it's that proclaimin' hour: the more I learn about the lineage of each, the more I think a blending of the open science, semweb/linked data, and piracy communities would be an extremely healthy thing for the human knowledge ecosystem. but I still don't know much much they talk rn
the semweb/ld people are maybe a decade ahead of the open science people on the cultural burnout from purity/overpromising vs. tooling to make it real problem. the piracy people are maybe 15y ahead on incentive systems for uploading data and decentralized curation of metadata
if academia was as nimble as infosec, it would pick off the admins, sysops, and moderators of private BitTorrent trackers: they built what we're trying to build a decade ago and did it at the scale of the entirety of human culture, not just one scientific subdiscipline.
the semweb/ld people are probably present in many of the same institutions that the scientists are, but we don't talk to them because we have no idea what kind of incredible work is being done in the libraries of our universities.
scientists interested in the always-scattered notion of "openness" serve as a profoundly underexplored bed of technological development, user testing, and parallel thought about provenance for the lineage of semweb/ld developers currently taking refuge in corporate world.
these are just technical communities and communities of practice. if we were to also collaborate with the information infrastructure studies and STS researchers, we might stand a real chance of turning the rudder away from the totalization of the corporate knowledge economy.
("just" =/= "lesser than" here^^. saying we should work with the people who study how digital infrastructure is developed as we develop digital infrastructure if we want it to work.)
I think we should be humbled as we build databases with dozens, hundreds, and thousands of datasets by the fact that piracy communities built infra for hundreds of millions of datasets for pretty close to zero dollars. when they get shut down, the data is restored in a few weeks.
from analyzing the incentive structures of these systems we might reframe development priorities for scientific infrastructure around systems for developing sustained digital communities with p2p backbones and expressive UI; instead of rigid specs and renting servers
know how much**
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