flancian/garden
0
0
Fork 0
mirror of https://github.com/flancian/garden.git synced 2026-08-07 23:16:21 +00:00
Code Issues Packages Projects Releases Wiki Activity
Files
1183c8db1e1562714c6025dd3272c52c42615c58
garden/agora pkg chapter.md
T
flancian 1183c8db1e autopushed
2022-08-22 20:42:31 +02:00

36 KiB
Raw Blame History

Introduction

In this chapter we describe Agora, a social protocol and associated platform hypothetically enabling a self-governing community to provision a sustainable knowledge commons for the public good.

The Agora as described in this article is just an Agora, meaning it is just one possible implementation of the principles delineated here. Because the Agora-defining Agora protocol tries to build on common principles1 and incorporate conventions already in use at the time of writing, you will likely find that other Agoras already exist -- if not by name, then in spirit.

A core aspect of this Agora is that its constituent distributed knowledge graph can be easily bootstrapped on a well-defined freely-available subset of the internet. The provided reference Agora can already integrate crowdsourced sets of personal knowledge graphs, digital gardens, wikis and feeds (including social), generalizing to arbitrary repositories. All data sources are retrieved and integrated using free software, while still supporting production and editing with arbitrary tools of the users' choice.

As hinted already, the Agora has multiple facets which we will try to explore throughout this article:

We will then cover experiments and potential applications in the academic, social and political domains assuming the availability and widespread adoption of this or some other free knowledge commons. This is done in the form of a series of short reports and exploratory essays.

Background

  • #meta TODO: this Agora protocol block is a MARKER for 'edited (up to?) around here in the last pass', move/delete as needed.

The Agora can be defined in a nutshell as a subset of the internet4 used consciously towards a particular purpose. As mentioned previously, it can also be seen as both a platform and a protocol for provisioning and maintaining a knowledge commons. Because of both this wide definition and the wide applicability of the principles detailed in this article, the background required to put this effort in context is ample and fuzzily defined at the edges.

Terminology

This project is of very large scope and might make use of non standard terminology. To ease understanding, here we provide a short summary of key terms to follow.

  • Agora: a protocol, a platform, a commons. The noosphere. Internet as a tool held right.
  • Graph: the heart of the Agora. A distributed knowledge graph in particular, both explicitly and implicitly containing a variety of social graphs.
  • Node: a vertex in the knowledge graph. Maps to an entity description encoded in a wikilink or #hashtag. Maps to a mental context in an Agora user.
  • Subnode: a resource contributed by a user which the Agora will provision when queried for a variety of Node contexts. A node is a collection of subnodes.
  • Link: an annotated edge in the knowledge graph. A relationship or connection between concepts or contexts, optionally annotated. Technically you can think of it as tuple of nodes linking to each other, or more generally a set or sequence of nodes related to each other via a composite relationship (e.g. a link with annotations). The later results in a hypergraph which is what an Agora generally implements.
  • Garden: a repository of resources maintained by a user over time. (Optionally entity mapped) information contributed by a user diachronically.
  • Feed: a sequence of points in time with pointers to objects. Interesting resources as positioned in a timeline. A core Web technology that an Agora can both consume and provide.
  • Stoa: a repository of resources maintained by a group over time.
  • Bridge: a device or process connecting contexts, applying to both nodes and repositories.
  • Siphon: a bridge which exploits a gradient.
  • Commons: a social organism or social system provisioned and maintained by a community of practice for the common good. As per Elinor Ostrom, Silke Helfrich, David Bollier, etc.

Principles

This section details goals and values as they relate to the definition of an Agora on a high level.

The Agora as a project is positioned at the intersection of the fields of commoning, patterning and knowledge management.

  • The Agora is inspired by the pioneering work of Elinor Ostrom and others in the study of well functioning commons, which resulted in dispelling the once dominant position that commons must be taken over by centralized agents to prevent the so called Tragedy of the Commons.

It is also clearly inspired by the work of pioneers of tools for thinking and the Web.

It builds on top of the open web, wiki culture and the social movements enabled by them.

It is also a project with a pragmatic bent directed towards world improvement and the planning and peaceful enactment of global reform.

Praxis

The Agora is a platform for shared praxis based on a set of public intents, which include declarations of goals and values.

An Agora tries to meet the user where they are. As a service in the internet, you don't sign up to an Agora: you sign in. Albeit the reference Agora is based firmly on web 1 principles and core web protocols and architectural styles like http, rdf and rest, it also includes partial implementation of social protocols like activitypub which affords it a basic level of integration with the Fediverse and Twitter[^twitter].

The Agora provisions an overlay (demo at https://anagora.org) querying an interlay (go/agora) integrating repositories as underlay.

With this tool the Agora community can embark on shared projects. The author, as one member of the agora community, would like to propose (offer) a series of projects as a collection of public intents.

Let us use Agora Protocol if you may.

Agora Protocol

This section describes a protocol for publicly defining sets of conventions and intents that can be said to define an Agora. An Agora is a public space that defines itself as such and follows an explicit variation of the Agora Protocol.

In text format, Agora Protocol is a series of typographical conventions that allow users to link and annotate resources regardless of the medium. Annotating here stands for encoding metadata and personal meaning in resources in a way conducive to be later decoded in an Agora-like context.

If you are reading this book, you probably know Agora Protocol even before reading about it; it is meant to reflect and build on existing practices in the personal knowledge management space, like:

  • #Tags designate entities as related to the annotated resource.
    • #PascalCase may be used to encode sentences.
  • Wikilinks designate entities as related to the annotated resource.
    • Wikilinks may be preferred when trying to encode sentences a particular typographical realization, as they seamlessly contain lossless unicode strings.

On a pragmatic level:

  • Optimistic linking is encouraged.
    • Links that lead nowhere (currently) are encouraged.
      • In an Agora, the place they lead to by default includes resources written by others.
  • Outlines or Agora trees, as encoded by nested lists such as this one, might be parsed by default as declaring useful patterns5 .

When interpreting the above and extensions, an Agora is liberal in what it accepts and when in doubt tries to default to being extra useful to the user -- meaning it is optimistic in association and surfaces all resources that have a claim to be associated with the context being served. For example: #CamelCase will be provided in all contexts matching camel case and all known variations, and this relationship is symmetric by default, in the sense that the user might provide either at write time and be later served matching resources in either context.

To put it simply, an Agora defines equivalence classes optimistically with good intention. Later we will discuss the hypothesis that this is an optimal default policy for a social platform.

Note that outlines plus linking seem sufficient to encode thoughts and structure of arbitrary complexity in a human readable way6 . In the opinion of the author this seems sufficient to encode a hypergraph in a human friendly way, which might do away with the need for programmatically generated block references7 . See Technical Specifications below for more.

Next we describe how Agora Protocol can help provision an Agora Platform which integrates pro-socially with the wider internet ecosystem, and how a community could use both to run experiments on distributed thought.

Agora Platform

Federation

Individual Agora instances, initially provisioned and maintained by like-minded groups in a decentralized (Fediverse compatible) model, but tending towards a fully distributed model, are expected to federate in a greater Agora network8 .

An Agora tries to be a repository of patterns in the tradition of Christopher Alexander, Ward Cunningham, David Bollier, Silke Helfrich and Murray Bookchin.

  • #meta TODO: this Agora protocol block is a MARK for 'did new writing around here in the last pass', move/delete as needed.

The Agora network is built on a federated protocol the aim of reducing friction to cross-tool cooperation and maximizing the constructiveness of forks.

Take the case in which two groups might temporarily diverge in their views to want to run separate Agoras. Ideally their instances should be able to continue to cooperate on problems and solutions for which there is enough values/ideological alignment. Persistent best effort cooperation as a default contract also maximizes the chance of re-convergence leading to a merge.

Bridges

TODO: Define bridges here.

Siphons

A siphon can be seen as a bridge across which flow can take place after some initial effort, with cost-benefit ideally following a Pareto-like distribution.

Agora Commons

A commons consists, at a minimum9 , of:

TODO: describe an Agora's root repository.

Intents

The author proposes we use an Agora to define and extend Agora Protocol as a project in the commons.

These are sample intents of the author. They can be optionally endorsed by arbitrary users of an Agora.

Literate programming

Intents in Agora protocol can be interspersed in long form writing, in which case they can act as human-readable metadata.

Tree structures with wikilinks are assumed by an Agora to carry Agora protocol by default, and may be elided or hidden when performing human-readable format conversions through Agora sync.

Experiments

Go links

Go links provide an interest base case to study in the field of provisioning and (pro socially) exploiting10 a knowledge commons. Put simply, go links are named social bookmarks -- strings of text (usually slugged, but not necessarily) associated with URLs by users in a community of practice.

Go links are a cognitive tool which was developed in Silicon Valley corporations and has the potential to spread and provide utility at internet scale. As cognitive artifacts they have a meaningful complementary component, which makes them interesting as a case study of Agora RFCs regardless of primary utility of application.

The primary utility, though, is high. In a go links rich environment, users can depend on other users to have defined canonical links for named entities; that is, collections of specially relevant resources to the terms at hand, as shared in a commons.

  • Go links provide an individual function.
    • They allow the user to associate a (usually short) string with a resource of interest, and then recall it from any computing with network access with a short deterministic flow.
    • At companies supporting go links, typing go/ in the browser address bar is usually sufficient to be redirected seamlessly to the target resource.
  • Go links provide a social function at low or no additional cost.
    • The trivial extension case for them is social bookmarking; even with invidivuals (not groups) claiming go link space recall of links spreads through a community of practice.
    • Sharing documents becomes simpler by definition in a community of practice that is go links aware. Instead of locating a resource and invoking a sharing flow to share, users are able to say to each other 'go thisdoc' (meaning either go/thisdoc or go/this-doc by convention), effectively transferring a URL in spoken word very efficiently, depending only on a previously understood mechanism to resolve such links (at a well known point, ideally a schelling point).

Pull

Push

Node Club

Applications

This section explores possible further applications in the social and knowledge spaces in the form of a series of short essays.

Building meaning together through federation and Agora RFCs

Collaborative world building

  • We seek to provision and maintain a distributed knowledge graph tailored specifically to the goal of solving problems: those of its users and society at large.
  • Its users, as a cooperative group, are promped to take a naive but rational and constructive approach to problem solving by default:
    • For each problem in the set P of all problems:
      • Describe it as thoroughly as possible.
      • Maintain a set of known and supported possible solutions, S(P).
    • For each solution in S(P):
      • Describe it thoroughly as an algorithm, a dependency graph or both.
      • Maintain a set of resources (people, time, attention, wealth) needed to implement it, R(S(P)).
    • Individual users can also declare their views on the state of the world explicitly: they define which subsets of P, S and R they agree with, in the sense that they believe they are feasible, true, interesting.
      • Users that agree on their defined subsets can then efficiently collaborate on solutions as they become available by pooling of resources.
  • Assuming the existence of such a graph we apply some good old recursivity and bootstrap an Agora with the problem of building itself.
    • That is, we are tasked with solving the problem of building a system that allows participating users and entities to collaborate optimally in the face of adversity (such as biases and irrationality, but perhaps assuming good intent).

Node Club

Thank you to neil and the agora community!

Educational technology

Solving coordination problems

Flow problems

  • #pull liquid democracy network flow
  • We seek to bootstrap a Universal Basic Income experiment using an Agora with a set of simple rules:
    • If you consider yourself under-privileged, you sign up to receive an income.
    • If you consider yourself over-privileged, you sign up to donate an income.
    • Incomes are recurring donations for a set number of months.
  • Optional virality rule: the person receiving the income should elect to forward e.g. 10% of the sum received to someone less privileged than them.
    • The virality rule both pushes network growth and constructively exploits wealth inequality and asymmetry of information: an under-privileged person is closer in the world to a more severely under-privileged person than the initial donor, so can more efficiently allocate the resources. This also empowers under-privileged people to also make ethical decisions.
  • Flancia Collective runs experiments in this field using an Agora.

Market regulation

A knowledge commons may be conducive to tackling the issue of regulating markets responsibly. A commons can essentially embed a federated network of ethical markets; the community of commoners can agree on the definition of such network and the rules which they which to enforce on transactions through the interface.

Technical specifications

Agora Protocol demo

The blocks that follow, and others in the current text in the same console typeface, are a self-documenting demonstration of text based Agora Protocol.

  • #push agora protocol
    • (Push can be used for writing child blocks to a remote context, as if broadcasting to a pubsub topic.)
    • a protocol.
      • Based on lightweight conventions conducive to knowledge federation of supported data formats as described below.
      • plain text as layer 0 (bootstrapping).
        • What the literate world already runs on: just plain old human language in full unicode.
        • Note that indented bulleted lists are efficient while encoding trees, heterarchies.
      • wikilinks, #hashtags and other link conventions and annotation as part of layer 1.
      • Layer 2 being defined, the same as refinements to other layers, as extensions.
        • If you are a member of an Agora, you can propose extensions to Agora Protocol by contributing to Agora RFCs.
        • This should be sufficient to bootstrap a governance layer defined by each Agora.
        • #pull agora rfcs
        • (Pull instructs an Agora to incorporate a remote context into the current context, e.g. transclude or provision below.)

Data format

  • Layer 0: plain text.
    • Plain text is ubiquituous.
    • It is not only a common standard for all tools in the knowledge space, which simplifies interoperability; it is a common standard for thought as shown by thousands of years of preserved culture.
    • It can trivially encode outlines.
      • It can be made to encode trees, like in this example.
      • Indented bulleted lists designate a useful heterarchy.
    • It generalizes to binary data.
      • It can be made to encode arbitrary data via application of uuencode or other encoding conventions.
  • Layer 1: markup and conventions for cross-referencing and linking.
    • Markdown, org mode, HTML or other rich markups building on top of plain text belong to this layer.
    • wikilinks and #hashtags seem like sensible cross-format extensions for semantic linking.
    • Markdown plus wikilinks is the default Agora layer 1 format.
    • More generally, this is an inline metadata layer. The above are just relatively unobstrusive generally available implicit standards that inline well.
  • Layer 3: JSON, EDN, RDF, protobufs.
    • In general, data exchange formats.
    • The Agora reference implementation currently provides JSON and RDF endpoints.

Graph definition

The Agora knowledge graph can be defined as a hypergraph A with a set of k nodes N (entities an Agora knows about) integrated out of subnodes SN_0 .. SN_k, each containing subedges SE_0 .. SE_k, aggregating into edges E_0 .. E_k (semantic links between entities inferred from known subnodes). Edges are annotated implicitly by link context and explicitly via the use of agora protocol affordances, which is extensible and tries to build on existing conventions in the personal knowledge management space.

An Agora differs from other projects in the personal knowledge space in a few ways: whereas a personal knowledge graph usually contains resources authored or collected by a single person, and a wiki usually contains resources produced by a group, an Agora contains, integrates and interlinks both personal and group resources. Whereas links in a personal knowledge graph or wiki usually have a single target, Agora links fan out by default and can be thought of as queries mapping to sets of resources. This is consistent with a general design principle of facilitating storage and retrieval of entity-mapped information with a view toward removing friction from agreement and cooperation.

Building on these general principles and a free software11 reference implementation of the underlying protocols and data, we model and detail how to implement a distributed system that provisions social knowledge services ethically and sustainably with a focus on upholding data sovereignty principles. We then analyze some of the potential applications of such a system. Finally, we shortly explore future work and implications assuming that the Agora network is run as a confederated system for the public good.

  • Being built around a knowledge graph, an Agora can be defined as a set of vertices or nodes N (each mapping to an entity in a knowledge base) and edges E (each mapping to a relationship between entities, annotated by context).
    • An Agora node is a collection; it contains the set of all known resources about (or related to) the entity described by the node id, defaulting to its name as an arbitrary length unicode string.
      • (But potentially overridden or extended with provided metadata and annotations.)
      • In this paper each such resource attached to node N is known as a subnode N_s.
    • Note that because links can be annotated by context (as they can be considered to be by nearby #tags and wikilinks), an Agora graph can be said to be a hypergraph 12 .

Reference implementation

  • This section covers details on the work-in-progress reference software implementation built on the principles described above, developed as free software and run as public service.
  • The provided reference Agora is designed to be a minimum viable cooperative platform that integrates and complements personal knowledge graphs in particular and, more generally, any writing done with a social stance.
  • Its guiding architectural principle being to build as much as possible on already existing conventions common to as many tools and platforms as it is possible with the aim to achieve maximal inclusivity and diversity.

Here we cover some details of the provided free and open source reference Agora which provides a minimum viable implementation of the underlay, interlay, and overlay components of a distributed knowledge graph13 .

  • The reference Agora stands out from other projects in the knowledge graph space in a few ways:
    • Whereas links in a personal knowledge graph or wiki usually have a single target (a particular note or page), Agora links fan out by default; targets can be thought of collections of resources.
    • While a personal knowledge graph usually contains resources and links authored or collected by a single person, and a wiki usually contains resources provisioned by a group in (a priori) a shared voice, an Agora tries to integrate and interlink both personal and group resources while preserving distinct voices14 .
    • As of the time of writing, some personal knowledge graph tools are exploring collaborative editing in format- and platform-specific ways. In contrast to this, the reference Agora described in this chapter tries to be tool, format and platform agnostic to maximize interoperability and data exchange and provide utility to users of many tools and systems. This is achieved by targeting a minimum viable set of cross-tool conventions.

Architecture

agora architecture

  • The reference Agora is a simple distributed architecture based on off the shelf components.
    • agora root is a git repository containing the Agora definition, meaning a base contract which sets the tone and high level goals of the Agora, and a list of data sources to be recurringly integrated.
    • agora bridge is a git repository containing connectors and importers for supported data sources.
      • User controlled git repositories are the default data source.
    • agora server provides a UI supporting querying and composition and json, rss, rdf endpoints.

Data ownership model

The Agora platform, although strictly rooted in web 1 principles in its reference implementation as of the time of writing, is based on a strictly distributed model: by default users are entities that inform an Agora of repositories they want to contribute to the commons. As such, an Agora is trivially distributed in the sense that all data required to bootstrap it is hosted independently by users at independent locations15 .

  • Users can contribute repositories to an Agora.
    • To do so, they publish their resources to a repository they control and then they let an Agora know of their intention to integrate, a desired username and their agreement with an Agora's contract.
    • git repositories are the default data source, with other repository providers (http, ipfs, drive, dropbox) to follow.
  • Users can contribute individual resources to an Agora.
    • As of the time of writing they can interact with an Agora system account (i.e. bot) in supported platforms like twitter and mastodon while indicating nodes they want to attach to using a Layer 1 convention.
    • (Soon they will be able to submit this information directly on the agora server provided interface.)
  • Whenever a user signals opt in to remote writing (bridging, siphoning, cross posting), an Agora does its best to guarantee user data ownership.
    • By default, an Agora will not store data for the user if it the user has not signaled a strong enough intent to write full data. Instead, an Agora will try to link to resources only in matching contexts, allowing users to recover resources without meddling in data management (see go links study case).
    • Whenever it does write data, an Agora will try to provision a separate repository per user and try to turn data management into a user's concern at the user's earliest convenience.
      • To put it another way, an Agora actively tries actively to own no data, preferring instead to act as a temporary data steward of the users' repositories.
      • When an Agora sets up a repository for the user, as in the case in which the user requests to write without having previously indicated their repositories, the Agora will try to set up repositories in such a way that turn-key full access can then be given over to the user on demand.
      • Inasmuch the user depends on services associated with an Agora for repository hosting, an Agora tries to trees repositories as instances of pods in the Solid16 sense.

Endpoints

This section triers to summarize the endpoints that Agora server provides and plans to provide.

Agoras can define mappings from these to URL schemes generalizing to isomorphic REST-like APIs using agora.yaml17 .

Entity resolution

  • GET / -> by default the same as /node/, might be overridden with a more particularly useful context
  • GET /node/ -> entity resolution, node can be percent-encoded
  • GET /nodes -> lists known entities in canonical form
  • GET /@ -> provides details about a user and the subnodes in their repositories.
  • GET /users -> lists users
  • GET /search?q= -> generally redirects to /node/?q= with node being a maximally useful context while preserving fidelity with the percent-encoded query string

Feeds

  • GET /feed/@
  • GET /feed/
  • GET /feed/journals
  • GET /feed/journals/@
  • …

Actions

  • GET /go/
  • GET /go//
  • …

References

Thanks and farewell

The author would like to thank Flancia Collective, the Agora community, and the Fellowship of the Link: for your inspiration, interest, guidance.

To my friends: for your ongoing love and support.

To you: for reading.

To all the Agora builders and maintainers through history, including those of the motivating historical poleis and those who will build Agoras for the peaceful cities and countries of the future.

Finally, some friendly parting words: if you don't like this Agora, rest assured that's perfectly alright -- it is early stage. The Agora of Flancia is open source; these projects have Apache and Creative Commons licenses respectively. Please consider improving them!

  1. both commonsense and related to instances of commoning. ↩︎

  2. because we require from would-be Agora contributors only that they indicate where to source their notes, and we are committed to supporting all useful formats, we hope to achieve maximal inclusivity. We believe this is important for the health of the commons. ↩︎

  3. we believe diverse groups and communities are healthier, smarter, safer, stronger. ↩︎

  4. Or Web? See literature for most common term, likely web due to ties to the semantic web if nothing else. ↩︎

  5. An Agora is a repository of patterns and its design owes a lot to Christopher Alexander, Ward Cunningham, David Bollier, Silke Helfrich and the commoning community. ↩︎

  6. indentation is sufficient ↩︎

  7. Hypothesis: Block References are suboptimal as cognitive devices due to being competitive, whereas user generated IDs and encoded structure can be complementary. ↩︎

  8. An Agora is part of the Fediverse. ↩︎

  9. https://logicmag.io/commons/singular-plural/ ↩︎

  10. TODO: there's probably a better term for this in Free, Fair and Alive. ↩︎

  11. The provided reference Agora tries to remain tool, format and platform agnostic, building on general conventions common to many tools and platforms in the knowledge space for ease of integration and maximal inclusivity2 and diversity3 . ↩︎

  12. "Stephen Wolfram likes them." -- see for example https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/. ↩︎

  13. https://www.knowledgefutures.org/ ↩︎

  14. it is an expression of the pattern chorus of voices. ↩︎

  15. as of the time of writing, GitHub is the most popular git host, but not by much (TODO: percentage goes here). This is likely suboptimal as it undermines the claim of the resulting knowledge commons of being truly distributed, and can be seen as an instance of the (anti-)pattern Anti Disintermediation. ↩︎

  16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_project) ↩︎

  17. or TOML? ↩︎

Reference in New Issue View Git Blame Copy Permalink