Daisy Olson here, Justin Tadlock, and we're talking about block theme features coming to WordPress 6.1 in a few weeks. And Justin was just sharing about how block theming is allowing him to do things that previously maybe we're just like on his wish list. So super cool. Yeah, you kind of got cut off mid ramble there. Sorry about that. But yeah, like I think block based templates and classic themes like or the like that's the where the transitioning point now like people can really theme authors can really start just especially if you have like an existing user base, you know, maybe you got 10,000 users you don't want to just like suddenly turn your classic theme into a full fledged block theme.  You can't edit that traditionally without diving into, you know, a PHP file. So like just drop in like a, you know, block template part that you know users edit that content and something they're likely not to like screw up the whole site with like just introducing that one thing.  I actually like using this system for sidebars more so than I do the like the kind of implementation we have with blocks, which lot widgets now. So then there's a lot of I think I agree with you on that. There's all some things to do there. I don't know how much I'll explore just because I'm like fully on board, you know, 100% block themes now. But I'd love to see like what our community does with it. Has anyone here tried any of these, like taking one of these block template parts and putting it into a classic theme. So this kind of reminds me a little bit so way if we go way back to ancient history. When I first started using WordPress widgets were actually a plug in so really weren't very many themes out there. And that would, I'm sorry that there weren't that many themes out there that that I used widgets at the time so it was a very popular plugin. Huge amount of support behind it and it wasn't too long before it rolled into core. But the other the other time in our history and this is kind of interesting because I've known there's there's some work being done to kind of replace this old old menu system when you would be looking to insert a new menu part of the new menu navigation system back in 2010, I think it was. And at that point we were, you know, moving from all of the themes just had to build their own navigation into like a centralized. Here we have a way to build navigation from within WordPress. And now we're moving even further down the road to saying okay well we can build these content areas that are going to maybe be used in more a place on a site kind of like a widget area. And now we can use them or build them similar to the way we would build with the block editor. Oh yeah I still remember the widgets plugin to those like version 2.0 or 2.2 somewhere in there somewhere in there. So Lisa says she has made a hybrid theme so far. Yeah, and I kind of hate that the word hybrid because that was my old business like my first theme and I'm still like subscribed to every like the hybrid word on WordPress so like I just get random emails now.  Hey, I bet you do. All right, and Sally says that she just made her first full site editing theme but haven't tried the hybrid model. I'm curious to try it too I'll have to go find an old theme somewhere and just play with it. I really everything that's in this field guide the related to things I just want to poke at and give it a good run. Make sure that I understand what it really does and how it's going to help people so that I can continue to try to share that word. Yeah, can I chime in real quick with something. Sure thing. One thing I've noticed that I like to call and I know this is for theme developers but if you're in like an agency land I know that's one of the things that people have been really excited about from the outreach program is being able to use block template parts and an agency setting.  You can provide that and there's also a ton of just locking API is in different ways you can curate the experience along with these block template parts. So I think when combined will be really cool. Obviously that's probably more in like an agency environment where you're working like one going with someone rather than rolling it out to everyone but I think it's easy to see how these things can combine. Yeah, good feedback. Like I've done a lot of experimenting with this like a couple of weeks ago so like the biggest issue I've run into with the block template parts is like just CSS issues like if you just like I went like full out and like wanted to put a hero header in 2021, I think. And so like it wasn't built. It wasn't built like in terms like to handle blocks in the like template outside of the content area. So like, you know, I was having an overwrite like old CSS. And I think that's just going to be individual themes like it's going up there's a little bit of a hump you're going to have to get over. If you're like plugging it into an old project. But not to make it sound like, you know, just walking the park doing you know just plugging in a template and being done with it there's some work involved with it but I think it's worth it. Yeah, but I that one of the things that and mentioned about locking content kind of leads us into another item that's in the field guide which might, I think it's going to probably relate more to people building custom post types, but there are some content locking features coming that so previously we were able to lock down like moving and removing blocks. And when we added them to templates but now we'll be able to lock down more specifically down to just the content of a block so things like media URLs and the actual content maybe like of a paragraph block or something like that and and everything just locked down around it so if you're creating for a client or for really custom very specific thing, and you need everything to like really stay where it is the design the, the, the where the blocks are and and all of that then being able to make it so that the something that the end user the the content creator is going to edit are the things that are relevant to them. So I think that is going to be really interesting for things that are maybe using more creative use of post types for example, or things like that. So in the Dev know it talks about example with a custom post type template that would be registered. Yeah, in my mind, like I'm thinking about the, like the content only editing, like when you lock that is the ability to create like, like a whole set of patterns that can keep the consistent design experience like throughout the, throughout the system and like users and users can just plug in their contents. And you know, maybe they instead of changing to the design on individual blocks, they kind of head to the side editor and change like the global styles.  That's where like, and then you have a different pricing table and you forgot to change the color. You kind of want that same consistent like branding across the site. So like when theme authors can like present like these pack packages of different designs, usually like along with patterns and lock down the design editing so the users only edit the content. And that just kind of forces them over to the global styles to make the changes. Yeah, because that's been like a pain point for a lot of people with theme authors like because like, you know, you might have a user use a, you know, a certain pattern like 100 times and then all of a sudden they want to change their site design but everything's tied back to, you know, any changes they made before. Yeah. Yeah. So thinking back to some experiences that I had working on client sites, you would come across a template or or a post type, maybe where the content area had been removed entirely and all you had was a list of fields to complete. That we're going to populate the front end but you had no idea what that was going to look like, except experience of having done it before. So, or even worse is you leave the content area but you don't use it. And you got to scroll down to see where you're actually going to be adding your content I think that this way of like building out a kind of like it's like a hybrid of somewhere between a whizzy wig and I don't know, an actual functional way to edit content. And it's never going to be quite what you see on the front end but but I think that that's just the nature of having something that can be changed you know it's never going to be, it's you've got to be able to have a way to interact with things. So, all right. So what else do you think looks interesting from the list, Justin is there something else that you think we could jump over to you. Does anyone have any questions if you feel like there's something that you've seen or you've heard about that you'd like to chat about. Call it out this is not just me and Justin talking necessarily I'd love it if we get some, some other voices in the mix on your video will not show up if you talk. So it's just me and Justin. But if you have your microphone on you did go ahead and and call out something that you think is very cool that's coming or a question that you have about something we've already talked about or something that you've heard about. Then let's continue. So, this feels like a pretty small change but it might make it feel a little bit more consistent if you're working with the theme that register I say register register is not exactly the word. If, if a theme uses a navigation block in usually it'll be empty. If it's in a theme that's been distributed. Then the fallback behavior of that is going to be changing just a little bit to make it more consistent between what you see on the back end and what you see on the front end when you first activate that theme. So that's the way I'm understanding it at least. Like previous versions I think on the front end, like if the navigation block was just the default. Then like when the user added to their website, it would just put out a page list on the front end, but on the editor it would just be like, you know, pick a menu. So the experience was different. The only way I've really worked around that is I've just like put some like, you know, demo links in there in the past, but like that shouldn't really shouldn't need to do that anymore. So, if anybody's right, so if you're a theme developer I would say and you want to control that experience so that whenever that theme is activated. Um, you want to know that these items show I think you can put like placeholder items into your menu. Yeah, and there there actually is a fallback hook to I don't know if it works in the front end and the editor though. I have to test that. Yeah, it's it's kind of like going back to the previous menu system and having to write custom Walker functions to make it work a little bit differently than the default right it's it's a lot easier to do that now. Yeah. We're responding here. Oh yeah I don't even miss custom walkers at all. That and comments to we had to use them a lot for comments. I'm just tapping in the chat there. So, yeah, that's just a minor thing. I know one thing everybody's excited about is the fluid fox sizes. Yeah, that's, it's not what we could do fluid for you just had to do it on your own. So, now there's you can tell WordPress to do it for you. I'm just curious about what that means basically it's your, your setting a default font size. Based on I think the 16 pixel base, and then using realms to to determine the sizing. And then you can set a max and a min size in rems. And then as your browser grows and shrinks. You can adjust the text size accordingly so we have there were some videos I think demonstrating this in the dev note. Maybe I can find one of those. Yeah. I was trying to say I've had an example on this computer. I don't think I do at the moment. I don't have a 2020 23 up somewhere. All right, let me see if I can share, share my screen. All right, can you all see that type setting and printing workshops. I can't see. Yeah, I'm good. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and play on this. I don't think there's any audio I think it's just a screen capture. I think as the, the display gets narrower, it changes the actual size of the text. So you think about, like we've come so far with mobile responsibility and you remember when smartphones, or even worse feature phones first started to come out, and we were suddenly trying to access the Internet on them. And everything got like really, really tiny as we tried to cram entire desktop websites into these small areas and now we're getting to a place where we can have, you know, infinite responsiveness. And so no matter what size, the display is it's going to be useful. It's going to be usable readable, but not necessarily the same. So it's not like you're trying to create this specific pixel perfect experience you're trying to have a website that's usable by human beings so. Yeah. I had, yeah. Actually, I think Michael actually is bringing it up in a chat about if I can pull that up. Yeah, bypass and media queries. That's like kind of a good thing to mention because we get a lot of questions about like, when are we going to get, you know, like some mobile, you know, mobile or tablet like design options on blocks. But that's really not the direction like, you know, quarters taken there's more of an intrinsic design direction. So like we use things like clamp to handle the fluid typography.  I mean, because there's new devices every year. New, you know, screen sizes is not the ideal way. There are some situations that is ideal to like, base your design off with media queries. But the more we can get away from that and just have things that are fluid and move along with whatever screen size that the user is viewing from, that the better. And that takes some time. So I know like some people get a little frustrated without like what they've seen maybe over the past decade from like different design tools. And but I think cores are going in the right direction with this. It's a different way of thinking about how to deal with responsibility. I think. The CSS is like much lighter at the end when you.  I feel like if you're used to that idea of at this point, I'm going to do this thing. It takes a little bit more work to like figure out like there's more math involved for sure. Clamp you. Oh yeah, I have a I have like a SAS function for just to like automatically do that sort of thing from for me. So I don't have to think about it. If anybody needs that just like ping me on slack or something. Well, now that we have fluid typography. Yeah, but yeah, but we still have other areas like, you know, like padding margins that could use a similar treatment. Sure. And I would imagine that we're going to get there at some point in some way what it's actually going to look like. It's a little hard to save at the moment. But because, you know, with this trend towards fluidity, I think we'll see more and more getting built in. But I think the font sizes is a really good place to start. The one thing I would say watch out with font sizes is like your line heights. Make sure you're testing those as a designer.  I know something like I get super picky about that.  Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah, it can look pretty, pretty wonky there. So there was a question about implementing custom designs and block themes. And yeah. This is this is such a thing that's really, you really have to understand how theme JSON works to figure out which things are going to become part of your sites defaults your themes defaults. In terms of what CSS is going to be output through the block editor system. And then what you actually do need to create as custom CSS and everything is kind of like a, it's still in progress, you know, we're in the early days of block theming, and we are going to keep finding new ways to improve on what we do. And one example that of something that we hadn't been able to do in theme.json that now we should be able to do would be setting some some styles for like states of links active hover. That wasn't something that we had enough of the option to do there's also some element styling that can be applied coming up and the site was added and you can also do the the state on the button on buttons to. Mm hmm. Yeah, so I'm going to throw this link into the chat of the styling elements. And that that's the direction where we're going in I don't know that you'll ever be able to do like we're not trying to necessarily recreate CSS in in theme JSON, but the idea is that you're going to be able to create this these really efficient style sheets that are going to get better and better over time so. I always describe it as a common language between like WordPress a theme and like the user to like, that's like what the theme JSON is. Yeah, just a way for everybody to talk to each other. Sorry to have somebody coming in or add some feedback there anyway. I heard something too. I see, yeah, cool. I don't know if I said your name right but I see your hand is raised did you have a question. Yeah, I got a couple questions. I mean, this is a very basic question but so like I can put text into a header blog and select which header I want. Using the blog system and kind of in each post like one or two or three. What I select each of these headers there's kind of like a pre formatted font size and style. How do I like change the defaults for those. So, you mean on a per template part basis. You're like for the entire theme like it could be done through theme JSON. You can set defaults. Yes. Like your styles that you can do it on end of like you can set some defaults for all heading all headings. And now I have something else coming through. You can set the defaults for all headings. It's also in Wordpress 6.1 so it's like styles that element that heading. And then you can also like go break that down to individual headings like styles that elements that H1 that takes to. So, but I found at least at this stage. So, I'm coming at it from a little bit different. And I found that when I if I had a specific template or template part that I wanted to style differently. Then I would make those styles at the block level in the templates and not try to put them into theme JSON. But I think that we'll probably get to a place just like we're now going to be able to do more styling from the JSON on a more granular level. You might also be able to target a specific template part styles. I am going to mute everyone for just a second and then you can unmute yourself again. Okay, yeah. So Justin, you'll have to unmute yourself. Okay, yeah. So, I don't know. I think that we'll see more and more but I found that sometimes there are ways to use the JSON to style something just by thinking about the nesting and in like a more creative way. I think that one thing that would be really cool would be for a lot more code examples. I don't know where they're going to come from necessarily some of us are going to have to go make some, but just to create a theme JSON recipes or cookbook, you know, that's going to show us lots of examples of how we can structure our styles. So that they are there giving us the results that we're looking for it's, it's, you know, we're all very probably a lot of us are accustomed to how to work with CSS. So this is a different paradigm where it's a different way of thinking because we're trying to apply our styles to controls that are in the block editor. Can I ask a quick follow up to that. Okay. Yeah, I guess in general I'm a little bit unclear on the systems of like overrides because you know there's like multiple levels with which you can program a theme. And I'm not sure like which one WordPress checks first, like back then when they had before the site full site editing they had like the additional CSS kind of like type additional CSS I didn't know if that applied globally or on a per page basis so anything you can speak to in terms of like the override hierarchy for any like style changes that you make whether it's by CSS or JSON. It's going to cascade just like any other CSS. What order everything loads in. Yeah, there's a lot of levels to that now. So you have WordPress like default block styles that are like at the very lowest and then like, then you have, you know, theme.json styles I think would kind of come in next and then even user overrides and then you got per block styles that come in. And somewhere in the middle of that to you can also have like style sheets attached to the blocks to as a theme author. But basically at the, like the very tail it like the highest and the level is like what happens on the individual block level. That's like, that should be the like final say so how something looks. And I've seen somewhere I wish I could find it right now I don't know that is we actually need a good like hierarchy page for the docs we need to like. Yeah, there are some posts in core in the make core. Probably maybe even somewhere in docs where it talks about. Core styles and then theme styles and then user styles and that that should be the hierarchy that first we pull it from core and then we then we pull from the theme and then we pull from user. So. Yeah, and user styles are things we do in full say editing basically that's it's the difference that changes you make from what the theme is pulling it. I think we may have covered that that question. I'm trying to catch up with questions in their chat now. They tend to come in. Yeah, so I've seen a couple of mentions of learn WordPress and I do want to throw a little plug in there for the great work that the training team is doing on making self paced learning opportunities to learn all kinds of things about WordPress, not just development but also just how to use it how to build block themes how to build blocks. Lots and they're working on doing more and more and this actually is kind of kind of part of that is we, you know, it's it we publish it as a workshop and that's probably how a lot of you are registered that was through the learn WordPress meetup.com group. Okay, yeah, there's just some good links from Michael in the chat for everybody else. And Lisa's got one too. Yes, we're there other specific topics are like we wanted to make sure to cover. I know we have some other questions like that came in with RSVP. Yeah, let me see if we have anything that can pull out of there. Yeah. Oh, Sally asked about first attempt as as using fonts and theme JSON didn't work. I mean, that's a very specific question. It would be like a, I think we're going to have to see your code to answer that but I think that. Yeah, I was just kind of interject for a second we actually have a course coming up that's going to have a whole section on fonts actually just wrote it. Yeah, I mean I went to a learn session on fonts and it looks, you know, beautifully easy to set it up you just put the font families, you know you put the fonts in the folder you put the font family info and your theme JSON.  Oh, it loads your custom fonts and when I tried to actually do it it was not working. But so I still had to, you know, and queue the fonts. So I'm sure it will improve with practice and and also it's just possible that some of the some of those features were not in whatever I happened to have active at the time. Yeah, I actually like completely done the same like it didn't work for me the very first time I did it. I think I actually had that happen to me too when I was prepping for WordCamp US and it took me a couple tries. I don't remember what I changed though. Something changed and then it worked. Yeah, I like I'll be happy to like if you're like so having issues. I'll be happy to like just to walk you like through it like one on one or because that's a can be a bit of a process because it's not just like the like loading font faces you also have to attach it to a font family. And then actually use it somewhere after that. I did that but for some reason it it wasn't working until I, you know, added something in the functions file and then it behaved itself. Yeah, it's a yeah I still look up even though I'm like writing one lesson on it like I'm still looking up and like just copy and pasting from like things I've already got working. Hey, that's the trick to being a great developers copy and pasting. I absolutely agree Google Reddit Stack Overflow, the codecs that still shows up in the Google search. Yeah, all that. So, here's another interesting thing and there was a question about tools for development. There was an example of composer but I wanted to throw out a couple of things that I think can be really helpful for from for the block theme development specifically and one is if you are using theme chase on. Make sure that you include the schema definition in your file because it's going to end use a ID that supports schema autocomplete it will revolutionize your ability to write these files because it will give you lots of little hints about what is available in any given space but also will autocomplete some of it for you with the default so then you know what to change it to. So I think that that is such a great thing that some of the developers have taken on to make sure that we have a good schema. And if you if you use the one that has trunk in that in the URL, that's the that's meant to work with the Gutenberg plugin, but there's another version of it that's specific to the WordPress version so you want to make sure that you're using the one that's that's right for your installation of WordPress so. Yeah that's change that's just completely changed how I've right like interacted with the inside now, like just moving the vs code and like, you know, put in the schema. Like, it's kind of easy now. Text expander for it. So yeah and so Michael blinked to a to visual studio, which is a Microsoft software that's cross platform compatible and it's free and it's built on an open source base. And it's one of several options that will just work with with schema out of the box so a lot of us have have started using visual studio for as an ID. There's a there's a lot a huge community surrounding it lots of extensions to to make it work the way you want I actually was working on building a whole mark down notebook. Like a personal knowledge management system that was all in VS code. I ended up moving a different direction but it was really fun to go through that journey and see what kinds of things the developers and that open source community have have come up with kind of like our plugin and theme community and WordPress. Lots of stuff out there. And then the other tool that I think is really helpful is there's a plugin in the WordPress plugin directory called create block theme. And that is a really helpful way to it does a few different things but one thing you can, you can do is spin up a like a blank empty theme. That's a functional block theme it has just the basics in it, and then it gives you a starting point to build from but the other thing it can do is it can take any changes that you set make within the site editor and save them back to your theme at the file level. So it was a very cool tool to be able to start off with some basics there are probably still things you're going to have to do in the code. But to actually build a theme mostly from within WordPress is pretty neat. Yeah, I'm just going to plug another like theme JSON related plug in. It's like called theme YAML. I tried it out like earlier this year I think if you just prefer like, you know not working in JSON like you just want something that's readable like I don't know. Like, it felt pretty neat to do it and like just like like transfers to the JSON for you. And if you don't know what YAML is it's it's basically a super set of JSON. So it's a different way of structuring your content in a still in a value or a key value pair sort of format, but without all of the brackets. I would like to see that as like a build script instead of like a plugin though. So there's probably something out there already. Yeah, I was just thinking the other day I was not aware of this plugin but I was just thinking the other day as I was working with some other non WordPress related things that they use YAML and I was like, wouldn't it be cool if I could write my theme JSON and YAML first because it is a lot easier to read. Yeah. And plus you can like the last easy to just leave comments, you know. So, yeah, and theme JSONs are getting like, kind of large or they can be. Yeah, I have a feeling that we're going to get get to a place where we need to break them out into smaller pieces. But not today. I'm just trying to look over our list now. I haven't touched, we haven't really touched on like the presets for adding more jet block gap. That's like the spacing. Yeah, they're spacing. Yeah, spacing presets. You can basically set like, you can like customize like every like spacing option. Instead of let and then like turn off custom spacing for users. Yeah, thanks. That's for the whole link there. They're like, there's two different ways of doing it. There's like a whole like steps thing that was a little confusing to me, but I just kind of like made my individual like spacing sizes. And that, I think it's going to be really useful for keeping assistants facing across your theme.   And then like it not work, you know, and then they kind of switch some things up and it not work. It just completely doesn't work with the next design.  And then the next one, not so much. I think there's like some internal mapping there. I haven't dove into it as much as I wanted to in this cycle. And yeah, I'm just going to be rambling about that. And we can move on to the next thing if we need to. The next thing. I know we do have a few questions. Okay. And I don't I haven't dove into the like reference styles yet. And Theda and Jason, that's a whole another topic too. Yeah, it feels like, I don't know. I haven't really wrapped my head around it, but the idea that you can reference a style. We typically are referencing the variables that are created. But to reference a style and another in another place within theme Jason is an interesting idea. And I don't, I don't know that I fully understand what that's going to look like in practice. Yeah, I need a project before I can really talk about it. But there's some stuff about filtering theme Jason data, which I think is going to probably affect plugins more than themes. That's my, that's my hot take on it. Where as a plugin, you would be able to filter in your own theme Jason type content or data. Yeah, they're, yeah.  Yeah, the theme Jason stuff. Yeah, that's probably going to apply mostly to plugins. I think maybe there are some times when there are probably some situations and things where you might want to still like lean on like a custom theme options page or something. Like, because you know, like right now you, there's, you can't do like Google fonts through the font system or something. And maybe you want to like let it use or like choose fonts and your theme, and then like auto download them to host them locally. And then you need to kind of hook back into theme Jason to like overwrite the font families or something like that. They're, you know, we just have to wait and see what, what people deal with it. Yeah. Um, it'll be curious. I'm curious to see what the community does with all of these things. Honestly, it feels like there's a lot going on in here and none of them are like, as Earth's shaking is like full site editing in general or the site editor or some of those really big things that we've had in some recent versions, but when you look at how many things are in this list, it's pretty, pretty wild. I see a question from Lisa about block gap being confusing. It is a little confusing. The main idea is it's the spacing between blocks so it doesn't put spacing before the first block or after the last block, and it's being applied to inner blocks so you actually apply it to the container, and then it gets applied to the next level and blocks that's that's kind of like my oversimplification of it. Yeah. Yeah, that's basically it's just like, well, in like the flow layouts, it's margin. And like then there's the flex layouts where it's actually an actual like gap value. So that it makes it even more confusing, like, because sometimes it's a gap, sometimes it's a margin. Yeah. And I think that the main idea behind it is to take the need to understand all of the technical details of it for the user to be able to say, Oh, I just want this space to happen here. I don't know if that's really working in practice but that's the main idea but it is a pretty confusing it is. It's caused a lot of conversation in the, in the core channels as we try to sort out the best way to implement these ideas. But at its basic it's it's how much space you're placing between blocks whether they are going horizontally or vertically. Yeah. I'm trying to think I like there's kind of an interesting question I don't know how much wonder how much it buys the themes but like this is from the RSVP lists as can query loops have conditional logic such as displaying only if the date has not passed. And the there are actually new tools for like hooking into like creating your own query block variation. Yeah, variations now that is in the field guide to but the way that we've done some of this up until now I haven't used these any I've done I've not done anything with the new custom query loop block variations yet. But one way that we've worked PHP into our block themes kind of through the back door I would say almost although it was in a core theme so I guess it's it's canonical at that point is to use block patterns that are hidden from the because block patterns are registered with PHP. So we can actually use conditionals in those in order to kind of get back some of our old temp our old way of thinking about how we do conditional so yeah. What patterns are like anytime you need to do something the block editor isn't capable of yet just kind of stick it in the pattern and hide it away. You know some of the PHP stuff. And the reason that it works is because they're the first of all you can create a pattern register a pattern. It's a PHP file it's got some header information most of the file is just HTML blocks but you wrap it up in whatever whatever old template tags you need to do what you need it to do. And then you register as a as a false for the insert so it's hidden and then you use the pattern block in your template to pull it in. So it's kind of like this it it's a creative use case of things that already existed. Just a quick note on like doing conditionals and block patterns with PHP is they're actually registered I think on the net hook. So like if you're expecting like like some condition that happens later that might not work. So, as far as references for doing this the best reference that I know of is to go look at the 2022 theme, because that's how some of the header is handled. I think the birds in there that section, it's, it's like, you kind of have to like break it down into pieces as you start to see how they actually constructed that header, because it's like a pattern within a pattern within a block within a template. So that might not be the right order of things but that's that was kind of my feeling when I was looking through trying to reverse engineer what they did there, but if you want to see a place where that where that was done that is a that's a good place to go. Yeah, I know we got a few minutes left, like just on time wise so like I want to make sure like we're covering any questions anybody has. Like, I just want to make it like open up the floor bit. So, yeah, can says doesn't it kind of defeat the purpose of WordPress if I need to know HTML and CSS to a professional degree or technical detail to do these basic customizations. I don't think that's the intention. I think that you were trying WordPress is covering huge amounts of ground in terms of being able to to meet the needs of developers that are building enterprise level applications for huge clients. And also your hobby blogger who just wants to have a website where they can talk about, you know, they're crafting. It's it's covering all of that. And so there you might not be able to do every single thing without some HTML and CSS experience. But there's a lot you can do without without any or with very little. Yeah, I'll say like, I have a cousin, an older cousin, he's just not really technically savvy. So, but he wanted a website several years back. So of course, you know, Justin, the WordPress developer and the family gets to set it up for him. And so he had such trouble just doing base what I would call basic things like adding a link or like bolding text and like classic editor. And like every week I would get a call I mess something up. But since then, I think like he like since he's moved I've moved him over to the block editor. I've had far fewer of those questions. So I don't really like this is an example of somebody who's just like not he doesn't know code doesn't know HTML doesn't CSS nothing. And like so you don't need that level of expertise until you want to start getting into more, you know, advanced stuff.  Absolutely. All right, do we have any other comments questions before we wrap things up for today. So I'm sure that we have a pretty wide variety of people with different levels of usage here today and I hope that everyone found something interesting or useful today. And we will, we'll keep seeing what comes along and try to maybe do some deeper dives into some of these specific things would be pretty cool. Yeah, and I didn't even have a cat show up like like once the meat like the whole thing got started like they missed their cat. Yeah, it was it just it was here at the very beginning and like, you know, that was it. Yeah, seriously, I mean we're like, I mean y'all got any questions. I mean, uses, you know, use whatever knowledge we might have. You can always find us and the make WordPress slack. Yeah, I'm at green shady, so not my. I am at Daisy Oh, the letter Oh. I'll just type in this like in case anybody wants to. Like, if you have a question about anything we're talking about today, you know, don't hesitate to. You know, just, you know, DM or something. Absolutely. All right, well thank you all for coming today and let us know if you have any other questions or if you'd like to see another topic we'll see what we can do. Have a great one everyone. All right.


These are office hours on Thursday, July 7, 2022. There's a few things going on in the world that are distracting. That is too bad. And I just wanted to set some context here also the the relate wiki website is behaving badly, a thing that Pete fixed. Oh, wait, let me just do. Oh, I just got rid of a tab that I didn't want to get rid of. So a thing that Pete fixed just a couple days ago broke again so I don't really know what's happening but I can use obsidian over here to just talk it through and screen share that will work. And earlier today, I was on a call where I was trying to use the wiki to talk about stuff and I couldn't find what I'd done and I got, I got discombobulated which was not not that encouraging but I think it was just me I'm not having my brain set right. Any thoughts or questions or anything like you guys have almost no context on what these office hours are what relate is and so forth so happy to answer questions, or I can just dive in and try to make the context. I'm glad you brought up the, the relate wiki. I was only if it was just me. No, it's, it's not you. It's yeah. And it's not me. And then, I thought I'd stop in we could definitely talk about the mid range goals which would you have on the task today but also I was having a little trouble anchoring relate in my brain. So I wanted to spend a few minutes finding the, you know, kind of like when you're trying to figure out, like let's say you're putting the other puzzle and don't know what the picture is sometimes you kind of make the borders first. And so I just want to kind of see where that vision kind of stops or if it doesn't, which is okay. Perfect. So I can do that. Bill anything you want to ask read. No, I just Bentley just did the, you know, the general systems thinking perfect intro draw the boundaries first draw the boundaries first thank you now. First you find the pieces that have a straight line on them and then especially the ones that look like a corner and you put those at the corners and then you work you in. Well, I want to throw in that happened on the matter most was this big really little explosion of fun on the fellowship of the link channel. Yeah, yeah. Which I think will end up possibly dealing with some of the goals here on the relate work. Yes, it's pushing at this. Anyway, so that'll just you know, but it was a lot of for me a lot of fun there. And so we were live on a jitzy call doing that that's why there was a torrent we were like okay everybody let's chat over there not in the chat over here. So I'll, and I'll put in the header of that channel, the time and date and jitzy link so that you all can join next week where we have a weekly standing call on Thursdays after GM, all that kind of stuff. And that that started because I was talking with Sam Klein SJ Klein, who's part of the underlay project with Danny Hillis. And, and he was like, we should just sort of have a general conversation let's ignore underlay for a little bit and let's go have this general conversation about this comments we're trying to build together of shared ideas. And by the way, I'm a little student today so all the things I'm saying are going to be a little off target but me, but close by I think. And then I met Flansian, who is like a mystery participant and has a funny ID and all turns out he's from Argentina and we spoke Spanish together for like the half hour the first time we met. And he's awesome and he's built this agora, which is very much in the spirit of Rome and Athens and log seek and everything else, but has its own sort of capacities and superpowers, but he's built the whole platform out and it's just kind of. It's, it's agora all the way down in ways that I think all of us would find pleasing, and then the tie that binds in the fellowship of the link. And which is a phrase I just came up with I'm like, you know, we're all into openness, and we understand the power of links and all that so that those are that's kind of the filter for fellowship of the link is like really working openly to build open platforms of some sort.  You're both very familiar with OGM and all of that, and OGM has become sort of a series of conversations within this large frame of how do we build both this infrastructure for sharing what we know and also how do we build the piece of OGM that I feel like we don't spend a lot of time on, and we kind of neglect, but not because it's not important is the softer side that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with. Gosh, if I don't trust you there's no reason I should listen to your sensible arguments, or pay attention to data or anything like that. So that's that's kind of the box for OGM. And then I ended up in a conversation with Ev Williams, the founder of blogger, then Twitter, then medium. And I knew Ev before the invented blogger, because I was a consultant, I was kind of like an external advisor not not so much consultant just to an advisor to Pyra, which was the name of the little company before they before the guy across the room who was ever busy talking about things that would be familiar kind of in the wiki and collaboration world guy across the room and then blogger that eats the company over the course of five or six or seven years, which includes a dip where at one point, the whole company is one server in Ev's living room and everybody's had to be they've had to fire everybody because they had no business model. A year later it's three guys in an office on Market Street. A year later they were bought by Google and he's now a Google employee and all of that kind of stuff so so super interesting lots of history there. And I had a similar conversation with Ev when he was early on medium, and I was already like way deep in the brain and I was like, There's a thing here where we could build context for the stories that people are posting in medium wouldn't that be interesting. I mean, and it didn't sort of stick so much then but then we, I contacted him again, and we talked a couple months ago, and he was like, and he is now a fan of using mem. This is another Rome like tool that lets you share notes, john borthwick from beta works who's also a player in this puzzle as is because become a Rome fan, and is busy trying to figure out how do we do better than Rome. So, I'm helping him create a tools for thinking camp around this body of tools. So with Ev where the conversation went and this is, this is the midterm goals, part of the relate wiki is exactly meant to be this. The conversation went has has the simple goal of why can't we share notes which falls into the short term goals of like how do we prototype that how do we do that. So what's the goal of what would it take, and here, broad imagination, don't assume anything, but what would it take to, to build out. I don't even want to call it an infrastructure but it would probably have to do with protocols and API is and it would probably have to do with prototypes and examples, and sample code. It might have to do with legislation I don't think so there's no there's no thought of that right now but it might. And create a movement and some platforms that would that would build out a shared memory for humans without creating a whole new Facebook or a whole new Lincoln or a whole new one platform to rule them all. So preserving highly distributed data in individual privacy. And in particular, and I'm here I'm layering on some of my particulars about this in particular allowing different people to participate with their favorite tool, but still getting the benefit of the shared work in the middle. And also allowing people to express their point of view and their biases and their belief system. The Wikipedia for example doesn't let us do because the Wikipedia is as an encyclopedia is meant to be neutral point of view. In fact they invented this notion of neutral point of view and have you know, a whole bunch of culture, culture now built around that. And I'm, I'm a believer that we need to acknowledge and express our points of view as best we can. And if we do that faithfully and in sort of the spirit of discourse, but then we can compare notes. And we can end up complexifying issues and taking them apart and saying, Oh, we agree on these six things we disagree on these six. Let's figure out experiments or queries or let's bring experts in or let's do something else to address address those things. However, our assumptions are simply fundamentally different. Yeah, you know, this person's coming from a faith tradition where these are the these are the basic understandings, which just don't drive in at all with with the other. And then maybe the question is how do we find other ways to live together on the same rock without destroying the rock, which I think is an equally important conversation these days, and I've gone a little far field from the core of this. So the medium, the midterm goal part of this is kind of my charter with Ev on a short term project to figure out what norms organizations protocols apis and dynamics. I'm making up this list would get us into would bootstrap us into a reliable shared memory of the kind I just described. Did that make any sense. Yes. Let me see if I can wrangle it a little tighter. So, I heard shared memory. I don't know it's been a goal of you. The brain is one type of that. I also hear you talking about people's beliefs and how we can work on that and stuff like that. And for me, something I'm building right now is an epistemic map which is kind of a name for what Billy bot is, which, you know triggers that. But also, we also talk about note taking. So then I'm thinking. Okay, what's the what are the different types of data that we're going to want to have in the shared memory is it literally everything. So word Excel, notepad. You know, medical study data is it do we have to support any data format, and any set of structured versus unstructured on the scale, or is there a limit they're saying we just want to be epistemic sorry, or we just want to be linked data with text. Do you have a feel for the scale. Yeah, it's a it's a great question and it gets, it gets the warning quickly, sort of. So I think a piece of this depends on how much needs to be in the thinking system environment lens. And so there was there was a question as part of trying to come up with a think camp we had a little exercise to figure out what do we mean by tools for thinking what are the boundaries of tools for thinking. And, and I saw that that was very helpful. Yeah, and as far as I got with that I was like, Hey, people think when they write essays and you could use any simple word processor to write an essay I don't consider word processors thinking tools. So for me, you've got to bump up with a couple features to get into thinking tools. But if you took emacs I mean, not log seek but there's an emacs extension that that basically does Rome, it emulates Rome. It's called. Oh, I'll find it. And it's like, wow, somebody took emacs which is sort of self programmable and extensible, and they made it do what role is doing, we are clearly in thinking tools territory now. And so I don't know what the minimum list of those added features is but it has something to do with Wiki links everywhere or, or backlinks that has something to do with tagging and metadata, it has something to do with visualization and mapping. It has something to do with a couple other things like that. And some tools are thinking do zero mapping but they do these other things really well.  But it's really good at the mapping thing. Right. And it's pretty good at the labeling and tagging thing man man man. And so one of the things I came up with, which I'm not sure I have handy. I did a spider diagram I think it's in one of the pages I put on the on the wiki. I did a little spider chart or radar chart with dimensions that are kind of the things I'm naming right now. And I thought of that as a way of rating and then picturing different kinds of tools that one would consider tools for thinking. So, so sorry, long digression about what an earth is a tool for thinking in order then to come back to what do we want to see when we're thinking together. And I'm telling that getting down to the raw data is really pretty important that if, if the tool for thinking were meant to be only the abstract thoughts, if, if it was meant to be like, did Cartian logic or, or Hegelian logic with only the logical statements in a perfect crisp map, without any evidence without any, I wouldn't like that I wouldn't use that it wouldn't make sense to me. One of the things I love about the brain is that it lets me mix raw data like articles. Things with insights derived from articles, which then point to a whole bunch of different articles and evidence. So this argues for, hey, at some corner here we're going to want to have an R database running in in Jupiter notebooks or whatever and we're going to want to have access to raw data and understand which data is reliable which isn't. And that's going to take some expertise in data management cleaning, etc, etc. And I'm not going to do that today, but I'm certainly that's certainly on the table for what could be included maybe ought to be included here.  And I think that's brilliant. And I want to include those communities in this inquiry, because as they come up with experiments that they can then test and do analysis on, and they can then come come back with conclusions. Those could close the loop and answer some of the experiments being set up from a more philosophical point of view, for example. So, does that make any sense. Yeah. So I'm not foreclosing a lot of data types I think I think I'm saying that he said, I think we're boiling the ocean, which is sort of yeah yeah that's okay you know you bought the ocean one bucket at a time right. So where do we start but I but I do hear some kind of principles. Like being able to bring any tool. So the having a principle of separating data from visualization, and having the data available so for example let's take massive wiki, and you're really wiki site is that if, if you posted the raw markdown files on the server, and there was some easy way for someone viewing the site to know how to do it, and then they could download them and put them in their own city and or go to get hub of course which they're there and pull them from that, which is very much the wiki, the massive wiki model. And we make that a standard because I was thinking my website is run from an air table base and some markdown files, which are hosted on GitHub. And on every page it should be, there should be a button to say, how do you get to the data on this page and maybe there's a standard like you do it.JSON at the end or I like that better than doing the having to set. I don't know, Jerry how much you do with the web stuff but you can, you can set application JSON on a web call but I can't do that in my browser. So I want to have a way I can do it in the browser. I want to, to have that kind of it as one of the basic standards that you always post the raw, the raw data is always accessible. And then we start saying here the suggested raw data formats. So there'd be we need to kind of figure out. And then we kind of need to figure out is it all going to be kind of static data, or is it going to be like here's API. So when you talk about Jerry's brain. Is there a format we could store it as raw files on the web server that someone could navigate, or do you have to have an API for something that big and not complex. And then are we going to support API's but I think the main thing is separation of data and, and editing and visualizing. So when I look at that data it'd be nice if it had some clues in it to tell me what formats this is, what's the suggested editor or editors what's suggested visualizer or visualize. Yeah, or even just what was this originated in so that you know what the optimal tool was. Yeah, exactly. And, and it's very easy for me to conceptualize separating data from tools from visualization or analytic tools that that's like, check, no problem. Once we get into protocols API's is the data live or not etc I start getting like a little, a little float in the ocean because it's more conceptual, and it feels to me like we've already exported my brain to a big bag of JSON objects in a postgres database. And if this were, if this were the base of bits that I was using I could keep it up to date all the time, and it would just live out there as a bunch of tuples and in some database and, and at some point it would be a distributed database and who knows what. But that makes sense to me, right. And then any node could be open for somebody else to contribute to in, as I envision it kind of a fork and pull kind of mode, which is one of the nice reasons to use GitHub under the hood. And that it bakes in, it bakes in a group collaboration, not necessarily a mass or large scale collaboration method but at least a community collaboration scheme that's proven to work pretty well. Sorry, Bill, I'm just getting a lot of these things out of our heads and into the conversation. Go ahead. Okay. So yes, I mean very, I like the conversation so just a little trick. Massive wiki. You're looking at a page. Just type md at the end of the URL and it cares your turn. And you'll see the markdown page. Right. That's just one of those just how it's working. It's just because the way Pete and I do this mess work you build the stores the markdown. In the same path in the same path. And yes, right at the same place. That's great. It's, I mean it doesn't answer the questions that Bentley wanted a little bit of medic information but here's some, you know, here are like some cordial things to know about what you're looking at, you know, to solve them to provide the following affordance. So, but nonetheless, that's just a mess of wiki thing. So one thing I want to throw out a little bit. I'm really kind of picky about language a little bit but I want to throw out when we talk about data. I think we should retire the term raw, because in the world of science there is no nothing is raw and if you're using instruments to collect data. There is nothing that is not processed.  You know, a digital thermometer has already built into it a model of temperature. Because it's sampling. For example, doing computations on whatever signal is being. It's transforming. Anyway, so I used to use the one I was teaching on data informatics I use the word primary data. And NASA I can think this up and NASA has a really nice chart of levels of data processing levels zero through five. Anyway, where they really talk about, you know, data that's zero levels basically you know we got rid of all the all the noise, the obvious noise from the instrument. And then there's other process so they have levels of qualifying. The transformations have been done on the original signals that were collected. So it's nice use the word primary, then because people can talk about primary. One could make a definition for that. I mean I guess you could make a definition for raw but it's, I would like to see us just be more just establish a glossary that vocabulary that really helps us. I made a comment when I was looking at Matthew Lowry's big medium page. You know, so my pre association note was like, are we talking. Is it jargon versus versus the general tool, the general idea. I think we should. And I was just kind of flip but I really just had this thought we could do that here. I think as we go forward, we could just try and create a little definition of the terms are using.  There was an author who actually wrote a really nice essay that said writing is thinking. I could argue anything that allows you to like, you know, put inky scratches on a piece of paper is the thinking tool. Because until, and it even happens, you know, when you try and talk create the, you know, a simpler compound sentence about a thought in your mind you're actually thinking. Because before that it has it's not really even. It's like, I don't know, not expressed in any way so I don't want to push back I think you're right that we have these other tools that add more capacity but to say that if there are no links all you did was type, you know, use your typewriter in a blank piece of paper. You'd have to say yeah that's thinking creating the type of paper. I just created a glossary page and put in a summary of what we just talked about I think is this what you're thinking about. Well, I think we as we talk as we go through I think it would be helpful to always ensure that we are all referring to, at least a close enough concept or notion about what we're saying. Because it's very easy to diverge. I'm not. I'm okay with not using raw I don't know if I like primary because when you're talking about a shared data system, this primary mean Jerry's original page or my copy of Jerry's data. It sounds like it sounds like the original. But I mean if we just say data versus visualization maybe that's still when I was teaching informatics but I was teaching about scientific data so it was important to that was a useful descriptor primary data. So I'm not wedded to it, but I just think what I mean I think it's broad data is out there people going to use it we just have to be know know that it's kind of a loose term. Yeah, well yeah I mean so I use raw data a lot and it's not for me it's never meant the original unprocessed data it's just before it's been manipulated into visualization and you had you had some loss. So, you know, an air table basis still the raw data because no data loss, but when you put it on a webpage there's data loss. So I mean I'm not going to push this because I'm talking from a scientific mean you know when you're talking when it talks about NASA about astronomical data there. They got a list. It's one of these five pick one, you know. And so so Bentley data that were the outliers have been thrown out where the decimals have been rounded where I'm just making things up but but five things have happened to it. But it's but you still haven't done anything to analyze or visualize it that still raw data to you. No, I wouldn't want to normally take the decimals points out and stuff like that. Right. Yeah, I mean that was a bad example. But yeah, yeah, I mean, if you take. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know it is it is Lucy there is no you know the human language doesn't isn't specific enough, but there is a look you can take if you took raw data and then you put it into a you know, a data format. And I knew that raw data that that if if you took, you know, a scan of someone's handwritten notes you took that you try to put that into a data table based on the scan. And yeah, technically the raw data would be the, the bits before the scan, but there's a fairly do we go that far back. There's a tiny interesting story here about a you see at my alma mater as you see Irvine, and there was a professor there named Sherwood Roland, who discovered the hole in the ozone layer. And the way he did that was he stopped throwing out the outliers that other scientists were like now this can't be. And the outliers were in fact describing or a tear in the ozone layer. Yeah, maybe, maybe source data is like what's the source data for this visualization for this visual. That's good, that's good because then someone could go if they found it. They could ask questions about the quality of that information. Although then is it the original source or the copies. In the digital world there are no originals I mean literally if you're doing bit for big copies from just this service. Yeah, it's really is not original. So it's really the source for this visualization or what's your source data used that you manipulated to get into this age age. So, so this is just going to throw it in from a little time with the dynamics heat thing, you know, the deal with like decimal points. The reason you want to round them off is like, you know, people at digital thermometers, somebody, you know, somebody gives you a temperature to four decimal points that's like, I don't know what that is like. Yeah, it's not that is not a right. You know, it's not a value. So we've gone pretty deep down a vocabulary and terminology rabbit hole. I would love to bounce back up to the picture of the midterm goals and how to describe this thing in a way that's kind of pity and intriguing and invites exploration and helps frame that this kind of heart of the relate project in some sense so all thoughts welcome and I'm going to screen share and go back to that page in matter most and just take not matter most in I'm sitting and just take notes there. Yeah, so have you looked at Matthew Lowry's little medium thing that he's writing this like he's got this big book going on in his personal knowledge graph. I skim the chapter I haven't. I think his picture really made me think because it's very generative. I looked at the picture and I didn't get the same generativity you got this is the picture. I did I had a thousand questions. You know, but the, but the thing that he says that's interesting is he has some, I took some preliminary notes. And I'll probably look at some more but he touches on me. It's obvious he's in the same space he touches on some of the same issues about trying to share, create something that shareable, being able to so that there's a lot of similar terminology here. I built this. It's a framework model for. I mean the one thing I liked about Pete Kaminsky is using the word massive. When it was, you know, I'm a SVF was that you know when this with the world be like we just have this just a few basic things. We're using markdowns. Things are shared. The version control. And because you're using computers, the files. That's it. Right. And the question of, well, how do you share them anyway? It's like, we're talking about, you know, these simple formats. So I found that to be makes that makes the massive wicked thing really easy. You could put it almost anywhere because basically just a bunch of asking text. So I just think I find there's some similarities here and this fits into the, you know, it's what Yuri has talked about. There's, so this is a very many people are having the same conversation. And in, and here I have got a page called relate pioneers. So I need to call this Excalibrain, because I think that's what Pete wrote about in today's Plex, which makes more sense. And each of these needs to be a link.  This is a Gora, the show is doing Excalibrain and some other stuff. This is rich burden who hasn't really, he's hard to get a hold of. But, and he was the CTO at the brain for one year along like 20 years ago.  Anyway, he's created this project called the distributed operating system which works like I did a demo for me and I think a year ago and then it was really pretty impressive and pretty it was sort of pretty like Google draw like Google Docs is pretty without this without all the features of Google Docs but it was but it was an elegant environment. I don't know that obsidian I would call an elegant environment that was better than than emacs for me anyway. This is Pete's massive human intelligence project. Matthew Lowry social knowledge graphs vision, which is exactly the page we were looking at curies. I don't think trail marks is the name he's talking now it's hyper hypergraph. I'm forgetting exactly what the latest rev of the curies projects name is, but this is this is a batch of them and I think I'm missing a couple that we know of in our communities. But for me, I'm trying to figure out for the middle for the for the short term goals of relate. I'm trying to figure out how to throw these people into a comfortable salon together to remix their ideas to start by just sharing notes across the different tools as much as possible. Generally, if possible, but pair wise if need be, and that's a good that's a to me that's just like an interesting starting point, but then to compare notes and say and compare architectures and say wow we seem to have built the same thing only slightly different ways and make a couple choices and maybe unify some projects, I don't know. And out of that to start thinking about these larger framing issues about gosh, we could do this except there's no API or protocol for X to do to do some things we someone somewhere needs to stand that up. And that would be great because then we can say oh, we can create an engineering effort to stand up the protocol and maybe an organization to host it, or find an organization that already has similar protocols. I'm kind of wandering in that space.  So, so the midterm goals. The top part here was basically the skinniest version of this I could think of so what will it take to create a large scale memory that is crowdsourced like Wikipedia, but doesn't necessarily have Wikipedia's model for existence could be any model that allows persistence use multiple memory and context making tools that allows participants to express their own points of view that encourages the crystallizing of those points of view. Not seven billion humans each with their own completely different than separate point of view but rather. Hey what what what Matthew wrote about this part of the business model totally speaks for me. I'm going to point to that and so will 60,000 other people. That's what I mean by crystallizing. So here's a question for me. So crystallizing. I look at. I know this probably puts it on a weird, I'm going to live as an engineer so crystallizing as a solution. What problem is this solving. I know what what Bentley's been working on and trying to help people try to organize argument and put together, you know, whatever the kinds of ideas evidence and stuff that solves a problem that many of us have right right. It's not going to be easy because you know, I already have an opinion don't confuse me with the facts. But this. I look at this is the thing would be for the relate project to say, here is how we're going to. Here's how we're going to relate our learnings discoveries hypotheses, prognostications we're going to use the following tools with the following interconnecting, you know, processes practices. Because I in, in a way this list of all the stuff that's happening is like, someday there's going to be a small number of that really seem to work for which everybody's like okay, give it up I'll write the software like this. Who cares, right, it'll work. I can debug it when it breaks. I'm happy. So, I, I just don't want to mean it's like, when two people have a problem they're more likely to try and find a way to solve it. Right. And if three that's maybe three people like well let's you know instead of doing it by hand, let's make that easier. So here we've solved, you know, the problem that people have when they get together and can't figure out how to agree it's like, you don't know about that one. Yeah, I'm trying to make a dent in this not necessarily solve it in some canonical fashion and some central fashion I think I'm trying to figure out, how do we work toward one another. Okay, so what kind of a, what kind of a knowledge, what kind of a knowledge collection. What's the artifacts are going to be left after relate gets through its medium goals, will there be an artifact that actually can be searched from which things can be. Yeah, yeah. So, so, so the nearest experiment like this that I can see happening quickly is flance and Zagora creates markdown pages on GitHub. And so does the wiki I'm working on and if we export some chunk of my brain out into the same space, we can then start to overlap with each other around the same sorts of nodes and thoughts. That to me is a, is a like a very, very simple use case that's interesting. And from that we can start to get to some of these things. Okay, so I think so that would be a short term staying one of those things up. So what I mean in the short term goals here about taking the relate pioneers and build some prototypes so that that was where I was heading here. So it's sort of what I feel like what's happening with the massive wiki kind of thing. We have some things organized we have some tools that are now, you know, and, and just to keep going to work. So I'm going to summarize on the big picture also. And I need to put in here. A new turn a new item here. Just to keep to keep the big ideas also in view. I think that we're heading helps change how education and journalism and science and governance all work. I'm very disconnected from each other right now but what if educational projects for feeding a shared memory, like Wikipedia but different that journalists were also feeding and feeding off of. And when scientists did research they were putting their work someplace where it was inspectable replicable reusable by other people, and then that turned into books and papers and whatever else. And by rethink media I mean the video I shot about hey PowerPoint is a playlist books or playlists. Let's rethink the constituent parts of all these ideas and how we share them, so that we can bump out of emulating magazines and movies, which is what we're doing right now. So, if we could jump back to the midterm goals. Maybe it'd be interesting to step through one of the examples like that plantia. Because it's the it's like the third and the fourth bullet point that I think we start losing traction maybe. And midterm goals so that these may be more long midterm goals and the first couple maybe the simple thing to do. So we still get into, or I guess, there's some, there's a nuance there that I'm wondering so in theory, if I have, you know, let's let's say, plants, you said plants is data was on GitHub. Yes. Okay, and then let's say, let's say we exported part of your brain to get hub. Yes. So you can go and copy a page from plantia Zagora and put it in your, it, you know, copy it into your GitHub. You could also put a link to that. Right. But then there's no way for people to see both, or to know that they're connected. Well, that's metadata right. That's the thing you were saying earlier about hey where did this where did this data actually originate from who created it using what tool that needs to live as context for the data somehow and there's Nora Bateson's whole warm data contextual data thing. I think those are important factors to include here. Well, it's even it's a little harder than that because if I don't, if I don't know to look at your. If I, if I don't know to look at your GitHub I won't see the metadata for your GitHub to know that you have a copy of flancia unless flancia has a has a pointer. Unless we, unless we decide, we do the best way to do this is to head back for toward canonical representations of the data. And then each of us is layering on whatever metadata or extra stuff we need to make it work. But until and unless that data changes fundamentally, we're always pointing at the same ball of twine. So even if you don't do canonical, if, as long as you have a, a directory and you could have multiple directory services so it's kind of Google for this thing so it's, it's a site that either crawl is crawling both your data and reads the metadata and says oh these are these were the same item and here's a path, or, you know, as you copy out some of the data for your own version you be reported to that. And then you can centralize but multiple centralized search. Yeah, tools. Agreed. Yeah, so that would be the crowd source in the Wikipedia allows participants to use more. So in since we're working on the raw data and not on the visualized. Since we're working on the data and not visualization. And we're kind of, we're hitting that although it'd be nice to have the metadata to say what the tool was a built in. Yeah, or what and and slash or what data, because some of the tools have multiple data formats so. But yeah, some way to say, what's the shape of this data. So allows persist participants express their own point of view if you have a copy of it, and you've edited it. Is that expressing your own point of view. Is that sufficient or is there more needed there. Sorry, so again. So, now the fourth bullet allows participants to express their own point of view. If you make a copy of fancy is one of fancy as items and then you change it that is you expressing your own point of view. Yes. So kind of have that. And then, and that's, and that's totally complimentary to this crystallizing thing because I might agree with once again about 80% of his policy position on HTML. Whoa, is what just happened. I think it looks like their browser just kind of rebooted all the pages. Hold on. My browser just rebooted itself, and everything started playing. What's there we go. Wow, this is fascinating. Theater of the absurd. My browser just rebooted every tab. Wow, okay I exploded something here. Hey, I'm back. I have a question I have to jump off in a few minutes. I wonder, do you all, we need this work really needs connections with the basically the library and information science community. And the citizen science community, especially moving forward to the long to the long term, because there's a lot. A lot of established working knowledge and practice there. Yes, and we're actually connected into some of these communities I mean, you know we know people at the archive we know people in different communities doing stuff. Especially with the data stuff because there's a lot going on in the International Scientific, the International Council of Science on managing scientific data I spent 10 years with a project working on preservation of scientific data so there's, you know there are a lot of efforts and there's a lot like the AGU is a geophysical union, you know the one that that it's got a Virginia members. They have been doing an enormous amount of work on data because they collected everywhere from the ocean and the air and the land and a friend of mine from Woods Hole Oceanographic was their data collection specialist from mostly underwater sensors and shipboard sensors and all that kind of stuff really cool. Anyway, so there are projects it would be nice somehow it's once this if you get some legs under this to see what's happening there because sometimes I get the feeling that some of these technology driven. You know I'm going to start with semantic web and you know hyperlinks it's like you should go take a take a walk and talk to a few people. You know, because Well, I think, I think that a lot of this work is being done in neighboring communities, where some of it's just really deep work that that they we need their experience and wisdom. And if we can, and if we can figure out what the loose scaffolding in the middle looks like, then it's easy. Well, relatively easy to go say hey. This is how that this is how all the wisdom coming out of data collection and science fits into this model for information sharing. And then somebody who knows what they're up to goes and figures out the details of how those things marry up. But I think I think what I'm trying to figure out is how what what is this bare bones skeletal scaffolding look like it's a little bit like this is a terrible analogy. I know how to make internal combustion automobiles, and they kind of know where the transmission goes and how an axle looks, and where the differential goes and whether there is a differential and sometimes the engine is back here and sometimes it's up here. Now we're in the state where we're going electric and for the last decade or two there've been these deep conversations about, do the motors go inside each wheel. Do we have four motors on every card of the other four tires is the chassis flat or shaped. It depends on better, like, all of the questions about all of our old assumptions about how to do stuff around a car and mobility are being rethought and in some cases improved on I think a lot. And that's going to change everything we thought went on top of the wheels of a car, right. And for me it's just going to be pods and now we're going to be able to design pods like will there be a massage pod there'll be a vaping pod there'll be a brainstorming pod there'll be an isolation soundproof pod so that you can have quiet time. And that's really cool. And I think what we're doing here is sort of metaphorically similar in the sense of, man we're trying to sort of rethink, think our way away from internal combustion websites and books and magazines into this new ish space of collaboration. I don't know why I'm here because Doug Engelbart showed it to us in 1968 we still don't have that. But, but how do we bring us about using more or less modern technology. I don't know if that whole riff was was was useful, but for me it was like yeah yeah we're at this moment of possibility and reinvention. And a lot of communities around the world are taking bites out of the different problems involved here. And they're not, and they're not bridged or talking to each other very much. And I think a piece of the longer term relate mission is to create a happy harbor or happy docking dry dock where these pieces can come together. I've been watching too much sci-fi I thought you're going to say docking station so sorry. I got it. I got it right. It's almost dinner time Casa Anderson here so thank you very much this super helpful. Yeah, no thank you all and it's great to see you badly. Good see you again. Happy to stop happy to keep going I don't know what where your head is on this. I want to finish that thought so I think one of the infrastructure technologies. I mean it is kind of like back links, it's just back links is a specific implementation. I'd rather go another way to where there's this sort of infrastructure of a pointer to all these different versions of the same data, or people have their own expressed versions. And then later on we can work on what's the process for crystallizing these. That's a different ways you can do that, but the question we need to answer is how do we want to know when someone makes a copy and make their own viewpoint. How do we know that those two are related and it's slightly more than, yeah the med just having metadata on it when you make copies useful and then telling the person you made a copy so they could put a link to it if they have time. I think it'd be better to have something a little bit more, a less, less manually intervene so having something like a Google that is running over all this data and creating a directory of all these. Is content addressability solved this kind of.  So it'd be nice if. Well, no, because the thing you're doing is a different chunk of data now because you've put your own view on it. It's not just a different view is you're expressing a different opinion with the data not just about the data. But a different version of that data so the data is different so the hashes aren't the same. So somewhere we still need to record that this day is like this data, and it needs to go both ways, not needs to be nice. So V one could be if I make a copy the standard is in my metadata I say I point to the source. But I think to get to that foot fifth or six bullet point you'll need something that aggregates all that metadata and to a few central places that people could search. And, and we're, we're getting into issues like transclusion, like what is proper transclusion, how does that work, but also there are some hacks hackable solutions in the interim like fed wiki basically super replicates everything. So, if I go to your fed wiki and and go start reading a page, my understanding of how it works is it just copies that page over into my fed wiki. Yeah, and says and says thank you very much. And then I'm working with a local copy whatever I do with it. And then I can, if I were to make a change to it I have no idea whether it notifies you and says would you like I have no idea if there's any kind of fork and pull there. To like replicate. What's the word. promiscuously. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And it's kind of a short term way of addressing this issue. I still have the problem that's where it's really hard to see the complete picture of all the people that have their own on this thing, which could be a later thing but the having built building into the standard that you always, when you make a copy always say what the sources which may be what they do and fed wiki. And then, you know, there's a standard thing to communicate back to them to say what it is and then there's this, you know, and then we could build on top of it later on at some point the technology to give you a view of all the different versions. Yeah, so maybe it's just a group of standards that says, you know, I created, here's the data, not the view. Here's the tool I'm using to edit it. Here's the data type within that tool. And you can figure out other tools that could use that data type. And then here's the source of the data, the pointer to the URL that got the data from. And then you kind of have the raw workings of kind of minimum viable product. And in GitHub, I don't understand yet the difference between forking branching and cloning. And I think branching is considerably different from forking. Yeah, so well. And I'm not asking that because I want to understand this is right now, I'm only saying, these are different ways of taking a copy and doing something about it and notifying the originator that that's something interesting might have happened to a piece of something that was created. Yeah. Yeah, forking branching and cloning are all taking a copy. It depends on how far they are away. And whether you have permission to merge in. So you're either then merging or doing a poor request, depending on your permissions. So I'd be happy to go over that with you sometime that's not that hard once you get here. Now, for the most primitive versions of what we're talking about. I don't know that we need to solve this issue of the data synchronization or doing like data synchronization. Well, I think data coherence I don't know what to call it exactly. Yeah, or are you talking about the crystallization part or just no, the crystallization, the crystallization I think I, I think it's a bugaboo in my head I don't know that anybody else cares. And the only the reasons I have for crystallization are a to prevent fragmentation and just replication all over the place I mean, well, actually, one of the goals of the system is to try to not minimize but not and not optimize I don't know what to call it replication of effort. So, so, so how do we prevent lots and lots and lots of copies of exactly the same thing happening all over the place, or even were slightly different things that we don't intended to be different. Exactly. And long ago there was a website I forgot which one, which had a couple of simple things, which took a folksonomy of tags and tried and were quite functional at narrowing the name space for that folks on me. So it was a plural and a singular it would identify that and connect them, you know, back together. A bunch of things like that which made the folks on me much more useful because it wasn't all broken and fragmented it tended back toward some some terms that started getting a lot of energy because one of the cool things about crystallizing or collapsing back in is then you can say, and this note has 66,000 people who have attested that they love this note and are pointing to it as part of their, you know, logic mainstream, that's a good thing. Right. And for me to play this out is, you know, David Reed would go to Congress and say, see this note right here with this behind this policy issue and this policy page. There's 2,336,224 people right this moment, who will vote for it. If you will approve it or put added to the bill you're you're sending in, right. Yeah. And I think that's really powerful as opposed to some lobbyists saying I speak for, you know, lots of people. I think the minimum viable product is a metadata protocol and some patterns. So, like, you post your data at a URL on the internet. And with that. I think that's your original information. Someone else wants to express their own view is that they copy that data posted at their own URL, and then they. Oh, I'm sorry. So in the first one you post your data, you post the app you used and you boast what type of data from that app it is. Someone can copy that, and then they are supposed to have the those the leave that metadata but add to it the source. And maybe the date and time it was taken. And then they can go in and edit it and it would override saying oh now it's done this tool and it's this data format. And so that would that would be, I think that would be minimum. So like you could do this with wiki with massive wiki. If we just on all the markdown pages there was some metadata or another file next to it that says this is using you know for your relate, it would say this is a city and then it's a standard city and which could easily go in YAML in the header and then there's a couple of plugins like data view and a few others that pick up that data and can do stuff with it. It's interesting so so that would be minimum. And then after that you're talking about building services and infrastructure to make that more visible and easier to do. And then you'd have apps that are compliant so if I wanted to make a new version of blogger. I would have it be a web editor that anyone go on and do it but in the end. Anyone can can put md md at the end of it they'd see the markdown they'd see the tool it was edited and blogger 2020. And then they could copy the data but the source back. And it would, you'd kind of have all these benefits. Makes sense. One quick thing just to kind of completely derail you from that thought on the relate wiki the tiles. One of the things about having like a little directory of things is that often the name for me isn't enough to be useful and then I click through to see what they are. Right. So a single sentence explanation of kind of what it is would be helpful and but that wouldn't look really good probably in the table format you have. Right. I was trying to figure out what I would suggest and I think one of the things I would suggest would be a. I don't know for this. Okay, would be. I don't know if you'd like this or not but have one row with all the columns in it and then a bottom merged cell that has like a description and then a spacer so then it's more like cards. No, it's just bros. Now, I don't know how the TV tables work very well but I'm a, I'm hoping that there's some reasonable word wrap and stuff like that so they're, the primitive answer is like just do a 10 word description of each project that fits in a cell and in the table. Yeah, I mean you're already getting bad rapping on that right. Yeah, shed. Yeah, that's only visible on this page I think it I think it's prettier when it prints to a web page. And until you view it on your phone. And then you get the exact same thing because they I think they both use the same. Gotcha. The same renderer ideas date tables are just hard on small screens. Yeah, okay. So, so there's probably a need for a different. So what would be need is to have, I don't know how useful this would be but it'd be need if that was data, and then when it was on the wiki site, it would say, Oh, this is a table, let's make these, you know, let's add a little JavaScript to make the column sort of a card view and, you know, instead of the table view, and give features like that, that that would work with any table. That's, yeah. And I'm correct me if I'm saying something that's not similar to what you just said but there could be metadata in the mean brain brain page the brain brain phase page etc etc that has a full text description. And then this table could just be a little app that pull that says hey, go pull these fields from each of, from any, go find any markdown page on this directory that has metadata that says it's a tile, and then sort them by this field and then pull these fields in and display them as cards. Yeah, I mean, even if the standard for wiki was that if you hovered over a link, it would, it would give you the, the text, longer text, the old text link, and then if you hovered over the mean brain one then you'd see what it, what it is. Gotcha. So, so, there's a lot of ways to do it. All of this partly to say that you're not a fan of clicking through to read what the thing is you would like it to be summarized up here. Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is yeah this, well this table is completely useless to me. Without that one little piece of information. If I don't know what mean brain is the name doesn't mean anything to me. I have to click through each one and I'm like way too lazy to do that. So I was thinking for like bringing McBrain face, which is an exact, what's that really is meant to be as an example open source visualizer of mean brain so it's not meant to be useful it's just a demo. Demo visualizer of mean brain would probably be the smallest like those four words that that would be useful, but no oh that's a demo I can go click on it learn if I know the code then I can adapt it or template. I don't know which column you'd want to put that in. Yeah. And there's also. And I don't know if you could put icons on there for the status instead of the words. I guess you could do either ASCII or emojis. So for which thing for like the finished and the proposed if you want to make a make a check mark for the finished and light bulb for the proposed. Good thought. Let me see if I can. So I just put in a new column. Yeah, description or something. Yeah. Yeah.  What is it. I guess I'd say an API for Jerry's brain. Let's see if that even let's see if that's even pretty. That's not terrible. Okay. Yeah, that's just not terrible. Okay. And we can replace the these guys the finished and proposed with icons that'd be good.  Yeah, tables are not. Yeah, not pretty. So much easier in a spreadsheet. I mean, you know, this could be a spreadsheet or an air table embedded and I get in a, in a full with the way editor in this. Yeah, I wanted to know for time so it'll just be like you're editing it. Yeah. But thank you that's helpful. Cool. All right well it was interesting talk. Thank you very much. Very fun. We'll keep exploring and see where we can get it.  Yeah, you're at the kind of higher meta level. I'm a specific use case. And what I'm trying to figure out and this is why my brain hurts is what is the largest framing for a general purpose scaffolding that lets gully bot and other things you're working on fit elegantly next to everything else that's going on. Yeah, yeah so finding a way that I could post the gully bot data in a data format. And then put those pointers on it that'd be an interesting little experiment but you got to figure out the granularity level because it's like, I have a debate. Do I want to post the individual claims separately, or the whole debate and then how do they know. So yeah, gotta figure it out. Yes, it's confusing but I'll be thinking about that on on my project and sweet. I think of anything sweet. I'll see you in the next time.