 So, technically my first open source contribution was to a role-playing game called Dusk. It was probably the first free open source graphical role-playing game in existence. I think there was a GPL license in that source repository at a time that didn't really mean a whole lot to me other than that it was available and I could commit code and no one cared if I was 13. That was just like magical access. What is it about the open source attraction? I always found it inspirational to be around people who seemed really driven by reputation and their personal contributions and owning their work. The idea that every line of code can be traced back to an individual rather than a corporation is sort of fascinating in the transparency and accountability that it provides and that accountability I think really has good upward pressure on code quality and community quality and everyone's willingness to be a good citizen. When you started out to make Hypothesis, what problem did you see that you wanted to solve? We are inundated with so much information of all different sorts in our lives. I think for me there was a point around 2000 where I really started to pay attention to the narrative as told by different people with different points of view and how difficult it seemed for people to come to consensus. I would appreciate having access to people who really knew about a particular domain deeply when I was casually reading some information and I think that desire to find a way to enable that is what drove me to this project. So things I liked about Hypothesis immediately were that you had good answers for all of your principles and you had principles laid out. Clearly open source at its core really resonated with me particularly with respect to Hypothesis as a communication platform, inheriting all of the things I like about platforms for communication and how they drive participation from developers. The thing that really kind of transformed the way I think about open source is when I read a book called Two Bits in which the author discusses the idea of a recursive public. In other words a commons or public where people get together for whatever their interests are but whose ability to convene that group is itself dependent upon the work of the group and therefore people working in open source are often equally interested in how to make workflow and communication for the developers better as much as they are making products for end users. If you are at a company and the software that you're making is not being consumed by you it's a constant struggle to remain in touch with who your users are but when you are your own user is a really powerful motivation that comes from it. Did you have prior exposure to open source software before you started Hypothesis? In my first company we used the Apache web server so I benefited from open source software. It was really the movement and the extraordinary powerful change that we see now because things like GitHub and earlier SourceForge really drove the ability to create the diversity of open source platforms that we have now and share them and reuse them. So then what is it that attracted you to open source as a principle of Hypothesis development? We haven't kind of seen other projects that have tried to do this over the last 15 years and kind of deconstructing why we don't have this yet. There's a couple things that became really obvious. One is that trying to create a walled garden and monetize that but at the same time being trying to invite the world in to participate and make it valuable wasn't going to work on this particular project and I think it's why the previous ones have failed. Partly that means I think we need to be non-profit organized for the purpose of preserving this and with our mission aligned with our users. But open source is a super important component of that because not only we're trying to build this community but what we're also trying to do is build a toolkit that enables this technology to be implemented in this way and then make that toolkit available for anybody else that wants to interoperate and exchange and participate even if they're not using our stuff. And I think that's like the secret strategy of this in a sense. 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 W3 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 just set out to build it and I think that's the direction that we should be going. You were the first person that I approached to come really to a hypothesis and it was just kind of an idea at that point what about it was interesting enough for you to drop what you were doing and join? I really appreciated the non-profit model I thought it was well justified in terms of preventing the platform from having interests that diverged from the users interests and I saw in it the ability to define success in such a way that is not bound up in the name of the organization so much as the technological contributions that it could make. I mean this is kind of a big idea it's I think something that's possible for us to create as humans but it's a big change in terms of what we have right now and I think the challenge was really just getting people to suspend disbelief long enough that they could imagine such a thing being possible. I mean the reason I'm in this is to see this change happen and if it happens but it's not us that actually ends up being the ones that gets it over the goal line but somehow we were involved to me that success. I really enjoy the degree to which open source software invites participation from everybody on the internet it really embraces the transformative power that we see in the internet. One of the primary things I like about open source and indeed one of the selling points contrary to initial fears in the industry ten years ago when this stuff started to become popular was that when an open source project is truly healthy it doesn't depend on the continued existence of any organization to keep it going forward it becomes its own breathing entity and its own community. I feel like this is an opportunity that humanity has to be able to get better about interacting with each other and I think that that's part of the potential of the internet at its most basic level and I want to see that happen. I think it's possible and kind of all the building blocks are in our hands now and so that's what I want to see. I would be happy with that.