Data is something given, some established fact. Open data are facts established by anyone who cares to participate in a given network. When we can establish facts which are shared by more people we can create more value, as value is a function of trust in that which is given. This is why open data matters: if we can develop mechanisms to share data between more people, we can establish more valuable truths. Assigning value to shared truths is the surest way to counteract misinformation.

In order to explore these claims, we will begin with agalmics, knowledge repositories, and networked knowledge artifacts. This first session will be largely historical and will take the form of a presentation and group discussion. There will be no technical details presented: Kernel always starts with why so that we can explore the various hows with greater clarity and honesty.

Data is something given, which makes hoarding it oxymoronic. This explains how proprietary data so quickly becomes toxic, and is often as costly to protect as it is to use to one’s own advantage. After all, static gifts becoming toxic is a feature of how gifts work.

This is not to say that open data must only be developed in the context of gift economies: it is simply to note that data is most effective and meaningful when it can be shared. Once we notice this fact, we can arrange all manner of relationships premised upon it, which is primarily what the study of agalmics is about. How are we to best represent the value of non-scarce goods such that we can produce and distribute them in reciprocally enriching ways?

In order to explore this question, let’s consider some properties of agalmics, which tend to be:

These properties come from the p2p foundation’s wiki and so are, in their appearance here, an example of how knowledge goods may be transferred and, by learned transformation, accrue value. In particular, let’s look again at the notion of a “transfinite” good, which means - according to the foundation - that I can give you one without appreciably diminishing my supply. Notice the inertia of language here: we are still talking about “one” and “my supply”. If this is the linguistic frame we apply, it is very difficult to imagine practical ways to apply this to any kind of modern financial marketplace.

However, if we define transfinite goods as those which I can transact without appreciably diminishing the value for which I am responsible, then we can begin to imagine how to code that in contracts which are executed without the threat of violence. The two primary means by which we may do this are:

The ability to establish any given fact via participation in a network produces agalmic goods like knowledge. This is why participation matters: your interaction with any datum imbues it with both structure and context; that is, participation engenders useful knowledge. The more diverse the participants and the more varied the nature of participation, the more uses there will be for any knowledge we establish collectively.

In particular, ensuring that anyone can participate is one aspect of what makes any repository of shared knowledge dynamic. This does not mean there are no rules for participation, simply that there are no rulers who can decide arbitrarily whether the conditions for contribution have been met. The conditions for contribution are common knowledge and are the means by which the collective maintains consensus. For emphasis, these conditions are not what we agree on: they are what we take as given so that we can maintain consensus.

Agalmia built upon this recursive foundation - a given set of common rules which allow us to maintain consensus about which data (in which order) we may use to establish shared state - help us reimagine how openness relates to dynamic knowledge repositories.

DKRs were developed by Doug Engelbart and are closely linked to his idea of CoDIAK, or the concurrent development, integration, and application of knowledge. He defined a dynamic knowledge repository as a living, breathing, rapidly evolving repository of all the stuff accumulating moment to moment throughout the life of a project or pursuit.

Many people have tried to implement his vision in many different ways, with varying degrees of success (nor was it a new vision in his own time: DKRs are the updated form of the Universal Book or the Mundaneum). There is, however, an almost impossible tension in this kind of work: make the conditions for contribution too closed and the repository dies, most often from attention decay, over-specialization, or abuse of power; make contributions too open and it soon becomes illegible and impossible to navigate meaningfully.

If we add economic incentives to the mix, we can ensure that contributing has some cost associated with it, therefore letting a “knowledge market” find the dynamic middle ground between cost and number of contributors, while simultaneously allowing us to route value through how information is curated and to the curators; those brave trailblazers of our shared record. While this is exciting, it is still not enough, because knowledge repositories are not economies; they are agalmia. This is a critical point, because creating structures where there is a cost to contribute is an anti-intuitive way to solve the problem unless you are also the one designing the tokens which represent and carry that cost through any transaction.

Much like we noticed the way that the p2p foundation defined transfinite goods within the frame of single objects and “my supply”, we can recognise that dynamic knowledge repositories are not singular, nor are they ownable: they are networked and they are open. Nevertheless, unlike the data on which they are founded, knowledge implies interpretative use, so they must be cared for by stewards (where “care” implies continuous learning more than plain upkeep).

Having many different repositories is also required to make consultation truly useful and meaningful, because where a repository exists - and the way it relates to those with which it is networked - supplies critical context that cannot be automated. Vannevar Bush made the point that creative thinking revolves around careful selection and intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes employed. Human intuition has almost entirely to do with the way things relate, which is why the problem of consultation cannot be solved with a single book, index system, or repository. It can only be approached through a web of knowing relationships, the shape of which can inform any response to a searcher such that they may better consult humanity’s collective knowledge and participate in its ongoing collection and curation.

Of course, many big data machines have already implemented some version of this. Google indexes the world’s knowledge quite well. However, the way it encourages consultation and represents the results of any search is tainted by artificial incentives. The kind of collective intelligence augmentation that Bush and Engelbart and Otlet and Ramsay were interested in is as much art as it is science, and so it is to art that we must turn to explore not just the shape of relationships between repositories in a network, but the form and pattern within each repository that makes it open in an ethical sense in addition to the open agalmia described above.

The state of the art is not actually dynamic knowledge repositories; it is community gardens. A garden is vital; it responds to its environment; it lives and it dies; it will grow in many different places, and never in the same way; it serves many different people in many different ways; it fulfills both aesthetic and utilitarian functions; it grows by virtue of being pruned and cleared; proper care requires ecological intelligence and cultivated awareness.

Both artists and gardeners will tell you that dynamism is not just a function of flexibility, but of form. We’re not looking for artificial intelligence, but for the intelligent artifices which can best augment natural growth/decay by virtue of the care with which they respond to the environment. Consider Kernel: it is the structure of the learning track and how it relates to an open source repository which has made it flexible enough to adapt to different contributions in many different forms. Our flower bed is seeded with horizontal, honest, humble conversations premised on listening, and watered by various customs and rituals like beginning each gathering with music and gratitude.

Or consider something more explicitly artistic, like Verses’ Declaration of Interdependence, which creates ongoing forks of the document as a visceral means of enacting its contents. The repository of interdependent insights is itself a small network of forking documents stored permanently on Arweave. Finally, consider all five blue books. These were intentionally built as structures which grow through your browser and alter your algorithms. As they were made, each one presented a new interface through which to interpret the ones prior to it, culminating in the “skeleton key” links which present entirely new desire paths through the previous books.

Seen through the lens of artful gardening and gathering, we can notice that explicit coordination is less important than collective ecological intelligence in which individuals are free to make the modifications they see as most fit while recognising always that they partake of the nourishment grown in the shared spaces they modify. Sometimes a well-placed, well-timed link in a poem which reflects a different aspect of another’s work is all the collaboration that is necessary.

Anything more might impose upon others who you see as doing something similar a framework that will not actually allow their work, or your own, to flourish in its proper season. Any mechanism which promotes open data will likely not require explicit coordination (which is inevitably dogmatic), but stigmergy: indirect coordination mediated by environmental modifications.

Importantly, we don't need some kind of new public goods dogma around which everyone coordinates: we need trails laid by courageous and careful people which we can use to inspire ever better questions, more fruitful searching, more responsive consultation. The goal of all this searching is as it has always been: friendship, fraternity, peace.

In addition to th video below, you can also find the slides here.