"Hitting “publish” on this, my first blog post on Knowledge4Policy (K4P), is a special moment for me. I’ve helped create a few online communities for the European Commission (I launched my first in February 2002, so I just missed that particular anniversary), but K4P may be the most important."

To everyone who's ever asked "what's that poster to your left of your desk?", I bring you UsefulCharts' Timeline of World History, which came embedded in their eponymous book, received last Christmas."covering 3300 BCE - present... displays all the major empires, kingdoms, and civilizations throughout history in a sid…

Like most guides, this one wrongly includes 'blogs' in web1.0, with "people creating and posting their own content" happening later, in an era dominated by big companies. It's as if bloggers weren't posting content before 2005.“the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens... including decentr…

"NFT stands for nonfungible token. But what does it actually mean? an uncopyable digital asset linked to a JPEG, which can be used to mark that particular copy of the JPEG as the “real” one... like the certificate of authenticity you might get if you bought an expensive sculpture. community or pfp (profile picture) NFTs... a series of uniqu…

"for nearly a decade... my own views have whipsawed between extreme skepticism and cautious optimism. These days... a crypto moderate... much of the crypto market consists of overvalued, overhyped and possibly fraudulent assets ... [but] it isn’t all a cynical money-grab, and that there are things of actual substance being built" Most …

the vast majority of defi apps rely heavily on oracles, middleware entities that connect smart contracts to resources outside of their native blockchains. Without oracles, blockchains are like computers without internet access... Often referred to as hybrid smart contracts ... [oracles enable] smart contracts that can react to real-world events a…

A video presentation "based on David Hyerle's book Visual Tools for Transforming Information into Knowledge". Some key points:written notes and verbal information present knowledge linearlymismatch with our brain, which must convert this linear stream into a mental map - major effort. images are fast to convey, but low on detail mix…

Video demonstration of using infranodus to visualize your thinking tool notes and explore connections between them, (hopefully) getting "a good overview of someone else's or of your own ideas, identify the potentially new interesting ideas... compare different notes to one another".I first came across these ideas in an earlier infra…

An overview by Coda, with 20 more resources, on Coda & Notion, which both take "a modular approach to digital documentation. You can do traditional docs ... but you never have to leave the tool to build more complex workflows and processes".

Interesting colection of notes from Andy Matuschak:Peripheral vision: "My physical workspace is full of subtle cues... together give me a kind of “peripheral vision”: when I’m doing one thing, it’s easy for me to fluidly notice other nearby things... Software systems, by contrast, often lack this kind of peripheral vision.". I started he…

Great example of the use of comics to explain some of the more arcane aspects of information and interaction design,

Captures my ambivalence about Roam: it's a great tool to create a complete personal knowledge graph, but is the result really that useful? And if it's only for taking notes that are unlikely to be useful in the future, isn't it expensive?"Roam is an amazing tool for a certain type of person ... If you like to wander off down in…

"DAOhaus is a no-code platform for launching and running DAOs. It is owned and operated by the community. All DAOs on the platform utilize the glorious open-source code of Moloch".Also see their glossary: https://daohaus.club/docs/users/glossary

tokens Trojan horse principles of cooperatives directly into highly financialized spaces... [but] as tokens that double as governance rights can be sold on secondary markets... DAOs can learn from cooperatives’ emphasis on long termism... DAOs could introduce more forms of decentralized governance into cooperatives.

The Identity Stack ... Traditional online bank accounts represent balances as numbers stored in a centralized database... requires placing trust in a banking institution. Blockchain protocols plus private key cryptography ...introduce ... full possession of digital assets, without having to trust a third party. Hence the terms “self-custodial” or …

"Not every DAO mints its own currency, but ... Friends With Benefits,,, [has] $FWB... minted on the Ethereum blockchain... Membership: 75 $FWB... only one million $FWB tokens... When I first heard about Friends With Benefits this year, membership was already valued at $350. Today, it’s over $9,000."... like most DAOs, grants one vote per…

"Olympus is building a community-owned decentralized financial infrastructure to bring more stability and transparency for the world.... Olympus was ideated by Zeus and built by a distributed pseudo-anonymous team."Sees itself a a "store of value: ... Stablecoins are vulnerable to inflationary policies, while Bitcoin or Ethereum su…

"The Fingerprints DAO collection is composed of NFTs that revolutionized the use of smart contracts as art.". Includes:"26 Autoglyphs, the first ... “on-chain” generative art pieces on the Ethereum blockchain... the event data contains the full output of the generator - codified instructions, in a character art pattern, to the artwo…

OP Arcade is:HTML5 game platform, with tournament competitionsgame developers contribute games which are transformed into fractionalized NFTs buyers collect nfts, co-own gamesplayers can play for free (?)DAO for "game owners to make proposals, vote for game updates, fund additional development"The community: "players, game owners an…

Starts by covering the first IRL NFT/crypto conference, before seguing: "smart investors are not buying seven-figure JPEGs these days... looking past NFT artwork entirely... to Web3... decentralized internet service [running] on public blockchains, with token-based reward systems that allow users to profit from their online activities."e…

"In the first nine months of 2021 crypto startups, especially those that are creating the tools to build a blockchain-based future, raised $15bn in venture capital", triggered in part by "retail speculators... Investors are also betting that, as regulation becomes clearer, institutions will take it more seriously, stirring demand f…

NYT's Kevin Roose writes "a column about NFTs that is, itself, being turned into an NFT and put up for auction". Good definition of an NFT: "digital collectible item stamped with a unique bit of code that serves as a permanent record of its authenticity and is stored on a blockchain... can be bought and sold ... can’t be delete…

NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, represent a unique relationship between owner, artist and art. They are "digital files created using blockchain computer code... essentially impossible to duplicate" and so can be owned & resold, like any work of art. Anyone can download a copy of the art, but the NFT is unique. Noone cares if the art i…

Basic intro to #fedwiki. Makes me realise it's a valid tool for federating myhub."anyone can add or edit a [wiki] page, but those pages all live on servers that someone else owns and controls... no one should have that sort of central control... [hence] the federated wiki... [where] the wiki put an edit button on every page... the federa…

"5 interesting things ... distilled from a helicopter view of trust from various branches of psychology, sociology, behavioural science and Responsible Research and Innovation."focus on others: "perhaps similar to love and happiness, the more doggedly trust is pursued for its own sake, the more elusive it may become", so turn y…

Wikis are like Minecraft for thought — very simple, very open-ended... can generate complex living systems, from personal notes, to collaborative fansites, to Wikipedia.While open-ended, there's scarcity: there can be only one page for each name, forcing "negotiation, communal norms, communal goals, communal meanings... Open-ended meanin…

Interesting, meandering analysis of different tools for thought.Craft "lacked databases - a key feature for any Notion user... [and is] limited to the Apple ecosystem", but they prioritised foundations first, features later: "a lot of work in exchange for small visibility - and users often don’t notice this until the point they (des…

"InterPlantery File System - IPFS - is a peer-to-peer distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data... to power the Distributed Web - DWeb... by using IPFS to download files from another system, your computer also becomes a distributor... a part of a decentralized network, helping ... distribute inform…

Jarche's network learning model encompasses 3 zones (social networks, communities of practice and work teams), with each activity involving both working out loud and personal knowledge management.There are several facets, each looking different depending on the zone - for ex:you share your work freely with your work teams (you are, after all,…

Another echo of one of my recent posts (Simplifying Zettelkasten by working out loud), but almost certainly published before: "One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” ... giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud".Essentially this…