What is Distroid?

The Distroid project is focused on developing new ways to search and discover digital media at the intersection of technology and society.

Primarily, we are working on developing the following tools and resources as part of the Distroid project:

1. Distroid Catalogue,
2. Distroid Sense-making Markers,
3. Distroid Digest, and
4. Distroid Rank.

Distroid Catalogue

The Distroid Catalogue is a catalogue of digital media at the intersection of technology and society, represented as a knowledge graph to find and explore the relationships between people, works, organizations, media outlets, topics, and more.

Distroid Sense-making Markers

"Sense-making refers to processes by which agents make sense of their environment, achieved by organizing sense data until the environment is understood well enough to enable reasonable decisions"

Sense-making markers are digital artifacts of sense data (i.e., signalling cues) that a person has identified from content, people, or other objects in their information environment (most often found as annotations or other indirect modifications to objects in the information environment). In other words, the sense-making markers are digital artifacts of what people have paid attention to in their information environment.

The sense-making markers can be used to signal important features in objects, and determining how to evaluate such features, ultimately contributing to assessing the epistemic qualities of objects in the information environment.

An example of a sense-making marker is the up/down vote button on Reddit or the like button on Twitter.

The common language describes a data model for sense-making markers, and how sense-making markers relate to other concepts, such as content, contributors, and algorithms.

Through the common language, anyone can create sense-making markers to fit their particular contexts.

The sense-making markers and associated concepts will be accessible via a registry. This registry will provide the functionality for creating, storing, and querying sense-making markers and concepts associated with them.

The sense-making markers provides an interoperable format for exchanging sense data (i.e., signalling cues) between information systems, and the sense-making markers granular enough to serve as the foundation for systems focused on collective sense-making and other parts of the collective intelligence lifecycle.

Distroid Digest

The Distroid Digest is a curated newsletter curating digital media (some new, some old) to inform people (or enhance understanding of) about news, updates, and trends from the intersection of technology and society.

Distroid Rank

Distrodi Rank is a ranking algorithm for content curated in the Distroid Catalogue for ranking content based on whether the content helps advance understanding of the intersection of technology and society, built on top of our sense-making markers.

Recent Work

Here is a list of recent work on the Distroid project:

• Distroid: Developing the Distroid Curator Algorithm for Ranked Feeds based on the Sensemaking Markers
• Distroid: Serializing Sensemaking Marker Schema in JSON
• Distroid: Prototyping an LLM-based tool to automate assessing the sensemaking markers
• Distroid: Graph Data Model for Catalogue

Recent Artifacts

Our project has produced several artifacts that contribute to connecting everyone to knowledge and ideas. These artifacts include:

1. Distroid Digest: a Substack newsletter for a weekly digest of curated content from the frontier, including research, news, tools, and more, available at: https://distroid.substack.com/;
2. Distroid Spotlight: a Substack newsletter, planned to start at the end of this year, spotlighting people and projects working at the frontier, available at: https://distroid.substack.com/;
3. Distroid Vocabulary: a Substack newsletter, planned to start at the end of this year, expanding the reach of emerging language from the frontier, available at: https://distroid.substack.com/;
4. Distroid Commons: a searchable web-interface demo for searching and filtering for content curated in the digital catalogue, including collections for DAOs, Tools for Thought, Web3, and Platform Cooperativism, available at: https://distroid.ledgerback.xyz/;
5. Publications Directory: a directory of publications (i.e., media outlets) publishing high quality content at the frontier, available at: https://distroid.ledgerback.xyz/;
6. Distroid News Content Network Visualization: early work on a network visualization of news content curated in the digital catalogue, showing the connections between authors, content, and publications, available at: https://codepen.io/ledgerback/pen/jOdyYzQ; and
7. Early findings from the Distroid Database for Issues 28 - 38: a publication of early findings and visualizations from exploring and analyzing content and associated metadata from items curated in Distroid Issues 28 - 38, available at: https://ledgerback.pubpub.org/pub/3ztmsk4k.

Mentions

You can find tweets discussing Distroid here:

1. This was an excellent list of resources - many tabs opened. Great job @CAdjovu & thanks for including our guide!
2. This is an incredible research digest (blockchain people)
3. Cool newsletter, subscribed.