Hypothesis: the simple act of each of us publicly sharing more what we're paying attention to (reading, watching, ..) would dramatically enhance collective sensemaking. In open source software they say "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow"- perhaps there is a parallel for open source *attention*?
Oct 21, 2025 at 6:07 PM
From Users to (Sense)Makers: On the Pivotal Role of Stigmergic Social Annotation in the Quest for Collective Sensemaking
The web has become a dominant epistemic environment, influencing people's beliefs at a global scale. However, online epistemic environments are increasingly polluted, impairing societies' ability to coordinate effectively in the face of global crises. We argue that centralized platforms are a main source of epistemic pollution, and that healthier environments require redesigning how we collectively govern attention. Inspired by decentralization and open source software movements, we propose Open Source Attention, a socio-technical framework for "freeing" human attention from control by platforms, through a decentralized eco-system for creating, storing and querying stigmergic markers; the digital traces of human attention.
Sources on social media: Information context collapse and volume of content as predictors of source blindness - George Pearson, 2021
Although social media has become a primary news platform, the effects of social media features on users’ information processing remains under-explored. This stu...
Overcoming information overload with circular attention economies - Cosmik Labs
What We're No Longer Seeing: AI and the Invisible Newcomer in Open Source
How AI is absorbing the visible friction that open-source communities have always relied on to see—and welcome—newcomers.
From Social Network to Sense Making
Why open source: 25 reasons to embrace it | Ben Balter
Open source isn't a fad. Here are twenty-five economic, moral, and personal reasons your organization should embrace it.
Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy
The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...
Open source engagement in organizations
Companies, governments, and other organizations big and small are working with open source to achieve their goals. Teams range from barely considering it to ...
The Lenfest AI Collaborative has additional funding. That's great for open source in news.
The Lenfest AI Collaborative lets newsrooms explore a new technology together - but more importantly, it gives them the muscle to open source their work and collaborate.
I can see a whole lot of people agreeing with this. Kinda the same with open source in general, but few open source projects are social protocols seeking widespread adoption. It's a particular flavor of narrative disconnection from reality we have to bridge out of to get out of our own way.
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Every @proto developer sounds like this to me:
Capturing our Attention by @neillevy.bsky.social "we possess sophisticated capacities of epistemic vigilance, which work reasonably well to distinguish reliable from unreliable information, but ... we do not have parallel defences against attentional capture" > tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048402.202…
New study finds that when people help collect data or contribute to research it can build public trust by making scientists feel personally familiar and approachable, and that trust then spreads to how local and tangible the research feels. jcom.sissa.it/article/pubid/JCOM_2506_2026_…
How can citizen science reduce psychological distance to science? Insights from three projects in contested environmental contexts
jcom.sissa.itsensemaking on social media
examples of useful sensemaking happening on social media
fray — Bluesky thread factions
samantha.wiki/fray
Mu for democracy - Erlend’s notes
social-protocols/jabble
Dan Singleton 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ on Twitter / X
No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior
