Mike would have a better answer to that. I will say that this is sort of his brain child along with our other debt or other devs and he's got. I'll tell you the number of mirror boards that are these highly detailed mirror boards that show exactly how all of this works because he's actually mapped all of this out for all of the rest of us who don't aren't developers. And eventually I think he will make some of those and I think he has made a couple of those public on the building blog. But my understanding is is that you know there if it's specific commons functionality, then you'd want to stand up your own commons if you just want the information, then you would just pull that pull that in or and we are planning on to incorporating our SS feeds and other feeds and the API, obviously will exist so you know there's multiple ways to do this. And the goal is to let people decide what their level of comfort is and where they want to participate. This is not sort of a you have to use our particular you know software and you have to do this and that it's here's our rules of how we want people to use this and here's what we ask of you. And certainly you know we on our mastodon so each common social we have very serious roles and we are moderated to some extent you know we still have you know we look over people and try to prevent spammers when we do find them we ban them heavily and one of that's my hobby is laying the ban hammer on spammers so usually I'm the first one to find them and I get to lay the ban hammer and that's very very exciting to me. My days my days, admitting forums in the 90s and the odds. Do you have like a like a physical hammer like even if it's made out of plastic that you put on the desk to show like a for hammer. I really should yeah I don't but I should yeah I had a little when I used to administrate a very large forum. Back in the arts, I had a little like GIF and a thing that I would, you know, so. Well, I have to say I mean what I really love about what you all are doing at MSU is what an expansive vision it is for for kind of scholarly communications, right and kind of moves it to like oh academia, you know like we're going to put all our stuff there and like making the Facebook we're going to make the same mistakes with the same silo again and again. And finally there's a kind of articulated vision about Federation right and obviously what will follow is sustainability and whether universities and groups are going to fund it. But should the two go hand in hand, you really do have a compelling alternative to what seems like a carousel of denial we've been in with these siloed these siloed sites that again and again we do the same thing I'm like what happened. Why are we in this situation it's groundhog day. Yeah, I don't remember did you mention who is funding your grant. Yeah, so we have we have two grants to large grants right now it's the Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Okay, when you run out of money there. You should have Kathleen call Josh Greenberg at Sloan Foundation, because he is super duper into this sort of academic and science communication. And I know specifically he wants this, not necessarily the Federation piece but the open portion in the back and forth communication. So, I, and for some of the history to a lot of the fediverse back into WordPress is heroically been built by Matthias Pfefferla, who is a former one and one senior exacting engineer. And I presume that's what you're using his infrastructure for some of this. Yeah, but a lot of what you had mentioned before of, I can post this thing on my WordPress website and you can subscribe to that. All of that works. So you can follow my particular site. And comment in the Fediverse and I'll get that comment back as a comment on my WordPress site. I think it's phenomenal. The missing piece I think is the front end of some of the reader piece doesn't exist in that space. So I'm curious if you're looking at how to build that from a kind of user facing perspective. Mike, Mike's plan is to use react to build that front end in WordPress. And so that would be something that would also be available and made public and open. I mean that is one thing you know we are tax funder funder fund taxpayer funded through these grants. We're very aware of that, but we also believe that, you know, I think the thing too is that we hope that other people will build on it. So one of the things that we're doing with Invenio RDM right now is we've written a number of plugins that other people are now using and then building on and so it's the same thing here. Invenio RDM in particular and this is the repository platform that we're implementing should go out I think in February 2024 was developed by CERN, primarily used by those in the sciences. We're the first humanities sort of facing organization to implement it and have found that there are some things that we need in the humanities that haven't been built out yet so we're building that out. And so our intention is to build these things out and then to make them public and in the hopes that other people will also build on this. I mean I think we're not, we don't see ourselves as the gatekeepers. We're just the people that are starting this and we're, there's a risk right there's a risk in doing something like this that that nobody else has really tried before and I think all of us on this team recognize that. But I also think we're very excited about it because we all realize that the infrastructure within academia and scholarly publishing, scholarly communication needs to change. And so we've kind of said we're going to take our best chance at doing some of this. But I think there's always, I think that with high risk does come high reward but I also think that there are enough people interested who are kind of going oh wow that sounds really cool. What might we think about it in our own organizations and so I think that that's what we're hoping for. From an infrastructure standpoint to and I, I know she is aware of it because I helped her set it up, but Kathleen kind of went full indie web for a while, and was supporting a lot of those standards, which are much easier and much more level from a technical perspective than activity pub is. But because you mentioned things like, you know, scalar and press books and a few of those others who are probably going to have a whole lot harder time, leveraging activity pub to do anything, much less the infrastructure that God is really not built to work with those things well. I'm kind of curious if you have thought about implementing those things in humanities commons, because those are going to be a whole lot easier for those other third party places to play in this space a lot, a lot more easily I think. Yeah, and we have. And one of the things that's really bringing that about is the stomach commons and thinking about the formats and things that don't lend themselves well to activity pub. So yes, there absolutely is that I really can't talk about the details on that because we're still kind of working through what that looks like. Part of that is really kind of getting our arms around and one of the reasons I went I just attended the science and team science insights conference to talk to people about their work in stem and some of the things that they're doing and the types of formats that are being done and that's partly because the repository and wanting to support more than just humanity scholarship and art scholarship. Yeah, absolutely. We're looking at a number of different tools right now. Open access tools that we may incorporate into the commons. We're talking to a number of developers and people who are working on these things so it's not just activity pub. That's what we're talking about right now. But there are other things that we're looking at. I've also been on vacation for the last chunk of month, so I haven't been watching their chat but if you're not aware you should find the indie web chat of which there are 57 ways to connect to it with whatever you want to use to connect. But specifically, Matthias spends a reasonable amount of time there and you can usually get his attention, although he is on a German time zone so it's always hard to connect with him there. Those English is reasonably good and even better for you, especially not he's not as much into the activity pub piece, but knows the indie web portion and trained in library science, which is even better although he's working in a different space although I think if you ever decided to grow you could make him an offer and he would jump ship in two seconds. Because he loves this stuff but David Shansky knows more about WordPress and the indie web and kind of the way all these things dovetail together than any other 15 people on the planet. And he's written most of the code that does that as well as you know I think he's worked with Matthias for going on seven or eight years now to make all that WordPress stuff work. So hop in and say hi and he will jump start you and put you a year ahead of wherever you happen to be and or you know probably help fix major problems along the way. Yeah, I know Mike has been in contact with some folks and I'm not sure exactly who he's been in contact with. But yeah, I will absolutely do that and that's one of the things that that we're out here to do is really to make those contacts or put them in touch with me and I'll make the introduction. Yeah, thank you I appreciate that. Bonnie we give you contacts we give you grants, we give you everything what else could you want reclaim chat for life. I was gonna say yeah I will I will totally be back this has been wonderful and it's just been such a wonderful conversation. I obviously I'm super enthusiastic and excited about this and and but you know it is I don't want to understate the risk and the sort of you know we're we're thinking very, we're thinking very creatively about how to do this and so you know it is one of those things where it's it's great to get out in the community and hear people say, yeah, you might have issues with that but it sounds awesome. Because it does help to and thinking through just how far we can push things to and and just say we're going to blow all this up and we're going to try something new. Because I think that you know as we've seen with Twitter and acts and as we've seen with you know Elsevier and Wiley and some of the other things that have been happening. And even academia that edu and research gate I mean, you know, if they don't charge for things that you're the commodity right and so what we're trying to do is to say that there's another way. No, absolutely in the expansive vision that you bring to it and that team at MSU and I know Kathleen Fitzpatrick hearing her talk at Reclaim Open like it is it's a very exciting moment for you all and the group you're putting together to do it there's being part of a group that's doing exciting stuff and believes in the work so major kudos to everyone involved at MSU and beyond because I know it goes beyond there. And thank you very much for taking the time today to sit down, explain it, share it will have this video will put it back online we really appreciate it and I'll be talking more and more about the work you all are doing and I hope Reclaim can partner with you in some way to figure out some of those pieces so you let us know if we can do anything but again just amazing work so thank you Bonnie. Yeah, thank you and I have to say we out the team was going to go into a team meeting we actually pause to watch her keynote at Reclaim because we wanted to see it too. But yeah I will say it's I've, I've never worked with a better group of people in terms of just the expansive thinking and the willingness to kind of take the risk and say we're just going to do this. And we hope we find collaborators and we have you know we have had people but I appreciate all the feedback and the names and the information and Reclaim is absolutely I mean like I said I've published two sites I run a project on Reclaim through domain of one zone. So I'm, you know, we're very, we're very excited about that too. And I think that, you know, as we roll this out. There's definitely, you know, opportunity for, for all kinds of groups to get involved, not just those who want commons is but those who support the infrastructure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and you said it earlier open infrastructure and what that looks like and there's not enough of it and this is a key development in the field to make it and build it and think about it. And if it fails anything could fail but the fact that you're doing it is freaking awesome. So, again, kudos big fan Reclaim loves MSU mesh for life. Yeah, and we love you guys too because it's been it's been fantastic and just this has been a such a great conversation. So thank you. Thank you. All right. I think we'll close it out there. Thanks everyone for coming and we'll see you next month next month. We might talk about something as cool as a new product that Reclaim Reclaim press. Yes, get ready. That should be fun. I'm going to be writing about it and doing it. It's pretty fun. We're going to have like, managed wordpress kind of wordpress as a service, which could actually template some of this stuff. So anyway, more on that next month, but thanks everyone for coming.