Recording is on. Oh, there we go. It's official now. I love the echo, but it sounds much more profound. Recording is on, on, on, on. So how about you? How's your week been? Good, I'm just realizing that I'm overwhelmed by the scale of the problems I'm looking at. So I'm trying to figure out how to parse them down to, you know, it's the old joke, how do you eat an elephant? And the answer is one bite at a time. Yeah, yeah. And so a piece of this, one question that's active for me that's a little bit too abstract is, where is the fungus? Have you heard me riff on the big fungus? It was mentioned last week, but I think it was mentioned in response to, I was talking about one of the people, one of the crews I was working with last year who were building a thinking tool on SOLID. And they were called Mycelio. And before that, it was called Understory. And their metaphor is they are, they want to build the fungus, the body of the fungus which lives underground, which connects trees together and there's actually a forest-wide communication networking, apparently. So that's there. And that's, you mentioned the big fungus, but you didn't elaborate on it. So go. Cool.  The conceit... You've got a lot of those. I do. I have many actually. I know, because I've followed a few of the links and it's like, oh, here's another website built, you know, and clearly as a starting point, but it's not very developed yet. Exactly. I do that a lot just as a placeholder for an idea. And if anybody wants to come in and edit and jump in, like it's on Google site, so it's super easy to build. So the conceit is that leaf cutter ants can't digest leaves.  It's because they're feeding a fungus and they have the symbiotic relationship with a fungus. And they feed the fungus, mulched up leaf bits. They inoculate it with the fungus and then the fungus metabolizes and feeds them nectar and tasty fungus bits, which keeps, so happy fungus, happy hive. And it gets actually even more interesting. They noticed that the subgenus of ants who were busy tending the fungus had like a white powder on their thorax. And so they took samples of the white powder, looked at that under the microscope, turns out this is a beneficial bacterium that acts as an antibiotic to keep the fungus safe. It's crazy. So the bacterium grows on the ants but keeps the fungus safe, right? Yes.  He goes in every day to the laboratory and experiments on ants. Oh, seriously? Yes, seriously. Is he a mycologist? No, he's doing a biology or a master's degree in biology on living systems. That's pretty much. And he's investigating something called... Oh, look, I can't remember it right now, but how there's epigenetics, the epigenetics of... He's got like 20 hives of ants in the laboratory and he's doing all sorts of experiments. What's his name? Oh, you wouldn't see him online, William Lowry, unless you find his Flickr account because he's an amateur nature photographer. He's got quite some nice photos online. Well, I've just added him to my brain, so he's official. Well, now he exists in the biggest brain in the world, so now that's quite something.  Anyway, so tell me more about... I mean, I did read the big fungus but I read like there's like literally five paragraphs. So I'm just using that as a rich metaphor because I feel like I've been at the fungus phase for 24 years feeding this weird tool called the brain. And the brain happens to work the way my brain likes to work, but every time I put something in, and this morning I probably already put 10 links in my brain from the news in the info flood, every time I click something in, it feels like I'm snapping a little puzzle piece into the large sense-making thing that we need, except the brain is a proprietary tool that doesn't play well with others. There is a thing called team brain, but you're still kind of building just a brain. And partly I'm trying to figure out how to external, how to avert this brain, how to make it so that it's a public commons good. That still looks like the brain for me, but looks like Kumu to someone else and looks like Rome to you or whatever, right? No, right, okay. Or Hubei. And how might we then each use our favorite tool to curate and improve this shared asset? Well, the thing is that that is exactly what open standards are supposed to allow, right? If you, like a Tivoli Pub is an open standard for sharing content socially, and it defines a unit of content, and you can view that unit of content using, Asterdom or Frendica or whatever, any client, which, so that's one of the reasons why I want to put my hub on the 30s and use an activity pub. Because then I might create these little atomic units of content as notes and then eventually build them into, or opposed to articles which I publish. But if I have friends who allow access to my notes, I don't know if you've seen the blog post, but there's a graphic in there which shows that I mean, there's two levels of social in there. You've got followers who just see what you publish, what comes out of the public end, but you've got friends, which is a mutual two-way relationship, and you allow them to see some of the notes inside your brain, but only ones you select. So you can, a note can either be private, friends only or public, essentially. And you can do that with activity pub. And it doesn't, for somebody else to be one of your friends, it doesn't mean they have to have a hub. They just have to have a client on the, that uses an identity, yeah, that you can recognize. Exactly, that can process that piece of content, and they can. So I was talking about this thing I'd read recently on, because I posted my blog post to the Fediverse website. And the guy, he shared me something, which he wrote just early this year in January, let me put it in the chat if I can find it in this interface, here we go. It's another long post, but he talks about social knowledge fabric. So when you're talking about big fungus, he's talking about fabric, so. Yeah, yeah. The other metaphor is tapestry or mosaic. Those are also. Yeah, follow the link and look at the picture. The picture is not a tapestry. It's a mosaic tapestry. Yeah, so, and if you read the article, this is the article that I was reading and I was like, yes, yes, yes. But I was reading it on my phone, so I couldn't do very much with it. So that's when I get back from my holiday, I'm away for 10 days, and there's some way to do this, just to process that. And I think that you'll find that there's some similar ideas there. So you might want to connect with him and some of the people in that space. That's the website dedicated to the Fediverse, essentially. Absolutely, that's really cool. And it's an open standard, so that's the sort of thing to use. And this is all about Fediverse and Federated Wiki. I think we mentioned Federated Wiki last. And we know Fedwiki and I'm in Portland, so Ward is a neighbor. Right. Yeah, so we could easily connect up with Fedwiki. And I've got a perpetual problem with Fedwiki in that I don't really comprehend why it does what it does, how it does it. But there's a big community there that's doing cool stuff. It's open source. There's a bunch of really great things around it. And I can see it easily as a tool that plays nicely in building this fungus. And so let me scroll back to the where's the fungus question. My best answer to where's the fungus right now is that if we use the simplest possible file formats like Markdown plus some metadata, then the fungus is Markdown files living on shared directory somewhere. And we reconstitute it constantly into our own visualization tools. But as long as it's in simple formats, we can then enhance what's in the files and share this thing. And so this is a really rudimentary view of what the fungus might be. And I think I need to learn a lot more about the Fediverse and these other components. And I've looked at IPFS and things like that a bit.  Because- Sorry, tell me about pinning. What is pinning? It turns out, are you familiar with how IPFS works? Not very, no. I know what it is, but I haven't dug into it. Yeah, it's basically a peer to peer sharded file system that distributes file bits over everybody's server. The problem is, if you want a file to persist on IPFS, you have to pin it, which means you have to pay a pinning service. Oh, okay, right. And I'm like, okay, so every node I'm gonna put, every file I'm gonna drop into IPFS, I need to pin if I want it to persist. That's a little bit crazy because I have half a million thoughts in my brain. You don't know which one is gonna be worth pinning, right? You don't know it until you come back and find it later. Bingo, or I might want every node in my brain to persist as long as possible. And that may be super expensive. Anyway, so- But that's the subscription model, basically, but as storage where you gotta pay for the service space somehow, right? Yeah, yeah. And if you use another tool that uses Markdown, is Obsidian, right? Yes, and Obsidian is just Markdown files on your hard drive, right? Bingo. And so I was kicking myself a little bit metaphorically this morning because I ran into a Hungarian programmer named Zolt Vicham, who is on his own little journey.  So using Obsidian and Excalidraw, an open source drawing plugin, he built a couple other libraries and expanded on Excalidraw to the point where he can emulate the brain in that combo of tools with plugins. And his like brainy version is the best sort of thing like, let me share the link for you of him explaining this thing. Here's the brain-like graph-based navigation in Obsidian. Let me connect it to today's call and then send you a link to it in the chat. He's the closest I've seen to anybody sort of getting this done properly. And there we go. And I wanted to invite him to these calls because I think he's a natural. But the thing I was kicking myself for is not immediately just trying to emulate what he's doing. And I think that I think that I've seen this video. I think, I think, I think. Isn't he the guy that invented Excalidraw in fact? I don't know that he's the inventor of Excalidraw, but he might be because he's deep in the Excalidraw community, but I didn't think he was the Excalidraw guy. He was talking earlier, if it's the same guy and he was talking about what are they called? Argument maps. Argumentation maps.  Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Because that was- I think- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is the inventor of Excalidraw. It's the same guy. I haven't seen the video you shared because he's got a lot of videos. But yes, I know this guy. You know, Hungarians are very innovative digitally. I have a thought in my brain called Remarkable Hungarians. Tiny little company. It's a study- Really? Excellent. Let me share screens with you. How do I share a screen here? Yeah, sure. Start, stop sharing your screen. Pick this one. Share, go to my brain so it's not recursively looping. And then go to Remarkable Hungarians. I think it's called Remarkable. Yes, it is. Look at that. Remarkable Hungarians. So Imre Lakatos, Carl and Michael Polanyi, Zoltan Kodai, Lajlo Vido. And I'm not sure I'm pronouncing any of these correctly. Arthur Kessler, Bilavartok, Gabor Mate. These are all Remarkable Hungarians. And I've got them under Magyarus and the Hanuk Empire. And I had a couple of Hungarians working for me many years ago. And one of them was the guy who introduced me to Prezzi when it was still in like a beta. Yes. And no one really heard of it. Yeah, and it was like, I think, this is so cool. You know, I was just so blown away by it. And he said, you know, we got into a conversation about how many Remarkable Hungarians there are. And he said, I think that his theory is that it's to do with the language.  Because it's got this logic, which is just perfect for computer programmers. That's hilarious. I don't know if that's true or not, but he was a computer programmer. So that was his belief, anyway. Love that. So a piece that I'm leaning into right now is trying to figure out how those of us playing in this pond might share our notes better more efficiently, even though we're in different tools. And I'm trying to figure out how to loop in Ev Williams, who is using Mem right now. And Mem is like Rome, only a little bit. I don't really know what Mem's native format is or whatever. But I'm like, OK, how can we make it so that we can start sharing notes through the big fungus wherever and whatever it is? As a simple exercise proof that this is even a thing that's easy to do.  I do. Yeah, OK. Is he still running Medium or is he moving on? He is. No, that's kind of his. That's one of his main sort of concerns right now is Medium. So many years ago, Peter Mehrholz blogged about using Pyra, this little website. So I went to Pyra, and it was basically kind of like a document management, workflow-y kind of thing. And so I pinged the webmaster, and I said, who are you guys? And I got a note back from Ev saying, hey, nice to see you. Why don't you come on, drop by. And so I went and visited them when they were in a basement flat near the train station in San Francisco, the Cal train station. And then I became an advisor to them before they invented Blogger. And so while we were busy. Oh, this is pre-Blogger, right? So while we were strategizing around Pyra, the guy across the room invents Blogger. That eats the company. There's a whole bunch of stories there. Then I met with Ev when he founded Odeo, which was kind of an incubator. And I talked with him and a guy about a podcasting app that was like, OK, before podcasting got really hot and cool. But then somebody in Odeo basically invented Twitter. And so Twitter eats the company. So he's been down this march a couple times before. But what's cool, I think, is that he's also seen what happens when VCs come in and when the profit mode kind of presses things. And if you think about what he's been doing, he's been trying to reinvent journalism and civil society. I know, I know, I realize. I mean, Medium has pivoted a number of times trying to make, how do we make money out of this? Exactly. It hasn't pivoted for a while. Since they brought in the paywall and membership scheme. I was a member for a while. I don't know how successful it's been, but they haven't changed. So I mean, they went away. I was glad that they moved away from the whole sponsored content thing. That really made my throat. I don't know. It's really hard to find a way to do that. I like Medium as a platform. It's hard to find your way to a clean business model these days. Yeah, it is. I think that having a data union of people working together and in the process, training in AI and monetizing the AI, I think that's the thing I keep coming back to, because I'm not going to pay $1 or even one cent to store a node on IPFS. I would like the possibility if I want to set up my own server, I set up my own server. I just download the open source tools. Great. But if I want somebody to set everything up for me, give me the pod, give me the apps, the templates, the Fediverse account and connect it all together without having to go into the code, which is what 99.5% of people are going to do, then I think there's a business model for that. But even then, I think getting people to pay for that is going to be hard unless you tell them you have six months free. After that, it may be a couple of bucks a month. But even then, if you use the tool enough, you may actually be able to, the training that you give the AI will actually, might actually pay for all of your costs and you may even get some money back. Yeah, that's an idea, I guess. I think it's worth pursuing. And I don't see anybody else doing this. So what's the simplest possible path to standing one of those up as an example? Well, you know how you were saying earlier how you got to eat the elephant one bite at a time? Exactly. Well, that's because you've got this big brain, you've got all these ideas, and you don't know which end.  The trunk, the tail, one of the feet, an ear. You've got to have an angle of attack. And I had this similar problem many years ago when I was thinking about these interconnected issues for quite a long time. And it was like, I need a framework for this. And I couldn't really come up with one. So what I did do was I said, well, if I decided I wanted to build a product, that would give me my framework. I want to build, actually build something. And then I can look at something and say, that looks interesting, but it's not relevant to my product right now. So I put it aside. And that is the box I put IPFS in. It was I came across it, made a note about it, not directly relevant, so it's not on my, you know. So I did a lot of that for a while. But because I had the framework of does it fit in this product or not, most things I looked at, I went, no, it doesn't. And then it was, oh, this one does. Soldered is an example of that. I wrote a blog post and this crew from, I think they're from Portland as well, somewhere in California, they contacted me and it was like, you know, we're doing something in a similar space. We have a lot of similar ideas. And but I hadn't even, I'd heard about solid, but I didn't think it was relevant. And they showed me that it was relevant. So it's in there now. Same with activity pub. I mean, it started as what you see my hub.ai is the website right now that the alpha version. That was basically it to start with. And then it just sort of, it allowed me to, it gave me a framework and then I could see what was relevant to it and I could expand the vision. And but still leave 90% of what I found outside of the framework because it wasn't directly relevant. So that's why I've got this product focus and the blog post I wrote recently, which is the introduction to this chapter is, that chapter is now the latest version of my framework. I'm going to develop my thinking because I need to deliver a chapter by the end of August either. And that is the only way I can focus and not go down a hundred rabbit holes at once and end up getting nowhere, just getting lost underground somewhere because I went down 50 different rabbit holes. It's by turning it into a project and turning it into a product to build something. And so I'm going to write my next milestone, big milestone is to write that chapter. And by the end of that I'll have a basically a master document for the user requirements. I'll have the features that I want. I'll have mock ups and wire frames and other pretty coherent picture of what this product should be. And a lot of the stuff in your big brain will sort of not be in it at least to begin with, but that's okay. It's the only way of getting a hand on it. So you eat the elephant one bite at a time. I sort of like, I'm going to give, I'm going to take a product focus to keep me focused on it. A couple of things. One of the things I like about the brain is that it has a feature I call local structure, which is it's like websites have local structure. If I click on a link from your website that goes to some third person's website, I'm leaving your local structure, which is how you decided to design your website in whatever sense you made out of nav menus. And I'm going to new territory where they might have done something completely different. But over a little period of time, my brain is going to adapt and go, oh, okay, now I understand. Yeah, you're gonna learn that. Yeah, exactly. And so in the brain, every screen is organized the same exact way. And there's always only one item in the middle. It's the active thought. It's one of the conceits of the brain, but I really like the way the brain is organized because moment by moment, I'm not confused by the half million things that are in the big brain. I'm always looking at a screen full. And I don't care what the big ball of twine looks like. It's not interesting to me, right? So I have thoughts about the design of this project and so forth that are like thoughts in my brain and I go look there. And I try to pay attention there. Problem is I'm curious about everything and very easily distracted. In fact, yesterday, I put in a clip from the movie up of the moments in the movie up where they go squirrel. Remember squirrel? I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it. You must see up. It's actually really, really fun. That's great. Good to see you. Yeah. You're muted by the way. Yeah, I say we can't hear you yet, but it could be he's in a noisy place. So anyway, so this notion of the local structure, I just sent you a link to my brain to potential OGM architecture components, which is where I put things like IPFS and solid and all those kinds of things. Because here's the grab bag of stuff I've drifted across. Hey, everybody's showing up. That's awesome. How are you? How are you? Hello. How are you? Good. Yes. That's right. And SJ just joined us. He's on mute. We're not sure that he can unmute yet at this point. Matthew and I started at the top of the hour and have been having a great time. Hey, yes. Yeah. And I know what I was gonna ask you, Matthew, which was the chapter that you posted on Medium, how are you interested in and how might you instrument that? And I think instrumentation is the wrong word here, but I don't know the better word. How might you add stuff to it to turn it into a shared object in the big fungus in the shared memory? Meaning right now it's sort of a blog post on a blogging platform called Medium, right? And that's interesting because it's in the public sphere, that's kind of cool, et cetera, et cetera. But how could it be made more useful, more linkable, more weave-able, et cetera, et cetera? Well, at the moment because of Medium is a very simple blogging platform and every year, EVE makes it simpler and simpler and takes away features until it's basically just gonna be notepad. It does that all the time. It's just like, I like some of the features that he's just taken away and my blog post has to, they refer to the video left. No, it's not left anymore. It's just up or down, sort of irritated. Anyway, sorry. They took away attention, right? Yeah. I didn't know. The images are in the middle and they're all the same size and that's it. That's all there is. It's just... Oh, that sucker. Well, yeah. I clearly have written a post on Medium in a while. You know, the thing is that it's a full blog post and it belongs there, right? And it's got some tags which are relevant to the Medium platform and that's all. What would... And I think that's fine and that should continue. I like finished products published as blog posts. But what... You can have a cloud... In any piece of content, you can have a cloud of content around it which is related to it, right? So for example, if you were to read my blog post and you were to annotate my blog post into your note-taking app where there would be public or private, that would be your takeaways, your observations, your ideas which have been provoked by what I wrote. And that goes into your system with your tags and your way of presenting it and your local structure and your local navigation. And people do that. People take notes on various note-taking apps and they're all in these little silos everywhere. What would be great would be that if those notes about the blog post could be part of a shareable soup along with the blog post itself so that when you go to the blog post, you can see immediately, here's what all these people are saying about this blog post or even about this paragraph of this blog post. And that's a decentralized network of notes. So if, for example, you take notes about that blog post in your system and the system says, oh, 29 other people have also made notes about that. And they may have made notes about it on the same note-taking platform that you use or something completely different. If they all use activity hub, activity hub, then that could be decentralized together. So you will discover other people and the way they reacted to the blog post. Through this federation, essentially. And that's how I think you weave content together because people put content out there, other people react to it. But at the moment, all those reactions are all in these silos and they're not connectable together in any real way. I think people can comment on the medium post on medium and you can see that comment and you can discover that person, right? But it's much easier if I could just, yeah, as long as you've got a medium account, but if you haven't got a medium account, you can't publish your comment and you can't do anything with it really. So you shouldn't need an account to interact with content. You shouldn't need an account on that platform. Part of the problem is that medium doesn't want to outsource the commenting to hypothesis, for example, right? If that happened, if everybody was sort of commenting through a hypothesis, you'd have an account on hypothesis. So you'd need that account. But then you could string together all the different bits and bobs over there across platforms, which is pretty cool. Yeah. But you're just tying... Yeah, or a platform-based compatible, right? Yeah, but the thing is that hypothesis is just one other platform. It would be better if there was an open standard. So any tool that used that standard could interact with any piece of content and the content that they create could be readable by anyone using that standard. So you don't have to use hypothesis. You could use My Hub, you could use Mastodon, you could use whatever. But we do have that... There was standard, as I understand it, it should be that. And that's what hypothesis and MemeX implement. But I asked Dan Whigley and Oliver from MemeX, why don't you interrupt? And they were like, yeah, we're cool, because we're using the same standard, but we're not. But that does seem like a very, like potentially low-hanging fruit. Yeah. Like development. Just like get it, you know, these particular two implementations of the standard to interrupt. Well, at the top of the call, Matthew mentioned ActivityPub and the Fediverse project, which are, I think, attempts to do some of this. Yes. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the Fediverse is the universe of apps which use the ActivityPub standard, which is a WPC standard. So, but I mean, I'm not technical enough to actually dive into it. I don't even have a Fediverse account yet. I'm a bit sort of blocked by knowing, I don't know which server I should use, should I set up my own and I haven't gotten to it yet. I'm really interested in this simplest thing we could possibly do to stand up a working example of this. So if we can help each other do the tools and connect the bits so that we can begin collaborating with shared notes and comments in the Fediverse, for example, I'm in, like count me in. I want to do that soon, because I want to start riffing on, how does this feel? What does it look like? What are the platforms that make it work? What's just like, let's just like get practical and get out there. Really. Well, why don't we set up a Mestadon server or something? Oh, good. Another tool. Yeah. So we do have, we do have the... Mestadon is the Twitter look alike in the Fediverse. I know. We do have the Mattermost channel active already. So that's a very good... I'm sorry, I forgot about that. Yeah, I'm sorry, I forgot about that. And I'd be perfectly, perfectly happy to run this conversation there. And also, Flancian, if you want to put links to the doc in that channel, then people can follow our notes. And also I meant to ask you, did you save the recording from the previous call? Did you post it any place on YouTube or something? Interesting. I think it's saved to my roadbooks, but I didn't. Yeah, I will. This one, when I hit record on this call, it made me log into my Dropbox account, which I don't use very much. But I will take it from Dropbox and I'll post it on YouTube and I'll post that to the Mattermost channel so that we know where it is and I'll add that to my brain around this call. Yeah. Where is the Mattermost channel? I will... I send the Hedge Doc, isn't it? Yes. It should be, if not this in the hour, I think I may have failed, but it should be in the fellowship. I've got it right here. The link, yeah. I've, of course, got a link in my brain. There we go. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. Yes. And on setting up these tools and the Massome server and so on. Yeah, I'm happy with that, with preventing there. I am happy to get the start that you want. I have a spare server like with containers and it shouldn't be too hard. I also run an instance already, I mean, run, I think. Like I am an admin in SocialCop, which I don't know if you know SocialCop. It is pretty much an experiment in the same space, so I think it's related to what we're discussing. Right now it's, we only run the Massome instance for the community. It has about 2,000 users. And it could be at least a friendly project in the space, like a good source of interesting people. Yes, but for an experiment, I think it doesn't make sense to perhaps set up like a special alloc instance and try to make things play well to each other, essentially. Cool. Okay, that sounds good fun, yeah. Awesome. Yes, Anna, thank you for your chapter. Matthew, I'm looking forward to reading it. Good luck, it's 18 minutes long. It's just the introduction to the chapter. Oh, interesting. Well, you know, I've got two months to write the full chapter, so it's just a brain dump, which I wanted to, I had to get done before, you know, I'm leaving on Sunday for a 10 day trek, so I needed to get this out of my system.  So a lot of that 18 minute read is gonna probably be transferred to subsequent parts of the chapter. I just wanted to get everything I had from various documents and, you know, put it all into one place and get a few diagrams out there. I'm really interested in deconstructing, so I'm on a similar path that I haven't written the essay you're writing, but for me, there's like a bunch of nuggets that assemble into an essay where some of the nuggets won't make it into the essay, but they still like deserve being published someplace. Yes, exactly. So in the video that I posted, I was like, hey, a book is just a playlist of nuggets. I just loved that video. You know, you've seen the notes I took about it. I paid a lot of attention, you know. And really, thank you very much for doing that. That's tremendous. And so I'm very interested in how to deconstruct your intro and chapter so that at the end, Bevor gets exactly what he wants for the intro and chapter, but every idea you have still exists in a lovely little nugget form in a shareable version in the big fungus somewhere, which is then- The thing is that there is like, yep, sorry, go ahead. Which is then weavable and connectable by you and by others. Sorry, go ahead. Well, yeah, the introduction introduces like five or six different concepts, which are all part of the big picture. And the idea is that each of these concepts gets a whole sub-chapter later on, and the introduction gives you the whole, the big picture. So if you think about each subsection of the introduction is like the executive summary of a chapter, right? So that's a nugget and it's linked to a slightly larger collection of nuggets. So it's like an executive summary of a set of nuggets. So you can deconstruct the entire chapter into one set of nuggets, which are executive summaries of each of them, a whole set of other nuggets. But so like a tree, but with lots of cross links, because you know, I'd have to do a diagram. There's no way of explaining this verbally, but you're nodding, so I guess you know what I mean. And that would be fun to do. Yeah, sure, that would be pretty cool to do. And SJ has a challenge for us. Yeah, go for it. Okay, take the comments that you care about or that you're building and scope out its potential full extent. So I have a suggestion for this project. Yeah, great. On my list of wish list of things to do in this whole general vein is to take one of the pattern languages that exist, like either liberating structures or the pyrogagic pattern language or wise democracy pattern language. Those are three that I know of that are well-developed, that are open source, that are brilliant or the communities I'm connected to, and actually turn them into common shared materials. And then further, again, this word instrument, somebody needs to train me with a better word than this. But the example I gave, I might have even done this on one of our conversations here, like liberating structures has a pattern called one, two, four, all, that says, hey, when you have a thorny question with a big group, it's really fruitful to give them each time by themselves, pair them up, bring them in the force, and then bring everybody back to plenary. It's just one, two, four, all is just a pattern. This could easily be a zap in Zoom. This could easily be a little Zoom applet that says, hey, I notice you've got a, there could be an intelligent chatbot that's helping you do facilitation that says, you might want to use one, two, four, all right now, would you like me to do it? And then you press a yes button and it does all the breakout room coordinating prompts, prompt setting into the chat, dividing people up into the breakouts, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff is handled automatically because it's just code, right? So all of that I can easily envision I haven't started doing any of it or approach the community, but that would make a very, very nice prototype project. If anybody else likes it. That sounds very nice, yes. I mean, in general, like the idea of having chatpots that assist in discussion and like push towards like coordination, high coordination, states, cooperation and so on. Sounds very interesting. For problem solving, something related, I thought of it's like, something that realizes when you're going, you're considering a Y and it leads you into like five Ys, right? For example, like perhaps in parallel, also in breakout rooms, it's like a little like a. I imagined a while ago a chatbot which the most irritating chatbot in the world, it's called five Ys. And it's really irritating, but you know that it's gonna help you at the end of the day. If you just keep answering it and it will get paid. It could be a really super simple chatbot. They're almost like Elisa, you know, back in the years. Oblivious, yes. And Robert Douglas is just his Y. So to follow up on your idea, Jerry, what would the full extent of the resulting comments be and what would its impact, what would its second order? So for me, part of the motivation is that there's a lot of wisdom, distilled wisdom, which is what I think of as a pattern language as a being. Pattern languages are distilled wisdom. That's just trapped in little websites nobody's ever heard of and trapped in books that are protected by DRM, et cetera, et cetera. So liberating, liberating structures and things like it and then instrumenting them so that they're really useful and usable and then creating some means that'll propagate, hey, everybody you should plug this thing in, it's available, would then hopefully upgrade the quality of group conversations because the facilitation would get better. Because you know, one, two, four, all is just one of lots of different patterns in these three pattern languages that I'm already thinking about. And there's a bunch of, and I know people who are dying to create other pattern languages. So how do we create a better platform for pattern languages? A brief digression here. In Free Jerry's Brain on Mondays very early in the lockdown, we decided to try to build a platform for pattern languages. So Mark Antoine Patel spent some time taking semantic media wiki and instrumenting it to create a pattern language. And we tested it out on the first day of testing we realized that when you change the name of a pattern, semantic media wiki sucked at being flexible on the name of the pattern. It just, we realized it would be a nightmare to try to propagate the changes or make sure that it was consistent. So we kind of stopped right there because the tool wasn't amenable to figuring that out. And maybe like a backlink rich system that knows that it's just a link and whatever you call it, I don't care. Maybe that's the way to go. But we could also then prototype a place for people to write pattern languages. And we happened to be using a finished one because look, here's the cake and what it's gonna look like when you're done but then inspire other people to build public facing pattern languages that are instrumentable. You definitely need a better word. Yeah, yeah. Instrumentable. I don't know because... I like instrumentalize. I mean, right. I think it's a term of art to say instrument X to give it an opportunity to Y. Normally my understanding now is instrumenting software means you're dropping sort of stop points and labels and tags or some other markers into the code so that you can then see where it broke and what's going on. That's what instrumenting means in software. The way it is, the way it is. Yes. So that's a question I know because... And I'm trying to take a completely different tack on and I'm trying to say, how do I enact, reify, enable? I don't know what the word is. How do I take an idea that's just an idea and make it software that's usable for example? Essentially it seems to be like, how do you develop an instrument out of something less pragmatically oriented or less available, right? So these pattern languages, they're a theoretical way. Probably should. A theoretical approach to doing something and you want to turn it into a tool which helps you do that thing, right? Yep. Yeah, yeah. I think instrumentalizing is the best you're gonna get actually. Yeah. Because it's instrument and this instrumentalize. I think instrumentalize is this? Instrumentalize is literally, literally gives you what you want but it's not very poetic. It's not very poetic. It's gonna be so loud. One of the patterns, so I like that you settled on this early on, Gary, because a long time ago, I also somewhere, I will track it down. I had a, after my first attempt to build tools for communities designing their own sites, I also tried to define what a platform for pattern language would be. And we wanted to help people do the thing. And my friends and I even reached out to the pattern language authors at the time they were all still alive and wanted to see if they were interested because the various books that came after Alexander's pattern language, they got kind of weird but they were all different kinds of patterns, right? Yeah. And he got the religion and he kind of wanted to patternize religion but they kept changing their framework and so the frameworks of the books are very different. Anyway, we had this idea that we could somehow get Alexander and Ward and a couple of other people to agree on a platform and use it in very different ways. But it was hard. It was hard. Yeah. You're talking about really strong. And I think it's easier with young people who are just playing around than with people who have like made a mark and then they're kind of fond of what the thing they did. They don't want to try something. Part of the problem with Engelbart in his life was that he couldn't see any other way to instantiate this thing he had invented. Yeah. Like Eugene Eric Kim spent a decade trying to help Doug rebuild the original MLS or no, NLS I guess, on new platforms which was not what was needed anymore. I agree. So love this. So do you like the scenario, SJ? So yes, I love the scenario and you have helped me clarify my challenge for you all. Good. What do you mean by scope out his potential to second degree impact? Could you please unpack that a bit? I'm sure that the rest of the other people in this group know exactly what you're talking about.  So go, please. So what I initially meant and what I would like the challenge to be this week although we can come back to the other things is to do this for a global commons and to think about the global impact of the commons. So in that sense, if you start with building a platform for pattern languages for my friends who love pattern languages, the first group are the people who have all these small websites and they realize not a lot of people use it. If you think about the global commons around it, it is something like the societal change that is possible when you identify a friend in these games. And the scoping piece of this is think about versions of this that have come before and tried and failed. Think about the versions that are like this that inspired it. Think about groups you'd want to partner or integrate with. And then after you've thought about that, reflect on what the broadest possible scope could be if this were simply embedded in everything else. If this existed and it were in understood commons that didn't need to be named as something that we're constructing, what would its extent be? What would its scope as part of human behavior be? And that's what I was trying to say when I played out the scenario with the pattern languages in terms of this is not a fancy thing to make pattern language fans happy. This was actually a strategy to make anybody facilitating conversations a better facilitator. And that's the global commons second order impact is that it ripples back into, oh my gosh, I've got better skills in their right at hand and look, I should be using these and suddenly the level of conversation goes up. Similarly, if they start using the artifacts and feeding the fungus, then we start building a global shared memory artifact which is a second order benefit as well that could come out of the same project.  It's fine, let's continue, I'm thinking notes. Yeah, does that make sense? Yes, yes, definitely.  No, no, go ahead, go ahead. No, it's fine, it's fine. No, but in terms of scoping out, what is the end product of this scoping exercise? Is it envisioning something? Is it a document? Is it, you know, what is it? I'm being a little bit too concrete perhaps, but because when you use the word scope, it could mean a thousand different things or a thousand different contexts to a thousand different people. So what do you have in mind at the end of the exercise? Who, you know, how do you judge if the challenge has been met? I'd like to, I would like talking to many people about it to add to some very crude universal measures of scope, but a couple of measures that would be good for provocation are things like proportion of total human or societal interaction or outputs or footprints affected in a given year. So for some things, let's say, and depending on what you're talking about, it may really only make sense in a very cleanly defined dimension. So if you're talking about a commons around energy and you want to talk about how some particular commons would change the dynamics of energy, that's pretty computable, right? We know what the total installation of the planet is.  And that's it. We actually have a fixed energy envelope for all sources and all things. And if you're building a commons that allows for some portion of reflected installation to come into the ecosystem, then you can very literally talk about that kind of impact. That's it, I mean, yeah. So there are some to use the other version of instrumented, there are some very cleanly instrumented dimensions where one can do this particularly well. Then there are others where you want to influence policy or thought or you want to influence education. And that's tricky. And there are some where you might want to empower people or speed certain things up. And then what are you doing? Yeah, that's what Jerry was talking about. If you instrumentalise pattern language, you're not making a tool which people who know what pattern languages are are going to like. You can, that'd be nice, but you're not going to have a great impact unless you actually make a tool with people who've never heard of pattern languages say, oh, shit, this is good. Yeah, this is cool. Oh, it's basically something called a pattern language. I don't have time to worry about that. I'm just going to use it, right? Bingo. What is this? Oh, I'm sorry. So, is that applause? Yes, from sign language, this means applause. Jazz, this means I disagree. So I've been using this all through lockdown because it helps comment back without interrupting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got to, I've got to start doing that because if you've probably noticed, I interrupt way too much and I know it. So jazz hands and what's this? This means I disagree. This means I'm kind of mad. I don't really like that. Well, I do that occasionally. Yeah. I also saw that for the first time with you, Jerry. And I just love it. It's great. And it actually, I learned about it through the Occupy movement because with Occupy, they were doing the mic check stuff and they also had some hand signs. This means blocking. I don't agree with this. I'm going to leave if this goes through. They're, you know, this means louder, speak louder. So there were a bunch of hand signs for Occupy that they borrowed from things like sign language. And now I teach this everywhere. In fact, years ago, I taught this.  And there was a colonel who was doing jazz hands in the middle of the session. And I'm like, yes, we have won. If a colonel is doing jazz hands and laughing and everybody else gets it and likes it, we're good. Yeah. It's really great. Cause I mentioned, if you look over a crowd and you've got, you can count pretty easily how many jazz hands there are and how many like this without necessarily being in, you know, having a verbal conflict about it, right? So the Occupy hand signs, not phrased as such because half the people in the planet hate Occupy and think it's a terrible anarchist uprising. So feedback mechanisms for group process are part of a pattern language or should be. So this thing we just talked about jazz hands ought to be available to people facilitating zoom rooms and say, hey, would you like some tips? And there could be a simple intelligent chat bot assistant that says, I'm here to help you make better zooms. Tell me what you're trying to get done. I will learn about you. And then using a transformer tool it could get fricking smart. It can then understand what the pattern languages are and suggest the right ones at the right time. And you could just go to town with this. Yes, completely. Are you familiar with Free Federal Life? I think we discussed this. It sounds familiar. Yeah, so it is framed as a pattern language for the commons and for like, it's you with the governance and they did study Occupy and other like, you know. Silke Hefrick and David Ballier, yes, the book. Exactly, yes, exactly. So he reminded of that because at least they set up to do this. I haven't finished yet but it doesn't include exactly a pattern language in the second half. And so I think it's a, I mean, we need to organize a reading club on this and others we could do a meta. So there was a reading club happening inside of OGM around Dawn of Everything, right? Which is a really interesting book. And I had to drop out because I had other things going on and I just couldn't catch up with reading the things. But how do we metabolize knowledge together so that it's more usable and instrumented as much as possible, right? I think reading clubs are great. And then mostly the people who participate in the reading club, 20% of them understood the book. The others couldn't keep up. And then everybody stops that book and goes to the next one. And all of the artifacts of that conversation basically exist only in the heads of 20% of the participants. Yes. How do we metabolize all the stuff fruited into the world, instrumented into the world in tasty fungus bits that let us all improve what we do? I mean, I have an answer to that, but it's obvious which is, and it was in static, it is with an hour. But like, right. But so the no cloud organized by needle in the hour is meant to be a take on this which is like will be like a loosely coupled reading cloud and writing cloud. And the writing part is important, right? Because that's precisely how, you know we default to interact in via the notes. So by definition, we sort of like are producing perhaps like more artifacts that can then be read and picked up, you know for like all the minutes of writing but gets very interesting. I guess I wanted to pick up on like perhaps some potential dimensions to explore Samuel's question. On your metrics perhaps, or I'm scoping but I don't know if you want to close on previously pattern language in general or any other things we can touch on, okay I'll go.  I just wanted to say that I put a couple of but once I got a hang about what Samuel was looking for I just put a couple of ideas into chat as well. I don't know if they fit under the heading of pattern languages but one of the things which I think would have a really big impact is an instrument, a tool or technique or some sort of software or whatever that could just help two people have better conversations when they don't necessarily agree with each other. That would just change the world, you know if people would talk that, you know okay we're going to have this sort of conversation and there's like a sign, like not this but let's not have this, let's not have that or something, some other sign we say I'm not going to try to tell you that you're wrong and that I'm right we're going to have a different sort of conversation and there's a shed load of literature and knowledge about how people can have better conversations and no one knows any of it and even the people who know it don't even use it because you just keep on getting trapped in the patterns of the animal brain, right and you don't end up having conversations which are as good as you could have. I'm trying to lower my hand now, I'm not succeeding. That's really cool. Raise, lower, yeah, whatever, consider my hand down. So that was one idea, techniques for having better conversations and the other one was just as you were saying Jerry about how people were having a book reading club and they have a conversation about the book and then move on to something else and all that knowledge is okay the people who are in the room at the time come away with some of it but if you weren't in the room at the time it's gone that's every conference and workshop you've ever been to even the ones which have been recorded. It's terrible. It's every mailing list we're on people saying brilliant things on private mailing lists that go into the bit bucket. Yeah.  It's terrible. So to me this just like leads me to think that one high leverage action here is like anything that reduces the friction for going from the personal and this goes very much in the direction of the book and so on it's like going from personal contributions to social contributions. Like, you know. Yeah, I don't know why my hand went down. I didn't take it down. I just wanted to interject two things. I have to leave at the quarter after. So I'm here for a few more minutes and then a small thing. We were trying to figure out how to have a really big effect on the world and I was like, we need to hack pastors.com because Rick Warren of the Saddleback mega church runs a website called pastors.com where tons of evangelical preachers get their sermons. Now. Oh God, how awful. Now I don't think Rick Warren has gone to the dark side but the idea here is if you could change what evangelical preachers are saying on Sundays in the United States only, you could change the world. Yeah, yeah. Because the evangelical far right is on fire about a bunch of issues that are being lit on purpose to distract us from the world's problems. Just my opinion, but hacking the server where they buy their sermons is. They buy them. It's a business. It's a business. You're not, you're gonna write a great new essay every Sunday? Well, I mean, couldn't you just post low cost, really well written sermons that are not necessarily fire and brimstone. There's no business model there. Yeah. No, but interpastors.com, you know, create an account. I'm saying, if you hack your way in and post like, you know, be good to each other and actual, be actual Christians, you could maybe hack the whole thing. But the problem is that many of the fiery creatures have gone completely off the deep end. Anyway, sorry to distract. That's not a distraction. That would be a really major impact on the world. And you could probably measure it if you knew how many people actually bought your sermon and how many people they preach to. You could probably get quite good metrics out of that. So as a fun idea, free sermons.org could be a website that where we motivate people who are really good writers of sermons to write sermons that are good for humanity.   I don't know if you've heard the term ex-vangelicals. Follow Chrissy Stroop on Twitter. She's really good. There's a bunch of others. But it's people who've left evangelical fanaticism and are busy saying, hey, she wrote a book called Empty the Pews, which is really, really interesting. So anyway, so that's interesting. If you're looking for cultural leverage, yeah, sermon central, and then post-open source sermons and let people riff on them and let people remix them and build them as nuggets, right? Let them build playlists of the sermons that they want to do using this infrastructure and we're off to the races. Sorry, go ahead. Well, I would say that rather than building a separate website, which you've been a struggle to get, I think the original idea, when you said hack, I thought you actually meant like really hack it and take it down. But instead it would be better to actually just go in there as pastors. You'd have to set up some sort of shadow network of people who want to do this, right? Yes, and they would all go in and all like each other's work and recommend it and set up a shadow community in there just to try to shift the overs and window a bit back towards the civilized world, you know? So you've understood my intention properly, which is not to take down the site, but to corrupt the site with goodness or sermon central, which I'm gonna add to my brain now, but the alternative here is to be above board and post a new website with an interesting name like humanistsermons.org, right? Communists. That is perfectly open, it is completely open source and modifiable and loves and uses a fork and toll, uses GitHub as the underpinnings so that people can actually improve one another's sermons, blah, blah, blah, wouldn't that be a cool thing? Yes, and I think that there's a lot of like fixed costs in running such a site or such a project, but if you take a step back and see it from the pattern level, there are a lot of the sites that we have that ideally will be part of the knowledge commons, but aren't, right? The alternatives we could develop to actually replace them or compliment them or like subvert them, they look sort of the same. Essentially, and this is where concepts like, examples like the interlay, the underlapering and so on, right? And ideally, it's also something we want to talk about the algorithm is like provide the core, the skeleton for any such site ideally in a way that is more flexible than perhaps just the currently kind of weeks we have, which only goes as far over that pretty good. But again, like you said, like on Gitbase and so on.


Mr. Maker, how are you? Good. Are you ready to show me the butterfly today? I don't know. OK, remember, a butterfly is like a little dolphin, yeah? It's not so complicated. First things, learn how to be a dolphin. You're both feet together, weak. You're both knees together, weak. You move like a dolphin, a little tail of a dolphin. Like a mermaid. Like a mermaid. Can you show me how you do it in my hands? Mermaid kick. I kick my hands. Boom, boom, don't stop. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Nice job. If you do it on your belly, it's the same in the water, yeah? Show me the mermaid kick, yeah? Go. On the surface. Boom. Hi, in the surface. Boom, splash the water. Boom, boom, boom. My girl, that was a beautiful mermaid kick. Stand up. Stand up. Now look. When you do your mermaid kick, you can move your belly as well. So you can move from your belly like this, OK?  You can do the boom, boom, boom. You will try with me, OK? So we go there. You do the mermaid kicks. Arrow position, your hands on the surface of the water. Put your head below your arms, blue bubbles, and mermaid kick until the end. Show me. You're supposed to do after the mermaid kick, but you need to do this. Yes, no hands. Just mermaid kick. Keep your hands on the surface. So try to go all the way. All the way, mermaid. Show me. Go. Full mermaid. Come back, Michael. Blow your bubbles. Try to keep your head below your arms. Lock your arms here, OK? If it's locked, it's even better, OK? And you just move your lower body. OK? All right, go. Go. I want you to count your mermaid. Every time you boom, it's one more. So one, two, three, OK? You count with me. Head down first. Go. No, but you have to go to the end, buddy. Ah.  Five. All right, let's go again. Go. So one, two, three. Just turn the way you turn. Every time you do one boom, it's one more. Listen. This is one. This is two, OK? All right, last one. And go. Deep. All right, you did great. OK, bro. This is amazing mermaid. Now, listen, for the butterfly, you need to pull your hands in the water every two doll things. So listen, you will do one, stretch your hands.  You double pull on the water, go back. And don't put your head up until you do it. No need to put your head up.  You do one doll thing, pull your both hands. One doll thing, pull your both hands. One doll thing, pull your both hands.   Simple.   Come on. Beep. Two, three, four. Beauty food.  Let's go back. Same, same? OK. OK, come on. Don't forget you need to pull your hands every two. So one doll thing, pull your hands. One doll thing, pull your hands. OK? Show me. Come back, Michael. One doll thing, pull. That's excellent. OK, now listen. For the butterfly, the pulling is inside the water. The fly of your hands is not inside the water like this. This is inside the water. Not good, see? You cannot move back. You have to fly in the sky. So pull in the water, fly in the sky. See? Like a big airplane. And shoot. Drop your hands on the front. Pull in the water. Fly on the side, outside the water. Drop your hands on the front. Pull and drop. Then pull and drop. Then pull and drop. OK? Got it? All right, show me. See? We do again? All right, try to drop your hands eight more minutes. Try to drop your hands faster. Pull and drop. Then pull and drop. Then pull and drop. Then pull and drop. Yeah? The more you drop fast, the more you're best. Adam, go. I really love it. Do you know what I love the most?  Pull and then drop. Pull and then drop. The speed on the front, that's very good. Show me one more time. Wow! You need two movements to do this. You need two movements. See? You can swim so far now. You're not the best. OK, we do one more. Almost. Show me one more time. All right, go, Michael. Super strong speed. Hey, Michael. I think you're ready for the last step. All right. To learn the butterfly, you need to breathe up with your mouth. Once in a while, OK? So what we do is one, two, three, pull your hands. One, two, three, pull your hands. Breathe. When you will pull the second time, you will breathe. One, two, three, pull. Don't breathe. One, two, three, pull and breathe. Look up.  The water is here. Breathe and look down. Dive and finish, OK? So we do one, two, three. Up at number four, OK? How many do you want to take? Until you touch me. All right, go, bro. At number four, you need to breathe when you pull.   So when should I know when to breathe?  So no, no, no, yes? Yes. Go. OK, Michael, listen. Listen. Listen. You forgot to breathe. You need to breathe at the end. Yes, but you breathe at the wrong time. So to breathe at a good time, you need to touch your strokes. Listen. Listen. This is one, two, three, pull one time. Don't breathe. One, two, three, pull and then you breathe now.  Understand? So when I say no, no, yes? OK, no, no, yes. Let's say something like this. I don't know how is it in your head exactly, but show me what is no, no, yes and I will tell you if it's good, OK? OK. All right, come here. And one and two, three and half. Yes. Correct. You did good. All right. That's what I want. OK? So we do like that. Run more time. Yes? OK. Show me. Big bubbles. That was good. Don't forget.  When you pull, you go up. OK? Hi. Come. It's very good.  You go up when you pull, not after the pull. That was nice, bro. I really like it. You show me one more time. Add down, bud.   Yeah? So you pull brief and dive again. OK. You got confused. Yeah. You don't breathe the first time, right? One dolphin pulled on brief. One dolphin pulled brief and died. Pulled on brief. OK? Yes. You can do it. We are almost finished. Add down, bro. I would say two minutes. Two minutes. Two minutes. All right, go. Brief and dive. One, two. Yes. Where you stop? When do you stop? Look at the wall. It's over there. You did it, Michael. You did it so good. You dive after diving, continue to swim. OK? You repeat the same things. You don't stop at the middle of the swimming pool. You just continue again. Yeah? OK. Hey, that was great, huh? I show you one more time. So one dolphin pulled your hand. One dolphin pulled and brief. Again. One dolphin pulled your hand and pulled and brief. Yes. All right, not too bad. You like to stop, huh? You brief.  Is it good? Is it good? Don't worry about it. Just keep going, OK? It is actually good. But if you stop, then it becomes bad. That's why you need to continue.  And again. One and two. One and two. One and two. You never stop. OK? All right. All right. Go to the end. Show me. And beep. But I wanted to see. You see? Hey, super good. You want to try one last and you got the balloon for today? All right. All right. OK. Let me get your hands on the water. I will do with you. We do together. OK? Head down first. And one and two. Three and brief. Again. And two. Three and brief. One and two. Three and brief. Again. And two. Three and brief. One and two. All right. It's good, man. High five. All right. OK. The balloon over there. It's good for today. All right. OK. The balloon over there. It's good for today. Ha!


Good morning everyone. Thank you again to John and to Cap for hosting us today and to Carl for organizing this fantastic event. This is my second law.gov workshop that I've had the pleasure to participate in and I'm delighted to be here today in support of this initiative and as Prita said, point out I want to sort of reiterate the comment that we're very eager to hear the discussion here and develop suggestions that are useful to us, particularly within, from my perspective, within the executive branch of government, what we can do to support the access to legal information. So I'm going to be trying to be strict with the time, including with myself, which means I will be very brief in my introduction to focus a little bit on our perspective from the executive branch side. And then I have the pleasure to be joined here today by Stephen Schulze to my left, who is the associate director of the Princeton, Princeton Center for Information Technology and Policy and most notably, one of the co-creators of the RECAP project along with Harlan Yu, who's together here today, the Firefox plug-in, which many of you know about, that tries to break the paywall of PACER, if you will, by putting up legal information online from PACER and making it freely available. To his left is David Mao in the newly created position, right, of deputy law librarian at the Library of Congress, who focuses on the global legal research portfolio at the Library of Congress. And to his left is Lawrence Tribe, now senior counselor for access to justice at the Department of Justice, and on leave is Carl M. Loeb, university professor and renowned professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. So I'm very honored to be part of this panel and have the, again, the unfortunate job of simply being the timekeeper and having to reign in people who otherwise we could listen to them talk all day. So we're here very much because, of course, as a head of the Open Government Initiative, my job is to support openness with regard to the workings of government and the information of government, and that includes, of course, access to legal information, very much so, if not centrally. I'm very pleased to report that as part of the Open Government process, there by now 29 CFO Act agencies and another dozen besides have created Open Government plans. A number of them, and I hope more to follow suit, are providing access to specifically legal information. So, for example, HUD as providing raw access to their ALGA opinions as a result of the Open Government process. But we want to get more federal agencies involved in the process of making sure that the legal information they create is put up online in raw and accessible formats. So to the extent to which there are executive branch materials that we can identify, that we can make them more accessible and more available in XML raw formats, we want to do so. And to use this process to hopefully identify more potential such clients to be part of the Law.gov movement. We have also, of course, been spearheading their two projects I want to single out in particular because they are ones where Carl Malamud and publicresource.org and the Law.gov movement have really played a central role in advising the accessibility of patent information, which is of tremendous corpus of information that is of great use of what we sometimes term high value information to helping not only create more accessible government, but also to create entrepreneurial opportunities and greater innovation and the opportunity for people potentially to build businesses and build jobs around access to the corpus of patent literature that the USPTO has recently made available just in the last couple of weeks in a public-private partnership with Google, with public resources help, I might add, to try to make this important information available and to not let technical obstacles stand in the way, in other words, outdated government infrastructure, to making necessary legal information that is essential to doing the research necessary to improve the patent system, but again also to help people build businesses using that information. And second, and we'll hear a lot more about this today, so I won't belabor this, is the phenomenal project of making the Federal Register, really the newspaper of our democracy, one of the most important collections of legal information about the executive branch action available last year in XML format. We'll hear from the Federal Register team today, Steven has also been involved with this work, is making XML based download of the Federal Register available for free instead of for the fee of $17,000 is now making it available for free. And so I'm glad that very mostly is here today to talk about that project. And what's really important about this, and this is to echo something that Carl mentioned earlier and John talked about as well, is that by liberating that data, it then allowed third-party partners, whether the folks at Princeton or the public resource, or the folks from Gulf Pulse who are here today to talk about their work, to then take that information and do something with it, to create new versions of the Federal Register that are searchable by theme, that are searchable by geography, that are easier to read, that are formatted better, and to do the kinds of things that Prita alluded to earlier. In other words, if you make this information available, please try to create the hyperlinks. Well, that's exactly what happened now with the Federal Register project. Again, in partnership with NARA and with the public printer, Mike Wash is here as well today. And so what's exciting is when we liberate this data, it's then what people can do with it to actually create more value out of it, to do the things that are sometimes unexpected that we don't can't predict, as you mentioned, what people will actually do. So we're excited about these efforts, as with the patent information, as with the Federal Register data, to think about how liberating legal information will help us to make it more accessible to people, but also more intelligible to people, to help those people who do, for example, research on citation networks, to find patterns in information, to again, help us to organize legal information better and provide access to those who need it the most. So it's very exciting to think about what we might do here, both to strengthen the rule of law, by making legal information more accessible, to help people in the juice business who need to process their mangoes in safe and healthy ways. But ultimately, what I think this initiative really is about is about whether it's specifically about legal information or about all government information. It's about putting that information out there as the way of operating for any 21st century institution. We have to understand that by making this information freely available, whether it's court transcripts or water sanitation codes, by making it available, we empower people to use that information to create greater value out of it, to make it more accessible, but also, again, to potentially create jobs, to create economic opportunity, using that information, and ultimately, in turn, to make these institutions work better. So what you'll hear about this afternoon in greater detail is how now, thanks to the liberation of the XML version of the Federal Register and the work of these third-party institutions who then prototype new versions of the Federal Register, we've been able to now reincorporate those improvements into how we, as the government, will deliver the Federal Register. So how we will improve the institution, how we will be able to essentially re-engineer the plane while flying it. I like that expression, to use this combination of transparency combined with citizen engagement, combined with these kinds of partnerships that we might develop to actually make our institutions work better and empower people in the process. So I am very happy to be here today in support of this effort and hope that we will get lots of suggestions not only about the information that we can identify and make accessible, but that the partnerships that we might create in order to create greater value out of that information as we turn it out there, let it loose, make it accessible to people, to do the exciting things with it that we know that we need following the pathways in the case as we've heard about creating the hyperlinks, but doing the things that we could never have imagined and won't be able to anticipate that will surprise us and excite us and make our democracy stronger and better and more exciting. So with that, let me turn it over to Stephen to give us a short introduction to the work that he's been doing at Princeton.


Following the assent of the Electricity Act 2023 by President Bola Tinibu, stakeholders have described the development as a good, as good for the sector. However, National President of the National Union of Electricity Employees, Martin Uzo Agui, has advised the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission to ensure the implementation of framework of the new Act. Uzo Agui, who spoke earlier on business inside, also charged the National Assembly to equally play its part through oversight. The microeconomy and some of the indices that could equally help the artists to work in fabrications and all other things. So some of these panels may not be needed to be imported abroad because people here cannot start developing it and designing some of the material that's going to be used so that instead of...


Internal Revenue Service, IRS Tax News, IRS Updates Frequently Asked Questions About Form 1099K. I, for one, propose we do away with the Form 1099K on account of it being racist, because like 1099Ks represent 366 sets of 3Ks plus one over another set of 3Ks.  In fact, this level of hate speech demonstrated by the IRS may warrant the complete abolishment of taxes altogether. Okay, that's obviously nonsense, but still, I still think they should do away with Form 1099K. Why? Because the IRS is getting awfully intrusive? Are they not? I mean, it's starting to feel more and more like the government just moved in right next door. And then your new government neighbor is like, hey, did you know Tom across the street has a new job? And you're like, wow, Mr. Government, how did you know that? And the new government neighbor says, because I found a paycheck stub stuck to the bottom of the dumpster, I'm going to make it public by posting it on the Twitters. And it's like, that doesn't sound very nice, Mr. New Government neighbor. But why are you, why were you going through the dumpster in the first place? Well, says the new government neighbor, I have this thing for wearing used women's clothes. And for some reason, the airports got really strict about stealing other people's luggage. So I thought, if I rummage through the dumpster, I might find some nice ripe used yoga pants I can try on, possibly as a ski mask. I mean, honestly, I thought it was scary when the Beverly Hill Billies moved in next door. I mean, my new government neighbor stops by each week after Payday looking for a fourth of my paycheck.  And I'll gladly mail you a check in exchange for keeping your distance. IR 2022-230 December 28, 2022 Washington, the Internal Revenue Service today updated frequently asked questions FAQs for form 1099K payment card and third party network transactions in fact sheet FS 2022-41. There's a link to that here. The updates include definitions, general information, individuals, more information about reliance is available. There's a link to these items here. If you want to check them out in more detail, there'll be a link to this in the description.


The best way to regenerate your spine would be by doing yoga namaskar. It has all-round benefits for the entire body. Yoga namaskar is a powerful system by itself. It activates the lumbar region of the spine in a tremendous way, strengthens the muscles along the spine, giving it a reinforcement so that as one ages the collapsing of the spine, which causes pinching of the nerves does not happen. And if already there's damage is setting in, the best way to regenerate your spine would be by doing yoga namaskar. It has all-round benefits for the entire body. Yoga namaskar is a very simple and complete process by itself. To practice yoga namaskar, you will need a light stomach condition. That is approximately one-and-a-half hours gap after having a meal. If you do not fulfill this condition, please skip this particular practice for now. Now we will learn yoga namaskar. This is a series of seven steps. You will demonstrate one full cycle. Please observe. Stand with your feet comfortably apart and parallel to each other. Keep your arms and shoulders loose and relaxed. Eyes open.   This is the starting position.     This is step one. You do the same thing twice more. Step two. As you exhale, make a sound from the pit of the throat. Step three.   As you lower it down, it is a full exhalation with the sound. After you do this three times, you squat straight down. Step four.  As you exhale, bring it down behind the neck.    As you exhale, making the sound, bring it back to the chest. Do this three times. Step five.  As you exhale, bring them down behind the neck.    As you exhale, back to the chest. Once more, step six. Inhale, hands up. Exhale, down. Inhale, up. Exhale, down. Inhale, hands straight out. Exhale, hands to the chest. Now, step seven. As you inhale, push your hands straight out. Bring your knees to the ground. Lean forward and place your forehead on the ground. Stretch your arms above your head. Rest your palms on the ground. Place your hands together so that the thumbs and pointing fingers are touching, forming a triangle. Your elbows should be slightly bent. This is Balasana. Stay here until your breath stabilizes or for a minimum of two minutes. Then gently stand up and come back to the starting position. This is one cycle of Yoga Namaskar. We will look at a few modifications and corrections. If you find it difficult to squat, then you can place a support about half an inch or one inch thick below your heels and squat down, ensuring your feet are parallel to each other. For some people, while bringing the hands behind the head, the fingers are pointing backward. The fingers should be pointing straight up. Also, there's a tendency for the head to come down. The head should be straight. Do not move the hands too quickly or casually. There should be slight tension in the arms as you do the movement.


other series. We're so happy that you have joined us throughout the summer, throughout the pandemic, and we're so excited about this final episode. Before we begin, we want to encourage you to sign up for an ad week subscription. You can go to adweek.com slash offer to unlock unlimited access to our essential content and resources. Today, we are joined by Heeth, who is the global lead of the B2B Institute at LinkedIn. Happy almost September, Ty. Thank you. Happy almost September. It's my favorite. Yes, I love New York in the fall. But, you know, it's such a weird time. So, you know, how are you doing? How have you been processing everything that's changed and solved and paused and evolved this during this time? Yeah. Let me just start by saying thank you so much for having me. It's always such a pleasure to talk and for giving this forum for all of us to connect. I think that's what we're all needing more than anything is community. And we're all kind of learning how to do it virtually.  You know, this has hit all of us really hard. Some of us harder than others. And some of us are disproportionately impacted by what's happening. And so I would venture to say that many folks are probably feeling a little bit weary and exhausted. But I also think that there are some places where we find hope, and especially when we do it together in community. For me, just for me in terms of like leading my team and leading friends and colleagues through this, I'm practicing more self-care.  No one expects us to be superhuman as we navigate through this. You know, and I also think that we want to guard against despair and cynicism because we will, it's not going to be like this forever. It's not going to be like this forever. Yeah, I love it. I think he just took some time on. You know, you get to come back refreshed and you talk about community. There are lots of voices, emerging voices, and also thought leaders who have kind of risen to the top with their relatable topics. So in terms of the people who are on LinkedIn looking for content and inspiration, what are they looking for? And what are they consuming? What's really resonating on LinkedIn? Yeah, yeah. I think everyone is trying to make sense of the world and including us at LinkedIn within the B2B Institute, which by the way, let me take a step back and define it. Some people are wondering, what is that? What's the B2B Institute? So B2B Institute is a think tank. And we collaborate with marketers and practitioners and folks that are thinkers and thought leaders in the space of marketing to help figure out how marketers can create more value and how we can accelerate business-to-business relationships. So that's what we do within the think tank. It's kind of like being a bit of an academic, thought leadership, education, all of that sort of wrapped into one. But like everyone else, we've been trying to make sense of the world. And what people have been engaging in and searching on LinkedIn have been really topics around how do we move into the space of remote working? How do I invest in business continuity through this time? I mean, if you think about all the connected searches around business continuity, we've seen an increase in about 75% of those types of searches and over 100%, 140 something percent in terms of engagement on those topics. So people are trying to make sense of the world. And I think in particular, what they've tried to do on LinkedIn is learn from others and look into what other people are doing and connecting conversation around how do I transition my culture? How do I take care of my people, meaning employees? How do I take care of my customers? How do I take care of my leaders? How do I take care of even my shareholders during this time? So people are looking to others to try to navigate through this time. So we're seeing searches around that, including searches on things like machine learning and data science. So people are still with trends. I think that everyone would imagine would be accelerated by what we're going through right now. We're certainly seeing evidence of that being accelerated on our platform in the conversations that are taking place. Yeah, you talked about your clients and we talked about self-care. So my hope is that there's a lot more sharing on leaders. And of course, our guest last week, a couple of weeks ago, she has a LinkedIn course and she's teaching people about entrepreneurship. But how do you almost become a thought leader? Is it simply having expertise in sharing it? What does it take to cultivate that thought leadership, especially at this time? Yeah, I think it certainly goes back to culture. And just taking a step back because I think the word thought leadership is overused in some ways and maybe not very well understood. So just sort of diving into it. In the context of what we're dealing with within the pandemic, the idea of thought and ideas and idea generation. LinkedIn has been a place where people are certainly looking for ideas as to how do I transition my culture? How do I invest and prevent my team from being burned out? And we've seen the content being generated there. But when you think about thought leadership, the more broad definition of thought leadership, it's not just creating a piece of content. It's the idea of thought leadership rooted in thought is the idea of idea generation and forward thinking, future looking, having a point of view on where things will go, such that it builds credibility, you become a trusted resource and therefore you can win business, build, which fundamentally is connected to relationships and having strong relationships and trusted relationships. So it really does come from a place of trust. And we've seen people sort of investing in thought leadership around the way forward during this time and expressing that on the platform. Now, when it comes to thought leadership from the standpoint of marketing, beyond the creation of content, strong thought leadership involves going out into the field, having conversations with customers. It involves then thinking through ideas and debating ideas. I'll tell you, within the B2B Institute, we will debate an idea and it will be refined through that conversation, but it's not just the internal debate of your team. It's the community around you where that you build that can help cultivate the strongest ideas and then help you define the path forward. So it's beyond maybe outsourcing a piece of content to an agency or just thinking about how you might write a post, give in some information or some insights you have to share. It's actually doing the work of framing the idea and then taking it to market. So I want to say a little bit more about that, but let me pause and see if that's making sense to you, Ko. Yeah, and it's making sense with one of our audience members, Ashley says, agreed, branch to keep this thought process when creating new content. And I oversee the thought leadership or opinion section of Adweek, and there are some similarities there. It's not just kind of sharing what's happening now, but really that forward looking voice and that credibility that comes with experience, which is really different right now. Everyone has been talking about adaptability and flexibility. So I'm curious, as you continue sharing your insights, what areas that thought leadership will really grow in the year to come? What are the implications for doing business and taking care of clients and client relationship, sales, whatnot in the decade to come? Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about where things are going, what we're experiencing now is not a smooth trend line transition. This pandemic that we're in is kind of a abrupt jolt where now I feel like we're in a new realm, it's a new path for us to try to define the way forward. We're dealing with different variables now. So I think that's one thing to consider as we're thinking about the direction. For example, in the space of virtual connections, we're not going to go back in very many places to where we were before when you start thinking about remote work, the way that people sell, even the way that we are marketing. So there's a fundamental shift in what's happening. And that does require doing the work, going out into the community, having conversations. And what's at stake is what we've been dealing with in the space of thought leadership for some time. And that's the recognition that only 5% of the thought leadership is deemed to be quality thought leadership. So a lot of what we're creating is not being consumed because we're not investing enough in the things that generate high quality, strong thought leadership. So I just want to touch on that for just a second, because as you think about how you create strong thought leadership, some of the things that we think about within the B2B Institute is, you know, is it is the idea replicable? You know, the best ideas that you can generate are ideas that when you repeat them through experiment and you think about the scientific method, they're repeatable. The strongest ideas are replicable. We're also looking for areas that are contrarian. And what I mean by contrarian is that there are little known ideas that kind of go against the grain. When you think about it, you can be consensus, you can create ideas that are with the crowd, contrarian against the crowd, and then you have ideas that are wrong and ideas that are right.  So then you get the full breath of that space. So we're constantly looking for ideas that are contrarian, because those ideas are the most valuable as well. And, you know, I there are a couple other points, but I think we're also looking for the ideas that you can build over the test of time. I think too many of us in marketing are thinking short term versus long term, and brand building is is all about thinking long term and building equity, building ideas that people return to year after year after year. One of the best known, what we call Blackbuster franchises of all time is Mary Meeker's Internet Trends Report, right? So when that report used to come out, it would totally break the internet. So we want to start thinking about how do we create Blackbuster content that's recognizable? Salesforce does this really well with their state of marketing and state of sales content that they put out, Edelman Trust Therometers, another example of this type of Blackbuster content. Within the B2B Institute, we invest in what we call B2B Trends. So these are trends that stand the test of time, you have about 30 of them to this date that we've been putting out over the course of five years. So you can find that at b2binstitute.org, but we recommend looking for ideas that are replicable, contrarian, and then also making sure that you're taking a Blackbuster point of view. How can you create a franchise that you can build over time? Yeah, I love that because it's not just about success, but going back to the kind of scientific framework, it's proving a new hypothesis, right? And having that little room for error and the most kind of ROI for whatever idea that you're building upon, and that can change a little bit over time. But again, it's good thought leadership, as you're saying, because it can be a learning, living, breathing experiment for other brands. So that's a really kind of cool way to look at it. I guess one of the last questions I want to ask you is what you're kind of looking forward to, the positives that have come out of this time, what are you looking forward to for the rest of 2020 on a kind of personal and professional level? Yeah, yeah. So I'll start with professionals. So one of the things I'm looking forward to is just now that we've kind of gotten into a rhythm. So it was, like I said, it was a jolt. We're all trying, like, figuring out, like, what do we do? How do we respond? And again, how do we take care of all of our stakeholders? So we've gotten into a bit of a rhythm. And so now what I'm really looking forward to is continuing to invest in the culture of our team. You know, what I mean, going back to the idea of thought leadership, part of the ability to generate strong leadership is rooted in the culture of your team. I think one of the fallacies that we need to overturn is this idea that there's like some genius in a tower or like in the basement somewhere that's just public on their own coming up with these like fresh ideas that are just filler and start to think about how do we do that collaboratively. So I want to invest even more deeply in this idea. Actually, one of the gentlemen on my team, his name is John Lombardo, I definitely definitely check him out. He raised this idea called genius. And it's it goes against the grain of like this one genius in a tower and instead talks about genius being embedded in a broader collaborative scene, where a number of people work together and sort of build and bounce idea, we don't always agree, but that conversation that scene is what generates the best ideas. So I'm looking forward to continuing to strengthen our our seniors within our team. Professionally, I'm just kind of geeking out over what's to come in terms of some of the research we have coming out, but you can always find it b2binstitute.org. And then personally, I so I just spent some time with my parents, which was really nice. I hadn't seen them since February. And so I one of the other things I'm looking forward to doing is visiting them safely over the next couple months. And I think, you know, for all of us, this is a time with making us slow down, it's making us pause a bit and think about the things that are most important to us. And now seems like a time more than any other time where I can get to spend a little bit more time with my parents and just kind of get to know them again at during this time. So I'm really looking forward to that and also just sort of cultivating relationships. Not all of that has to happen in person. It can happen virtually. But I think community is key, which is why I adore what you do at AdWeek. You all bring people together beautifully. You bring amazing content to help us, you know, think through and navigate these challenges. I mean, literally, the title of this broadcast is AdWeek Together. So that's that's what I'm looking forward to. Yeah, absolutely. Connection, you know, is so healthy. And the quality connection is so beautiful. Before I let you go, I wanted to share a comment from Josh to ask you a follow up question. So Josh said absolutely going against the green can be the most valuable decision for a company because it allows you to test those hypothesis one might have balancing that with the core philosophy of the business is the key. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then you talked about, you know, having that collaborative seniors, right, as a key in kind of cultivating culture. Can you elaborate on that? Does that mean everyone brings, you know, their maybe ideas from different thought leaders to the table? Is it, you know, approaching it in a different way? Like, what are you doing? And I asked this because, you know, we talked about this before about how people are also interested in stories. So what are kind of the stories that work, right? So what's what's the story? I'll give you an example straight from our team. And I don't think people talk about this enough. When it comes to thought leadership creation, I think, you know, many people take the approach of outsourcing the work before sort of debating the ideas and getting kind of rolling up your sleeves and kind of diving into customer conversations. You know, but just to talk about the definition of the seniors, it is a group of people not all have don't have to have the same point of view, right, are committed to doing the work, you know, rolling up your sleeves, learning, reading, doing the deep work. And then the ideas are then strengthened in conversation to the so to the point of the person who just commented, yes, there should be it should be, you know, rotating around that core concept, but you're looking for those ideas. So, you know, for example, within our team, we'll generate a few ideas and bounce them around in conversation.  But the best ideas rise to the top within the seniors and thinkers within your team. You may also have some as a part of your seniors thought leaders and or folks that are thinkers on particular topics or even outside of your team. But the point is that it's not just one person, you know, like I said, in a tower that's a genius. I think that's the misconception that people have about thought leadership. It's a it's a community generated and such that the best ideas move forward. The other thing I would say that we need to guard against right now is because of all the distraction, you know, we're living in a time when there's so there's so much news and so much that's being thrown at us, it's stressful. But it is tough, it's difficult for us to do the deep work that's required to think and read and process ideas for yourself and ask yourself why. And why does this matter and why would it matter to this audience and to question that and perhaps do that with two or three other people after having done the work yourself of asking those questions. There's a book actually by Cal Newport called Deep Work. And he kind of talks about how, you know, the distractions that we face today with all the technology and I work for a social media company but from time to time I have to step away and almost like go into a cabin in the woods. I mean, I'm just I'm not literally but like I have to be away to be able to think about those ideas. But then when you come back to your seniors and you ask the question, you know, what do you think about this idea? Does this resonate? What comes up for you? And I think that's how we can strengthen our ideas and start to expand on that statistic I gave where you know, only 5% of the thought leadership is truly hitting, you know, think a little bit differently about how we generate that. Yeah, right, making me want to rethink the LinkedIn post where I ask questions to try to bounce off ideas. But hopefully, hopefully the good cream rises to the top. But Tahit from the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, I do want to thank you for pausing and taking this time to, you know, share what it's been like for you and your team.  So thank you again so much for being with us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. And thank you to our listeners and our viewers for joining us on this journey of AdWeek together. We do want to remind you to sign up for an AdWeek pro subscription so you can stay connected with us and stay connected to the content that's at adweek.com slash offer. We do hope that you have a great September and the rest of 2020 ahead where we can take pause and make great progress. For AdWeek, I'm Cohen. I'm Claire.


The Court of Appeal in Michael D. de Benres State Capitol has nullified the governorship primary election of the APC in the state. The Court also ordered the APC to conduct a fresh governorship primary election within 14 days while ordering the supposed elected candidate, Hyacinth Alia, and the APC to pay one of the party's governorship aspirants, Professor Tehembah Shija, 2 million Naira. The Court gave the order while ruling on the appeal filed by Professor Shija against the judgment of the Federal High Court in Makraji, which dismissed his suit challenging the APC governorship primary in the state, which produced Hyacinth Alia as candidate. Delivering the lead judgment, Justice Biobeli Abraham, God's judge will, held that Professor Shija was able to prove that there was no conduct of primary election by the APC on May 27, 2022. The Lord denotes in any way by APC for presenting a candidate. The Lord only order for a rerun in 11 local government is to an internal affair of the party. I have no right to conclude now, but we will get the judgements 30 each, brief our client, and take their instruction, dear friend. At the judgment today, all the other four cases were thrown out, or trashed out, except one that the court directed that APC should go back to the 11 local government to do a rerun of the elections. I just want to be quite clear that we respect the judgment so far. All I am appealing are the party fates and to the fans is simply that please remain very calm, everything is under control. I still remain on the ballot and what you are going to do is I am going to do further consultations with the party's leadership and then you hear from me further. As it is now, as of today now, right now, we have accepted the verdict of the appeal code and as far as the details of the judgment, the legal team will look at it for the purpose of this ruling today. I have not had an audience with him. I'm sure when I brief him and he invites his legal team to put his together, perhaps the issue of whether or not the verdict has been accepted. We believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God and we created an illiberal environment where they exercise their franchise by voting a mass in the person and candidate of Reverend Father Heisen Alia. And of course my appeal to the teaming supporters across the 278 words of Benway State is that nothing has happened. They should remain calm. There should be law abiding.