EncycloPipe
Synopsis
An open-source white-label app that allows for the generation, local storage and browsing of user-curated sub-encyclopaedias.
Motivation
There are a number of conceptual obstacles that the KSF faces with regards to its work.
Firstly, a lot of people prioritise ease of use over anything else. A good case-study here would be RSS, which appears to be in a permanently “undead” state for multiple reasons, including:
- Lack of technological standardisation: Articles behave differently on different readers, due to different technological standards/rules.
- Lack of content standardisation: Various sources will output different quantities of articles etc., and these will be of varying quality, relevance, length and so on.
- Lack of widespread adoption: Many news sources and other websites either never had RSS, or have since abandoned them. Many corporations, in general, have a financial incentive to create walled gardens.
- Lack of software support: There is little money in it, so there isn’t much of an incentive to build good infrastructure around RSS.
The KSF, as a body discussing technical standards, is in a unique position to facilitate some base level of support to make other aspects of the project more usable for end users. Furthermore, this support would further encourage and facilitate the use of consistent, utile standards amongst both end-users and encyclopaedic groups.
A second issue to be concerned with is our ability to meet unique selling points (USPs) that are a natural fit for our projects. Facilitating offline usage is a huge potential application for our work. One place where this could be used is as part of a solution to online safety for children. These days, it is an assumption that even very young children will have access to the internet for basic tasks, such as homework. On the other hand, social media and various other sites pose all sorts of risks, particularly when children can access them.
National governments are attempting to address this, and similar issues (e.g. the UK's online safety bill, the EU's digital services act), but all of them are making a critical error. All of the current approaches rely on removal of content, blacklisting, and so on. There are 2 problems with this:
- It sets up a framework for overzealous censorship that will affect everyone, although in some cases, this appears to be the intended effect, rather than an ancillary side-effect.
- It doesn't actually even solve the original problem. With so many online interactions at one time, a blacklisting-based approach will be like playing digital whack-a-mole – as soon as one threat is removed, others appear, and some will fly below the radar and never be caught.
The only way of solving issues pertaining to online safety is a whitelisting-based approach – in other words, give parents the option of allowing kids to obtain what they need from the internet without granting full access. Obviously, entertainment, socialising, and other functions of the internet need to be resolved in other ways, but we're in a position to deal with the education part.
Offline storage of sub-encyclopaedias pushed from kid-friendly aggregators could be used as a tool by parents to facilitate a whitelisting-based approach to online safety. You could imagine particular subjects in school curriculums coming with their own recommended collections of articles that contain all the required information (and further reading), for example. It would be like a textbook, but more advanced, more customisable, and more demanding in terms of requiring independent research (an important skill to teach kids).
Other USPs would include the general encouragement of archiving and re-distribution efforts. This app in particular could be used in numerous other ways, for example:
- Automatically updating field guides for conservationists.
- A portable handbook containing important information for those travelling overseas for extended periods of time.
- Repositories containing info, guides, tutorials, and so on, for (otherwise sporadically documented) hobbyist software projects.