 And they made Flansy and Riaw. Interesting. So are you going to stitch all the videos together for this? I don't know. I might just do this one. So this is the fellowship of the link. Call on Wednesday, September 20th, 2023. We are struggling because Flansy and Riaw is going to give us a demo of the Agora and it wasn't working on Zoom. Yeah, I'll publish it for that. I should test Zoom more, but yes. Apparently, Wayland and Zoom don't like each other. Yeah. I will note, if you want to stitch the two videos together, I do recommend OpenShot, which is an open source, free to use video editor. It's not useful for complicated stuff, but if you want to stitch two clips together and output a single video clip, it's very fast and useful for that. Well, interesting. Thank you. Also, it turns out QuickTime, as long as the videos are ABI format, I think, QuickTime does a very nice job. You just drop them into a QuickTime video and export again. Oh, nice. I've never tried that. Yeah, but FFMpeg's got a lot of. The trick with FFMpeg is you go ask ChatGPT, how would I do this? And it likes that complicated line and then you go, cool. You're depressing me as somebody who spent a year of their life building an FFMpeg-based audio tool. So that's how the universal CLI will come out. Yes. To exist, yeah. Hey, Samuel. Hello, hello. Hello. So I think, well, I have some slides. I can present just for feedback. I mean, and then any feedback is welcome. And of course, questions we can jump to a day or so on any time. So here we go. That's great. Can you see these recently well? Yeah. Cool. OK, cool. So I'll try not to take too long, but that means you can cut me off any time. And a lot of these, it's a bit last minute for me just because of how I prioritize. So these are in flux. So feel free to criticize and tear them to pieces because I'm not invested in that sense. So with that being said, yeah, these are a base. Let's see. Just a bit of history here. I guess the hour of project started, which we're going to talk about today. It started in 2020, actually. And which naming scheme? I love the naming scheme for your items in Google Drive. Everyone should do that. Yes, I think like real URLs are actually everything. Yes, I agree, actually. And goal links, you know, are like a key part of that. So yeah, we'll discuss that in a bit. So yes, I mean, the project started in 2020, very late November, and you know, has something running like a week or so. But of course, that was a simple prototype. And since then, it has become like a less simple prototype, but it hasn't advanced much beyond that. So this deck I adapted this week or so from a version I did in 2021, I annotate. And then, you know, I kept iterating over it. So there's links to the historical aspects of this, not very interesting maybe. There's also the hour of chapter, which is what some of you know I wrote for this book on social knowledge graphs and not taking tools. Last year, some of the material here comes from that chapter. And yeah, this year, this is the first time I present this. So thank you for like, like I said, for your feedback and your attention. I did present like an internal fork of this deck, which unfortunately I couldn't merge back because I did it in-corp. So for my employer, so there was another presentation this year, but unfortunately, you know, a lot of the work there is siloed. So I read it for this presentation. Yeah, like I said, just fire away. OK, so what is an hour? So like, you know, I talk about the hour quite a bit, sometimes not defining it sufficiently. That is out of necessity partly because it keeps mutating. And once you get really involved into these projects, they can get a scope creep. And also, to make things up, it has this danger of being everything that is interesting. But, you know, I tried like to update the definition to, you know, how I will say it this year, I didn't have some of these words back in 2021 when they started. So that's at least some progress. So I will say that I'm going to say it's a commons. I mean, I almost say knowledge commons. And of course, it starts as a knowledge commons, but it has aspirations to be like a commons of different different kinds of natures, you know, expanding to the physical. And, you know, because of that, I just say commons. And I say that it's defined by a community, both explicitly and by convention. Does that apply to every commons? I don't know. But in the case of the hour, it applies because it has some, you know, actual concrete like mechanisms to describe what is in the commons and what is not. So that's the explicit part of it. And the conventional aspect of this has to do with the conventions we all choose to share or not in how we take notes, how we write documentation, how we write a blog post, and anything else we contribute to these commons, right? So a lot of that is just based on convention. Yes, on the facets, I call out three facets here, which I think we can discuss. We can go in the direction, but so first is a space. So this is a most wide definition, of course. In that sense, it is exactly like the original hour or the one I know the most, which is the Athenian hour. I was recently there this year. And of course, I was also in previous years and I always found it very inspiring. And of course, it directly influences many aspects of the vision of the hour. So it's public, the space, but it has semi-public subspaces. So in the hour of Athens, those were called Stoas and are called Stoas, like for example, the Stoics, you know, met in the Stoapolkile, and different groups met in different Stoas, which were like these porticos, right? These semi-open spaces where people could snooping maybe, and also joining and be part of something. And as a space, as a commons, in this sense, in this, why are aspirations try to go beyond the market, precisely like the hour. You know, it had this market component, it had this public space, you know, like the commerce took place, but it was not about that only. And that's the feeling behind the hour of aspiration. Technically, it's also what I guess it sounds, it is a mouthful, but it's a distributed knowledge graph. So that's very much the point for this group. The idea is that this is a loosely coupled knowledge graph, like assembled out of these resources that people pull together. So, you know, the gist of it, as you will see, is you give the hour a list of repositories, a list of resources even, like depending, essentially, like those could be a lot, and the hour I would just try to import them, like mash them together, find connections, find patterns, and then serve those, right, to the users. And it is also a social network. I mean, this is sort of like very aspiration, I know, but it is at least a social network in the sense that when we write about, you know, about things, including things and people, particular people, we're writing all the relationships, our positions with other people, our connections, our friendships. And in that sense, any knowledge graph which is about people describes a social network, right? Also, we have like, we are working on this, it's not available, but we are working on the hour being a part of the favors in the sense of speaking activity, power, and so on. So in that sense, it will be more clearly like a social network. So we're gonna cover some facets of each of these, or some aspects of these three facets. So, you know, I guess one question will be like, and this comes, it's like, why? Why would it be this? I guess this comes up for every project, but so this is sort of like both a vision and a hypothesis here. So I guess the hypothesis is like, it stated up top here, which is as of this year, but also probably as of next year and like many years after that. A lot of the sources of the internet, which I guess you could call constructive, you know, like those which are like, pro-social, I say here, generically, but also, you know, like dedicated to building, to finding agreement, to linking, to collaborating. They could benefit from the wide or wide availability of an interlay. And here I use interlay in the sense of TAMUL, TAMUL from the underlay project, right? Which is, we have a slide on that later, but I don't know if you get that. But it's there. Of course, it's underlay, interlay, overlay concepts, essentially this connective layer. And that's very much what the Agua tries to be. So to be like a pro-social, you know, for common good, connective layer. And here again, the commons in the sense of like, these interlaces, there are many interlaces depending on how you see them. But it seems like, you know, using again, like the terminology I will use this year, as last year, it seems important that the governance and the provisioning of this infrastructure follow the principles of commoning, right? So, you know, community oriented and, you know, like actually there's a lot of common theory, which I know you're interested in as well. So here I will stop speaking, but that's interesting in its own accord. So the project as it is, is about developing tools and instructions to put it some way, mechanisms and so on, just to make it more likely that such a connective layer arises with these characteristics. That stops short of trying to be that, the connective layer, because as we will see, this Agua is probably not good enough, and it's more like a bullstrap step towards that, or that's what it tries to be, but let's see. So, and then this is a bit long, but here goes about why it is important or why we're going to question, I guess, for this group, right, for the fellowship, we are interested in linking and writing and sharing. And it seems to me, and it seemed to me back when I started the project that, and this is how I found this group, of course. So, you know, to some extent, I am always preaching the choir here, but it seems like we are the no-taking communities, the wiki community, women auditions as well, you know, this is why we also have connections to a hypothesis and so on. These are communities that are in a good position to exploit an opportunity. And the opportunity is paraphrasing, I'm not going into what this slide says, to push back a bit against the, well, what you could call the corporate control internet, which is very much, since the internet is a market, and maybe stops there very often, right? So, essentially reclaim the internet to some extent and maybe build something that is from the get-go federated, you know, works like a common, assumes principles of basic cooperation and instead of like, you know, just like profit seeking and so on. And a lot of the tools and workflows that exist within the no-taking and wiki spaces are already decentralized, right? And they also happen to share common patterns so that, you know, even as they are the capital, a priority or independent, they can be made to work together, relatively simply will seem, and that's what the project tries to do, find common patterns and try to exploit them. It's, you know, what we can, essentially. And of course, the longer vision, I mean, this is our big wars, but you know, why do this at all? I mean, of course, first, because of what you said about like, you know, giving an alternative to the corporate internet, but also, you know, no independence. If we think about, and this goes way beyond the scope of this project, you know, like what we're all trying to do here, I think, to some extent is about preserving like the best parts of the internet and of like the knowledge communities and so on for future generations, maybe. So, you know, that's, I guess, one of the aspirations for many of these projects. So, yeah, I mean, I'll skip a bit over these, but you know, I think essentially, the reference I would add that you will see is very simple or tries to be as simple as possible, conceptually at least, I mean, architecture. Not necessarily in the UX, right? There's like a lot of like complexity that arises just from surfacing, just as we do now, the graph, but this, you know, like a base to work on, let's say. Another thing is we do try, like I said, to leverage conventions and formats that already exist instead of like running our own or reinventing the wheel. There's already too much of that. And also I'm just like very lazy and my attention span is short. So I rather reuse. And like I said earlier, like the core intent is to, and this is written all over the place, but you know, like it's to boost up a simple hour to then try to be a better ones. So, and this is where the hour, you know, again, we go through facets between, you know, like the particular implementation and the aspirations, you know, and, you know, there's a lot of that. Right, so some key characteristics before we dive in. So about what the hour is right now, right? So the line is just scale free design. You said Samuel, which is compelling, right? Exactly, right, like you said. So yes, this is the idea where like, doesn't make them like, you know, I like this, it's like self-similar, no? Right, right. So on what it is now, so, and, you know, this tries to follow from the vision or should at least it is free software, all of the hour is free software. And, you know, a lot of the right answers to do with this is in Creative Commons. And, you know, the software is targeted towards any community to build one of these. It's not meant to be like one particular monolithic platform, of course, is centralized. It also tries to require a little to actually integrate into it. You just need to essentially write the right format so to speak the right formats and point the algorithm in the direction of your content and the hour I will just take it essentially. And, well, you might notice this is like an aspiration again. And, you know, like I said, it was an inclusive and use extended conventions, format tools and networks even. For as long as practical, this is like the hour in 2021. It doesn't look too different, but it does look different nowadays. And like here, we see, I don't know if you can actually read this, but this is an example of the common we will cover in a bit, but, you know, the idea that in a particular location, you can see a content by different users. In, you know, what I think what I was looking into the hour and like he calls the course of voices, right? Of like also like a fair weekend somewhere. Essentially, we all keep an individual voice, but like share space with the voices. So this is like, you know, how it was very much from the start. And, well, this is our agenda to do one because we already have all the users. Our architecture, and this is just like, you know, I know some of you, I mean, of course, like develop software. So you may be more interested in this aspect, but also like, even if you just want to run your own hour, some of these concepts will be useful. So the architecture is, it tries to be simple, but powerful enough. And this is the variation of everybody. So let's see that work, but essentially the hour as it is now has three components. And if you take one, you will take the top one, which is actually not software. The top one doesn't contain software. It is a description of what the hour is. So this is what we call the hour root. This is, they are all repositors in the sense that these are actually in it. Of course, we could have an hour repository reputed anywhere, but give you probably support. What it contains is a description of the hour. So the list of repositories that will be imported into the hour. So essentially, in this case, users, in the case of the hour that we have running, this is actually a file that says like user name, and then like it and so on, until you end up with users, simple as that. And also contains the base contract. We call it contract, it will change, but like essentially this is the intent of the hour, which is essentially the terms of usage to some extent. But giving a community is what the community wants to be or the values they want to uphold and so on. In principle, the idea is what, this is the heart of the hour. Any particular hour should be defined from these and the repositories that are described in this route and potentially recursively, the pointers in those repositories. So this is the seed from which the hour is meant to grow like a tree, essentially. So using this route, there are like two software components of the hour. So I guess first the hour as error because this is the most visible one, this is what you have running in, if you just go to say an hour out or. So this is an hour out or, as of like three, it is this Python, Flask server that essentially will, you can point to an hour route and it will be an actual directory on disk and it will like read those resources, try to find the patterns. I will automate resources into nodes, which we'll discuss nodes in a bit and then serve them to the user. So as of the time of writing, we have about 29,000 nodes by 69 users. And this is like the graph of the hour. Yeah, Flask is, yes, it's just like Flask a lot, it's a powerful thing and so on. This is like a zoom in into like, this graph is getting quite large and just for like a sampling of what this error contains, these are the most popular nodes in the sense of like the nodes with the most sub nodes. So we will see this in the next slide probably, but essentially, you know, it was, well, I was, what do we choose? Walter Benjamin or Samuel Klein? There are both six in the, so I'm gonna go for it with Samuel Klein. Clearly Samuel Klein. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here, of course, we have like a bug, unfortunately. This used to work, but for some reason, Wikimedia is refusing iframes, sound. Ah. I wonder why. Yeah, yeah, I wonder too, but it's, you know, I think we can fix this. Here, the node, Samuel Klein and, you know, you will see has a different, so I guess mentions of Samuel in different places, some discussion in chat room, discussion in Twitter, discussion in mass, so on. And essentially all of these sources are, you know, like I said, sequentially presented. This company wasn't Benjamin, so I am, you know, like a node by myself, a node by Neil, a great user. And here we can maybe jump to this interesting book. Yeah, I read a lot, of course, I like it, but essentially now we are in the garden in the node path of Neil, an Agora user. In general, this is one of the most delightful, I guess for me, uses of the Agora. I very often go into the Agora to find a node I wrote, and then I find a note that someone else wrote, which is better. So to some extent, that's one of my favorite things. Yes, so we are going, we're going into the demo now, going back to the architecture, this was Agora server doing this work, and serving it to the user. On the other side, we have our Agora bridge. So this is a separate repository and component, which reads from the Agora root, the division of the Agora, so in particular, in the case of the Agora of Lancet, it's 69 users that are linked, and then imports the other resources and keeps doing this and updating. Essentially, once you import a repository into an Agora as a user, it will be pulled, and every 30 seconds on average, nowadays, after you submit any changes to your resources, it will be imported. And here you can see that these repositories are actually like Git as well. And of course, it goes well, well, well, it's a massive wiki and this is why we also have already like massive wikis into the Agora, in Agoras, but also support social media, which we will discuss shortly. So maybe the one key concept, and this is where like we break the metaphor, or like we mix metaphors. So the Agora has to us, like we saw, like I mentioned, I will discuss in a bit, but the key thing is the node. The node, this is a presentation where essentially it's entity, high-level entity, which contains resources by all the users that contributed something to, that is about that entity, right? So, you know, Walter Avenger, maybe so, had like two takes, one by myself and one by Neo. And in the case of some node, they were like sources from all these, different social media and chat, right? In different files. So the Agora aggregates these into this high-level node concept. And this is where like, there's a difference maybe, and we try to exploit this between, you know, if you have a digital garden or a massive wiki, you link from node A to B in a massive wiki. The Agora will actually see that link and then link A and B at the Agora level. So then, essentially, it only, so links are social. If a single user says, I think A and B are linked, the Agora is like, sure. So we just have like an Agora level link there. And, you know, as you navigate, you will see the links by everybody, essentially. So, yeah. Yeah, like I said, well, this is just the page we saw, which actually points to every node. And some patterns, I guess, you know, what is in the Agora? Because, you know, we import different repositories. We have digital gardens, the majority, but not the whole thing. We have blog posts, because some people, there are some blogs that are imported into the Agora, and I'm all talking here of the Agora-Flancia, which is the first one, as such. We have a personal wiki, it's very similar. We have journals, so, you know, which I guess is like blogs anchored to date. And I said, no club in the sense that, you know, this is something that happened in Agora-Flancia. Some people started saying, oh, let's all agree to node, you know, fellowship of the link, for example. It's a conversation. Once you agree on an Agora, you can say like, you know, like a name, like essentially like an Agora slice, just like pass over the air, like a concept. And that is enough to start coordinating. Right, exactly. It's like, precisely, like saying, let's use this hashtag for this conference. And of course, you can, nice of you to mention hashtag, of course, the integration of social media, work with hashtags, where you can obtain and then essentially what the Agora tries to offer once your repositories are integrated into the Agora is, you can hashtag anywhere. And the Agora will incorporate all these resources into the, whatever these hashtags you mentioned. Yeah. So we have Stoas as well. So Stoas are just these semi-public spaces I mentioned. So they can be shared documents, a video or a chat space, or like a group Wiki page. So if we see, for example, let's see. So here we have the actual, this is the actual node for the Agora Slides I'm presenting. So here, I mean, this is actually empty, I think as of now, yeah. So you can say, well, I want a hashtag and then you type here, this doesn't need signing or anything, it's actually complete anonymous and an Arctic. So anybody on the internet can go to any location in the Agora and start writing essentially. And this will actually show up and be incorporated into the Agora within 30 seconds or a minute of in return. Like you know, from the meeting notes for this meeting, you have an etherpad as well for like, it's more colorful and a bit nicer as chat. And you also have a GC, which I wonder if this will actually, yeah. I guess, oh, here I am again, I guess. So essentially- We're about to fold into the time space continuum. So beware. Yes, yes. I mean, let's do this towards the end, maybe. Yes, 15 minute adventure. So yeah, I mean, the idea, I mean, this is where like, it's just like a, you know, you have exploration, but Agora server and this I'm just a big fan of transclusion and of high frames, which are the easiest way to do transclusion ever, maybe. And the Agora tries to really just run with it. So this is another example. For example, in the Agora Slice, we have the new version, which I'm presenting and we have the old version, which is from 2021. And in this case, I'm doing a pool. A pool is like, like, essentially telling the Agora to do transclusion of this other node. This is because previously this slide, there was a fork, so I had a different node for it. And then this means that within Agora Slice, the Agora will present Agora Slice 233. And essentially, here I have some nodes about stuff I wanted to say or add, and I didn't get to. So if you want to see like the intention between the slide going forward, these are the nodes about the slides. And essentially, this is the experimental UI of the Agora Slice, essentially, where like, transclusion is around 211. I sometimes end up using the Agora 304 level deep. Is that a good idea? I don't know, I like it, but this is where like feedback and, you know, like expanding the Agora to more users will really like help. Here, for example, we see the kind of like graphs that the Agora, these are local graphs. It only shows the vicinity of this node. So here we can see essentially, I'm directly going on, so I think I wrote, yeah, I wrote that. And here we have all the mentions, just like full text search. So this is essentially the extent of what our server provides as it is now. Yes, and I show the stores. So let me quickly go forward, yeah, I show this. Right, how do you join an Agora? So there's joining an Agora and there's running an Agora. A lot of what we discuss about, you know, Agora Bridge, Agora Server, the root, it has more to do with running your own Agora, which is definitely like something we want to make easier. And we have been mostly investing, but we, yeah, I mean, in this I have been doing mostly, trying to make it easier to run Agoras has been a focus this year in particular. And this is why we have others now. But in the sense of contributing to an Agora, you go to an Agora, you hit this page, this is the, let someone change this, this is still, yeah, exactly. This is still, this is like actually a primitive. So this is the empty, this is the 404 of the Agora, which just says like, you know, start writing this. You can visit any, and you know, you will get this. And it says, you know, what you can do, you can join, which means, you know, you need to have your blog or your garden, wiki. This is like for like, maybe power users, you could say, you know, but precisely, you know, the target of this audience, right? Maybe, and then contribute the garden to an Agora. Or you can just post from social media and chat, actually. So we support the favor, some master on a matrix. That means you need to find an Agora vote, follow the Agora vote or add it to a room, and then you start wiki linking and you're done. It will be imported, it will be cross posted to the Agora, whatever you're right. Or you can write in a store. So for us anyway, you can just pull the store and like go. If you are fine with anonymous. About that, you know, how to join as a power user. Well, I mean, in general, the flow looks like this. You know, this is like, you can take notes, whatever you see, whatever tool you want. Then you need to get into it somehow. We also are trying to, we have in the plan, which is in the Agora, by the way, Agora plan. You go to Agora plan in the Agora and you see all the stuff that we'll take you to probably. So we want to support like Google Drive and Dropbox and so on. Or iCloud, I don't know. But for now it's Git, Git is the game. So take notes, get them into it, tell an Agora. And that's it, essentially. Once you do that, it's one time set up and then the Agora will just keep getting your notes. Of course, it's worth mostly for powering notes. Agora editors, I guess you know, I mean, this is phone, which I was using in 2001. I don't know what you use nowadays. I know for some of you, it was the SDS code. And here, just a bit about going back to the convention. You know, we saw architecture for the vision, the architecture, the actual like a software components that play, but we didn't cover the actual conventions. Essentially, and here we could do either of these first. So we have, so Wikilings everywhere was one of the original motivations. Some of you will remember. And, you know, the idea is like, you know, how powerful Wikilings are, let's see. Essentially how far can we go by Irene on just one thing, maybe. So, and that thing being a particular convention for saying this thing is related to another thing. You know, Wikilings being our entities, being like having this semantic information, right? So, yes, essentially like hashtags. Hashtags are also supported now in the Agora, but Wikilings are still like how I started and what I use most of the time. Of course, they are also supported by, well, most Wikis as the name. And, the idea is that, you know, like, okay, so you agreed on a syntax, say you're gonna write those square brackets when you mean I want to link to this particular thing, whatever that is. The Agora, what it tries to do is I build on that and say, well, you agreed on one thing. If you agreed on a second thing, which is an Agora, then any link that you don't know how to resolve, you can just ask that Agora by default, right? So, essentially, and then you can use that, you know, in different tools and workflows. For example, if massing Wiki, you have a non-existing page. So, you want to, you have a red link. I don't know if it's really massing Wiki, but you know, you link to a page that you haven't written yet. If that Wiki is part of an Agora, then following that page, you know, beyond saying, like, here's, you know, you can write the page now, can show what, if anything, what is the Agora. So, to some extent, it's like a catch all the Agora for links that aren't anchored. And this is essentially, you know, the first intention here, that precisely because, you know, again, like as a person who would like write a lot of notes, but they're, you know, like very often, like listen, hanging the links. I just really wanted to see what happened if like, you know, we all made that jump. We all as in a group of people made a jump of saying, when I write a, like, we killing eggs, if I hadn't said anything about this, you can just refer to my friends. Whatever my friend thinks, I think about eggs, whatever the fellowship thinks about, like, weak links. Well, if I hadn't said anything in particular, you can just, I'll try the fellowship to define it, right? And this is where like, you know, interact, this intention interacts with a lot, oh yeah, exactly, a lot like just agreement. So, someone says, if you would like to see a list of repositories in the Agora and which ones have a note for even weak link. Yeah, that's nice. So users, actually, this is pretty light on information. This is 69 users in this Agora. It will be nice to, so for seeing which ones have a note for a weak link, that's just missing the weak link in the Agora. So for example, if you want to see, I use Flaner as a default, you know, I mean, by definition, the gardens that, or the repositories that have Flaner as a subnode, are the ones that show up in the node. So it's here we know that Neil has Flaner, right? Which is by visiting Flaner and so on, right? So here we have like an example of a pool, where like, you know, we get something from modeler in Flaner. What it is, as you should like, just post around random stuff. And this is to be slow, but it should work. What I also would like to see, and we haven't implemented this, showing this overall Agora graph, but only the ones that, you know, have overlap, essentially. And perhaps even coloring the graph per user. So you can essentially see which parts of this, like choose graph, well, this is really hand, but it should work. Which parts of the graph are actually shared, right? Yeah, so this, all right, about the protocol, just closing. Agora protocol tries to build on top of the weak link and other conventions that you, essentially you are just textual. So essentially, once you have a weak link and you're in an Agora, what can we do that is just a matter of writing the right thing, essentially? And this is where essentially, like I said, you know, like what we use, we have links, we have hashtags, this was on Wikimax everywhere. And right now it has very few other things, essentially. It has the notion of composing nodes. So essentially you can have nodes which have special behavior. And one of the examples here is a goal, the goal, these goal links, I, you know, that are, for example, in the other mechanism that you can use to jump easy to the slide. So this just means, if you write goal as a weak link or a hashtag and a URL in an old, then GoFu will send you as a redirect to that node. As simple as that, and I think I mentioned goal links before, I'm a huge fan just because I've seen several groups where like just agreeing to use these goes a long way in reducing friction towards collaboration, right? So the Agora tries to capture these and generalize it. Pull and push, they have to do with the exclusion. I think we are out of time, so I won't go deeply into these, but essentially it means, you know, if you're in a node in your wiki, in your brain, and you're like, here, I essentially already wrote this, I would like to, whenever I see these, I would like to see that other thing. You can just pull, which is like a hard link, like a strong link, which is like just bring it here, right? It's essentially the intention of inclusion that we saw. And push is the, it's sort of like the inverse of weird in the sense that when you push to a different node, you are transcluding these nodes in the other one. You're sort of like writing at a distance. Yes, and here, well, okay, almost on time, I don't know, I have no plans, so I'm gonna say almost on time, completely unwarranted, is the end of like what, you know, the slides that seem pretty more interesting. And in general, if anybody wants to see more of these in depth, you can go over a chapter in the hour. And anytime you see go hour and like hour of dash, you can just write the space there, or a plus or a dash and it's the same. Thank you so much, Samuel, and every one of you for your time. Before we go further, I'm gonna suggest we pick up on this next Wednesday as well, if you can make it, and I think we can keep going, I can hang out for a bit. So anybody who needs to leave, know that we'll come back to it. Thank you. Are you ready for questions? Yes. Thanks. Anybody who wants to, please jump in. And if nobody will, I will. Okay, there. I'm waiting the requisite five seconds. All right, so I am not a coder, but I am an intense user of some tools. And I love what you're doing, I love your language, I love your intentions, but I have to say, I could not explain this to somebody else right now, nor could I use it. Oh, good, Samuel's back. So that's my problem, is that when I've listened to something for 45 minutes and I can't explain it to someone else, there's something slipping in the explanation. So I kind of feel like I need a layman's summary or I need to paraphrase what I think it is and have you go, yes, yes, no, no, to get closer to what the thing is, I really don't know how to explain a Gora to someone else and I think that everything you're doing is stuff that I want. Thank you so much for that. So let me maybe like phrase it, and let's see if this helps. Probably won't, but here goes. So I usually start nowadays in short to say like, the Gora is a free knowledge commons, right? Which of course is very also abstract. And then the next one will be, right? The next one will be, the Gora is just an agreement that is an agreement upon default place. So when, if you, the idea is that, and this is where, whether you believe in this, it's like, it may to be seen, it's like, it's a default place. So if you agree on a default place with your friends or your group, then that lets you do things more easily. I'm gonna, you've just tried to explain the Gora for 45 minutes. I'm going to challenge the other people on the call to explain it to us and see if that works differently. Cause you've done your best, I think so far. And you've done a lovely job, but who else would like to jump in and explain this? Please. Okay, I'll give it a try. I have to drop soon, but I'll give it a try. I'll give it a try. As I understand it, it's a machine that aggregates data from any number of resources that match its expected format and link them together and provide displays in which you can see both the linked data in place and the links that form from those places to other places. In this sense, it is a machine that aggregates content from multiple sources, connects that content using its own logic, and enables participants to connect to each other through Wiki links and tags. That was amazing. Can you, I will call you in a blurb. And we have a recording of this so you can use it once again. What would you change or correct from what Aram said? That's pretty pretty strong actually. I mean, I think that's pretty much it. Maybe if I added something, it won't be to correct, but I just like to add about the intention. I mean, for me, my intention behind the algorithm is like what I haven't found elsewhere. Maybe I've just found it, but like, and that what led me to actually start building this machine, which is like, you know, essentially setting out this interconnectivity, developing the tools so that people can link into the algorithm, in particular from World Gardens, right? And use that interconnectivity to, you know, try projects, find solutions to problems, build essentially like maybe use this machine to build pattern languages. So, but this is on the praxis or pragmatic. Anybody else wanna take a swing? Okay, I'll try. Yay. And I think that there are multiple, one of the challenges for the explanation, I think is that the idea of an Agra as a shared space has led to a number of separable things that all have that name. And one way to clarify that is to have a family of things with Agra at the beginning, like an Agra Commons, an Agra Environment, an Agra Resolver and so on. And so I like the diagram that shows the Agra server and the Agra Bridge. So maybe one of the things that we can, one of the bits of feedback we can give back is to say, here are a set of nouns that are worth describing more that have two word names. But for the Agra as a whole, I would say it's an environment for streamlining the sharing and the contextualizing of links across a universe of documents intended by the participants to be shared with one another. That's amazing, thank you. Yeah, yes, that's amazing. Streamlining environment, yeah, definitely. And thank you for the feedback, yes. And definitely like Agra Commons, for example, is a key concept that is not mentioned anywhere. Although we say the Agra is a Commons, that sort of like maybe makes it more opaque than list, but that's saying like the Agra, such a thing as an Agra Commons and it has a component, yes. This may be a really bad analogy. It just occurred to me now, but I'm sort of reaching for analogies in other realms entirely. So there's things called switches, which you attach to automatic weapons. Like there's a Glock switch, which is a really big deal right now. It's a very small piece of equipment. When you attach a Glock switch to a Glock, it turns it into full automatic fire weapon. It's a tiny thing that basically holds back the hammer and does whatever, I don't know what it does exactly, but it converts a single fire weapon into an automatic fire weapon. It's like a little tiny power tool. And the analogy I'm reaching for here is, and I may be entirely wrong about this, that Agra is a set of sort of tools and protocols that are intending to build a Commons that you could bolt onto other tools, giving them superpowers of vacuuming up and synchronizing links and information across different bodies of work. And it tries to do that with the intention of building a Commons. It tries to do that by picking up the most commonly used kinds of document and link. It tries to do that by creating a vocabulary only when it has to for how to do that. But the intent is to do that. So I use Obsidian and push to Massive Wiki on GitHub all the time. And my next question kind of for next week I think is, what do I bolt onto the vaults or the repos that I have going? And Pete, is there a Massive Wiki component that could be an Agra component that could be just a configuration switch that says, yes please share my Massive Wiki content promiscuously through the Agora or am I misunderstanding it? And the reason I said earlier it's a hypertext catfish is that catfish are kind of bottom feeders. And I was thinking that what you're doing is like feeding on the hyperlinks that fall to the bottom of the Commons and picking them up and going, look, look, look, this was set over here. So again, I'm stressing and stretching for metaphors and analogies. I mean, I think it would be amazing that those are like three different metaphors or takes and they will work. Fortunately, catfish cannot use a Glock switch or we'd all be in trouble. Right, right, right. Yes, I'm happy to discuss integration next time without taking a little more of your time. But yeah, definitely Ocea and Gitex sees and it can hook Ocea and I think maybe you're using that for Massive Wiki already. And if not, that's the recommended way of integrating Ocea and at least. Which one? Ocea and Gitex. Obsidian Git. We are using Obsidian Git to push to Git hub. Right. Yeah, Massive Wiki or maybe it's the other way around. Agra is just Massive Wiki compliant. They just work together. Yes. Oh, well, are they compliant? Because, well, so Pete, I like that statement. In one sense, they're compliant because they use very similar primitive moving parts out there, links marked down a couple other things. But from what I can think of, Massive is not designed to be promiscuous. Massive is designed to create lots of different repose, vaults, wikis, spaces. But there's no, I don't know that there's code in there to synchronize across them on purpose to create the bigger commons where that seems to be Flancia's primary intent where the rest of the things that Flancia is building are as duct tape and baling wire and spit as possibly could be. Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah. They integrate this core, yes. And for now, what about the Apeat? I'm not sure what the difference between those two was, Dre, but maybe let, so I think I would rather not try to describe the whole Agora because for what it, I mean, I appreciate the, and each of those third-party explanations was great. But what would be more helpful for me, I think, is I loved SJ's, you know, it seems like you have a bunch of little piece parts here that are kind of all Agora and if you name them separately. So I would love to, it feels to me like there's about 15 things that all work together to make the Agora. And I find that I can't understand any one of them very well because I'm trying to capture all 15 of them in my head. So for me, what I would be interested in is having all the little piece parts and understanding what they do, how they work, like just atomically kind of. And then I think the way I understand things like this is by understanding all the piece parts and then constructing the map of how they all work together or what they do in my head. Because all the explanations to me sound like they're abstract and they sound great but they don't actually instantiate any understanding in my head. Thanks so much. Yeah, so that could be like a more detailed architecture diagram and maybe just like an explanation for each component with a better name. But also renaming the components so that they form an architecture of sorts that they can follow. And then you can, in your head, you can grab this part, the Agora set of graphs. Yes, and the intention of course is that, for example, like the Agora reach, you can use for other purposes, right? If what you want is to like import data from one of the sources, it could be used as an official tool but that's not made at all clear, yes, currently. Yes, so thank you. David, Michael, any thoughts, if you want? Yeah, I mean, going back to your original piece of feedback as a non-technical, non-encoder, most of this, I could look at, say, I get what the intention is. I think this is really cool. I can't really understand. My biggest, my biggest challenges are, okay, what's the consumer-friendly UX here? And could it be that somebody could be using their choice of information gathering tool, whether it's the brain or doctor or Instagram, and from there, very simply tagging something and having it, having what's going on in the Agora, in the background to them but manifesting itself in a much more user-friendly, you know, UI, and I'd be curious to... Yeah, I'm equally challenged with, for a long time, even trying to put a word around what was happening and I think when, you come to the welcome page, it tells me what, but it doesn't tell me why. Why would I come here? Why would I connect? Why would I leave notes here? I think over time, I kind of got to the idea that the Agoria is a machine that's going to attempt in some way to collect information that I might not otherwise know about, maybe it speeds that collection, maybe it helps, it finds in different areas, but I think, and then at some point, it's got to be what I call my wife's UI, meaning anybody could come to it and walk around in it, right? I personally even think, and I'm a huge user of the brain and user of many different note-taking apps, even at the brain level, if you haven't been using it for a while, or if you don't use it, it's hard to find what you're looking for, or even just wandering around. So I think you have to tell me why I wanna be here and what I get for being here. Thank you, that makes complete sense, yeah, completely. There's another? Conversely, I would say I find myself understanding the why just being intimidated by the how. Yeah, so I mean, but I understand the why, not from the welcome page, but from what you've said and what I've heard you say before, it's what the how is really. Yes, thank you, thank you. And the index actually, yeah, it's actually not geared towards this, it's an experiment in what happens if you give the index of the site to the community, essentially. So everybody just has this fringe thing. So one thing that might be helpful is two or three short use cases that might just be videos or screen captures with your voiceover, but I need to sort of see what are the insights I would get from feeding this or connecting my information into the agro? What would it tell me that would be super useful that I would be like, damn, I can't think of another tool that would have told me this was happening and this is helpful to my quest to understand blank, but just that's what I don't, that's what I'm not intuiting or seeing, which would make me then go, oh, okay, so in order to do that, it would have had to do this, this and this and then I'm thinking architecturally how it might have done that, which is taking me down where Pete was asking. Right, right, makes sense. And also potentially showing the value if it actually is worth doing. Yes, user journeys essentially, completely, completely. And just short vignettes, just like all I really wanna see is the little aha, I wanna see the light bulb turn on in my head and then we're good and you could do that in a minute if you have kind of the setup. Yeah, yeah, thank you so much. This is all like gold essentially. So I really appreciate it. Sweet. Anybody else with thoughts to add or shall we pull this call and then reconvene and I think it's nice that we'll have a week to think about this and so forth as well. Nobody's speaking up, so I'm thinking we fold and reconvene and then we fold. We good? Good. I'm glad. Thank you so much again. I'm glad Jetsy was finally friendly. Flancy and thank you so much for this. This was super interesting and useful. Yeah, yeah, really appreciate it. I mean, more useful to me and I thank you for your time and your patience and like your feedback is really like, it's gonna just steer this. Thank you. Awesome. Yeah, thank you. See you guys. Bye bye. Thank you, bye.