Federated Content Curation Lecture and Tutorial

Lecture (1/2 Hour)

Historically governments paid librarians to curate information. With the arrival of the internet that job has been left to for-profit search engines who manipulate the results for their own benefit. People tolerated that, but with the arrival of AI slop there is a stronger need for human curated content. This talk will review the history of content curation, my own experiences, useful technologies, and future directions.

The tree of life illustrates taxonomy, but really a knowledge graph is needed. Yahoo directory, now mostly forgotten, was the largest online curation project. Awesome lists show us what to do, but they have their limitations. My own experiences taught me what not to do. The required web and email technologies will be reviewed. Integration with ActivityPub will be discussed. In technology there is a business model: curate content to become known as the expert in the field. In political activism, there is a "business" model, curate content to become known as a trusted source of information and in the process attract voters. In other fields only wealthy eccentric hobbyists can do the work. In the future, the government, universities and libraries should be funding curation using federated tools.

Tutorial (45 Minutes)

The goal of this workshop is to bring together a community of people who want to build a human curated taxonomy or knowledge graph of the Fediverse. To make the ideas concrete, we will split into smaller groups, focused on software, marketing, people, communities, organizations and other topics. Each group will create a different branch of the directory. It is hoped that the project will continue after the conference is over.

There is great content in the Fediverse, hashtags and search help us to find. it, but it would also be helpful to be able to browse a taxonomy or knowledge graph about the Fediverse. The goal of this project is to bring together the people interested in this topic, and in the long run to create such a directory. To gain experience with these ideas, we will build a sample directory, using the ForestWiki.com software hosted at wiki.PythonLinks.info. After working with taxonomy enabling software, people will be invited to suggest what they want to see in the future.

Discussion

It is a very enjoyable venue. The lat time I held such a meeting, people stayed around for an hour chatting.