There are reasons to think that administrative burden might turn out to be very light, for a lot of webs:
If you trust just three people, and if they trust just three people, and so on, that could conceivably get you a very large userset with very little effort on the parts of each person. The question is, how do each of those people discover the others? How do you get into a network? Do you form a portfolio of submissions, proof of humanity, then issue join requests to the curators who know you the best? Yeah, that should probably be common pattern!
You don’t need to maintain an active presence in a web in order to make use of it. Somewhere there is a small community of people who are obsessed with vacuum cleaner reviews. To get an extremely well curated set of vacuum reviews, all you need to do is find them and include one of their central figures in a query over them.
I propose governance communities (maybe funded by the project) like metacurators to aid people in finding those communities. As an experiment, I recently tried to find “train twitter”, knowing that such a community almost certainly exists. I couldn’t. There were actually lots of results for the search “train twitter”, but all that and a whole hour weren’t enough to find me to it. Measures will probably need to be taken.
adjusting weights over time based on your usage
I like that one, that could be one of the things the above mentioned, very simple like/dislike (“relevant”/”irrelevant”) actions cause to happen.
It would be interesting to see what happens if you fully automate the formation of webs based just on users’ liking/tagging interactions, whether we’d end up with a perfectly good automatic recommender system that’s also perfectly accountable/controllable. It’s not clear to me that we would need automation for the first version, or for the types of users who’d use a first version of anything.
Regarding Administrative Burden:
There are reasons to think that administrative burden might turn out to be very light, for a lot of webs:
If you trust just three people, and if they trust just three people, and so on, that could conceivably get you a very large userset with very little effort on the parts of each person. The question is, how do each of those people discover the others? How do you get into a network? Do you form a portfolio of submissions, proof of humanity, then issue join requests to the curators who know you the best? Yeah, that should probably be common pattern!
You don’t need to maintain an active presence in a web in order to make use of it. Somewhere there is a small community of people who are obsessed with vacuum cleaner reviews. To get an extremely well curated set of vacuum reviews, all you need to do is find them and include one of their central figures in a query over them.
I propose governance communities (maybe funded by the project) like metacurators to aid people in finding those communities. As an experiment, I recently tried to find “train twitter”, knowing that such a community almost certainly exists. I couldn’t. There were actually lots of results for the search “train twitter”, but all that and a whole hour weren’t enough to find me to it. Measures will probably need to be taken.
I like that one, that could be one of the things the above mentioned, very simple like/dislike (“relevant”/”irrelevant”) actions cause to happen.
It would be interesting to see what happens if you fully automate the formation of webs based just on users’ liking/tagging interactions, whether we’d end up with a perfectly good automatic recommender system that’s also perfectly accountable/controllable. It’s not clear to me that we would need automation for the first version, or for the types of users who’d use a first version of anything.