# Holistic Digital Authorship

#### 31 July 2020

### Agenda
18:10 - 18:20 : Intros + stretches
18:20 - 18:25 : Context - What is COMPOST?
18:25 - 18:35 : Reflection questions — Individual reflection + collective drawing/notes
18:35 - 19:05 : Group discussion — Share reflections (15); New words + proverbs
19:05 - 19:10 : Close out

### Context
* What is COMPOST?
* COMPOST is a magazine about the digital commons that provides fertile ground for creative experimentation, cultivates communities that value participation, and celebrates the labor of regeneration and care.
* We are also building the Distributed Press tool for COMPOST, so that anyone can publish to the World Wide Web and Distributed Web
* Links
* Distributed.press
* COMPOST.DIGITAL
* Our process
* We’ve been hosting conversations with different communities to understand challenges they face and their aspirations for a free and open web publishing ecosystem. This is a continuation of that.
* How to talk about our labour openly
* One step towards liberation

## Common Issues in Digital Authorship
* Publishing platforms are broken
* Excludes writer/creator input at best, exploitative at worst
* Ad-based revenue model undermines user privacy
* Atomization of labour
* Established orgs often exploit labour
* Freelance writers, coders, creators are left to fend for themselves, to create individual brands, very atomizing
* Creative expression
* Lack of supportive networks to produce creative works: Editing, platforms, publicity/outreach
* Network effects
* Content about the DWeb often ends up on platforms like Medium
* Difficulty of finding an audience and promoting your work

### Reflection Questions
* What experiences have you had in how you’ve spent your time in passion projects? How did you make it personally sustainable? When did it become unsustainable?
* What would a dignified livelihood look like to you (to support passion work)?
* Think about your experience in relation to the issues named above, or other systemic issues in digital authorship

## NOTES

* Jeremy Cahill
first :o:
* Eric Rangell 12:22 PM
Ted Nelson thought a lot about this but it never caught on in the mainstream. He has good data structures, but some issues are: source of truth, transcopyright micropayment acceptance. I am interested in applying his ideas with DAT protocols. Barriers to entry: time devoted to earning a living and steep learning curve. My training was in older tech so it is hard to follow new tech on a detail level - at a high level I understand it. User community still not aware of possibilities of decentralized tech, and it's hard to sell it. Echo chambers and politics have us fighting each other - connections between authoritative information where people can evaluate source material from their frame of reference are needed. Xanadu with tumblers can be structured in hypercores/hyperdrives to keep all versions of documents, and mounts allow sharing and pinning to versions for commentary - rich metadata and link types can be created. Peter van Hardenburg has examples like Pushpin which are close to what I envision. Sharing requires trust and that's another tricky problem for decentralization - combining webs of trust can help but it is not clear to me how to make it work. DAO models may give you ideas. I've been following DAT since hearing Brewster Khale's "Lock the Internet Open" speech. [name=serapath(AlexanderPraetorius)] sounds great - that's kind of the goal we are trying to go after in DatDot too :-) ...step by step. Only when one foundational layer exists and is stable can the next be built. Have you seen our talk? :-)

- Note: you can style your comments like this too.
> [name=Jeremy Cahill] [color=red]

* James Littlejohn
Met Ted's friend Doug Engelbart while in the bay area.
The vision they had for the internet did not 'win' out, well not yet.

* Eric: Yes, Engelbart had great ideas which were sidelined for corporate political reasons after he gave his demo in 1968. I am also interested in his work.