May 12, 2025 08:28 AM
https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/play/PDsQmm31yJGPdEeY-4CcloEVXyQfOpO2CUHBqwg47Wo8xt5u7QPI8Dh7dcZOSTmls7skRIegKtPz1z8J.isjTL6k9E44rDnIf
Relevant Links from Video:
Collaborative Tech Alliance Ecosystem Map Space on Catalist
Tibet Sprague Okay, once again for the recording, welcome everybody to the Collaborative Technology Alliance dynamic interoperable validated self sovereign mapping project and reveal. We started this project as part of a collab-a-thon that was in spring of 2023 that the Collaborative Technology Alliance ran where we had a little pot of money. And we had folks within the alliance put together project ideas and submit them to the community. And as a community, we decided as a group what to fund. And this was one of the projects that got funded. So yeah, if anyone is not aware of the Collaborative Technology Alliance, we are kind of a loose community and network of technologists working on social technology, social platforms and tools that are oriented towards the thriving of our planet and people that live here. And the alliance kind of supports and enables collaboration and cooperation and coordination among different projects. And interoperability is one of the main goals. And so really excited to reveal what we’ve been working on for this project. I think it’s a significant step towards the type of interoperability we want to see in the world. So that being said, I’m going to pass over to Oliver to kind of discuss the project itself.
Oliver Sylvester-Bradley Thanks, Tibbett. Perfect intro. Yeah, so I’m Ollie from the Open Co-op, and I also work on the Murmurations Project, which is a protocol for interoperable data sharing, which we decided to adopt as part of our mission to achieve these four goals that you see on the screen. So the first goal was obviously to make ourselves more visible to ourselves, figure out who is in the CTA and how do they relate to each other, obviously to promote ourselves to the outside network. But we wanted to do that in a way which would be cleverer than just your average adding everything to a spreadsheet or sticking it on a database and then watching it go out of date over time. And that’s what the Murmurations Project’s been all about, which has been running for about five years. originated from an idea about how to do mapping better and has now evolved into this protocol which helps share information interoperably between platforms and networks working using different technologies so it’s quite exciting i’m said to tibbett when we kick this off i’m going to struggle to avoid using the words world first because as far as i’m aware and i’ve been following this area for a little while i’ve never seen anybody demo a map which actually pulls data from four different kinds of platforms and networks and uses it together to make one systems map. So hopefully this will be interesting and work. And yeah, last goal, obviously, to make this useful. This is only the beginnings, what we’re going to show you today. And all we’ve done is map the relationships, map members of the CTA using bidirectional relationships. But hopefully more things will flow out of this in the future by us being able to map other things as well, like offers of needs and relationships between individuals and their organizations and other organizations. So this is the start, even though it’s taken two years to get to this point, of something potentially quite cool. So next slide, please, David. Thank you. So here, this quite complicated slide is mapping out a couple of different things. The first one at the top, if you follow the line, phase one, dynamic, this was where we got to reasonably quickly. So we had the map at the top right-hand corner of your screen, the dynamic ecosystem map. And the way that worked was that people would come onto the CTA website. They would then sign the pledge, which all CTA members must do, and then add themselves as an organization and click the box saying, yes, I’m happy to be displayed on this ETA website. That information would then jump into an air table and Catalyst, Vincent’s platform, which he will show to you very soon, would pull in that data and use it to show a systems map of the related organizations. So it was good. It was a start, but it wasn’t really truly dynamic and it wasn’t built across using these, enabling people to host their profiles for their organization wherever they wanted. So what we’ve done here now and what we’re showing today is more this phase two, this interoperable and validated section. Oh, let’s go back. So in this way, you can now add your profile to the ecosystem map using one of these four platforms. So the first one, Hilo, second one, Catalyst. Third one, you can publish your profile directly on the Memorations website. Or fourthly, you can host it yourself as a JSON file anywhere you want. And as long as you have a bidirectional relationship, so that means you’ve signed the pledge and then the CTA knows that you’re an official member. somebody checks you’re not a spam bot and then adds a relationship in the cta’s profile which states that you are a member of the cta and then in your own profile you add a relationship stating that you are a member of the cta these profiles are registered with the murmurations index and And then we have a script which checks the index for organizations which have these bi-directional relationships. So the CTA has said, yes, this person’s a member. And the member has said, yes, I’m a member of. And if those two things match, then they get pumped through and shown on the interoperable and validated ecosystem map. Ta-da! So that’s the objective of what we’ve been doing. And now we will attempt to demonstrate a new profile for a new organization being added in one of these three, four ways. So back over to you, Rudy Tivett. Maybe we want to start by showing the ecosystem map itself, the latest one.
Tibet Sprague And here is the Akumu of this map, which is being generated using this kind of script, crawler script that we wrote that basically finds the, or in this case, the Collaborative Technology Alliance memorations profile, but you could feed it any memorations profile. looks at that profile in the index, finds the relationships defined in that profile, and then looks up those profiles in the murmurations index and checks those profiles to see if they also have the member of relationship defined to the the original profile that you’re looking up to the CTA in this case. And if they both have it defined in their profiles, then it adds it to the map and pulls in all the profile information from murmurations. So what I want to show here is adding something via Hilo. So here I just have a test group in Hilo, Tibet test, and I am going to go into my settings and let’s see, I’m going to go down to privacy and access, and so I have this group defined as public in Hilo. And we have added this publish murmurations profile link to the bottom. So actually before that, one of the important things, the way it works in Hilo is you have to be added as related to the group. This is how that relationship gets defined in Hilo of I’m a member of, or this group is a member. And so I’ve already added this group as a member of the Collaborative Technology Alliance on Hilo. And the Collaborative Technology Alliance group in Hilo, there’s a little bit of interesting kind of mapping of profiles here. It’s kind of primary URL defined as the same one as the primary URL in the murmurations index. So that’s how a little convoluted, maybe hard to follow, but we will share detailed instructions for how to do this. But because it’s defined as related to the Collaborative Technology Alliance in Hilo. Then all I have to do is say publish Memorations profile, save, and then go back to the Kumu map and refresh it. It does take a minute here because it’s doing it live, but there it is. Tibet test has now been added to our map. And the other really cool thing is, so if I click on this, it pulls in the description, the mission. If I go back to my Hilo group, and I update the description here, and I go back to the Kumu and refresh, There it is, a description that is even better. And so I am now able to update my profile from within Hilo and have it automatically flow into this map. And I can, you know, remove my profile. There’s no longer needing to, you know, communicate with some maintainer of an air table or a Kumu and say, Hey, please change, you know, please remove me or please update my description or my image. It is all handled from the platform that is publishing the profile and instantly updating, which I think is really, really cool. I don’t know how many of the folks here do as well, but yeah. And so that’s, that’s the high low version. And now Vincent, you want to show publishing from Catalyst?
Vincent Arena (Catalist) Yeah, sounds great. Let me screen share. Okay, so I’m going to show, back up a little bit and just share a bit about the process for the phase one. Since we didn’t get to share that when Ali talked about it. So when you’re signing up and signing the pledge, there is a link here for what organizations you work for. And so you can either find an existing organization or add a new one. And when you add a new organization, you can accept the pledge on behalf of that organization and then decide if you want to display it publicly on the CTA website. So if you checked off publicly, this goes then into our air table. And then from here, it goes into the Catalyst ecosystem map. So here’s a directory of the organizations here. And so Catalyst is a mapping platform that also has a big focus on interoperability. We have a sync with Kumu as well. And so this is going from the directory gallery view to the Kumu view, which I had shared in the chat. So this is an example of the Kumu view that shows the people and relationships. So these are the relationships between people and organizations, as well as any relationships between organizations. And then out of this, you know, subset, the process for basically taking a profile that has been added into Catalyst and putting it to memorations. So how that works is that if you go, if you sign up to Catalyst, you create an account. And if your email matches the email when you sign the pledge, you’ll see in your dashboard that you have one object to claim. So right now I could claim my member profile. And then once you hit claim, then you are essentially the owner of that profile and you’re able to update it. And so right now, OmniMapping, I’m going to use this as an example. So this is an organization profile which I had previously claimed. And because of that, I can go here and I can click edit. And similar to Hilo for this profile, if I go under manage, I can see here the settings to publish this in murmurations. So I can hit update in murmurations. And now this is going to show up on that same exact map. It’s going to show up in the murmurations index. And it’s also going to show up on that same map that profiles from Hilo, profiles from WordPress websites that are publishing to memorations and any other platforms that end up sinking in.
Oliver Sylvester-Bradley Yes. Thanks, Vincent. Can you can you spell out on them where you specified that Omni mapping had the member of relationship to the CTA? Just so everyone’s clear on that bit. Or does it happen automatically? No, they need to specify it, right?
Vincent Arena (Catalist) That happens for any organizations that sign the pledge as a one-way relationship. That’s added specifically within the CTA space. Right.
Tibet Sprague Yeah. Got it. I should add that the reason that, or the fact that the Tibet test group instantly showed up in the Kumu map is only possible because I had already added that group to the CTA profile. It has to happen two ways, as we mentioned, and I did put a link to the CTA profile in the chat in response to Steve’s question. So there is a little bit of a manual process there of, you know, my organization is joining the CTA, I’m setting up my murmurations profile, now I need to email the CTA stewards and say, hey, add me to the map. I signed the pledge. And so there has to be that validation happen. Yes, this is a real organization that signed the pledge. We check their profile and make sure it looks real and connected. And so that two-way kind of communication and relationship has to be established. And I’ll also paste the link to the Kumu map that we’re showing. So, yeah, now we can see Omni mapping is there. Coming from Catalyst.
Oliver Sylvester-Bradley You see my screen okay, yeah?
Vincent Arena (Catalist) Yeah, sweet.
Oliver Sylvester-Bradley Okay. So, yeah, there’s the one that this one, sorry, that Vincent just added. And now what I want to demo is the last two ways of adding your profile to the map. So you’ll see this profile here for the Open Co-op. This is a profile which I have self-hosted just by creating the required JSON and then hosting it at my own domain. So if we look here, we can see this is the actual file, which is hosted at opencoop/open.json. And that is being used to pull in on the CTA map. So we can see it kind of matches what we’ve got here. And to show you how you can do that, I have already kind of built this using the tools, the Memoration tools. So this is the profile generator within the Memorations tools. I’ll just share it in the chat for you as well. So you can go there and have a play. You can use all the different tools here to browse the index and update the index. But what I’m using here is this profile generator tool. And I have chosen the organization schema because that is the way that you add a group or project or organization. So that then brings up this form, which I have gone ahead and filled out with all of the information that you see. All of these things, description purpose, you can set its status, etc. And then when you get to the bottom, you hit preview and it will generate this JSON for you in a validated format. So then you can copy it. But the important thing to note, these are the relationships here. So when you’re building your own profile, you have to manually add this relationship with a predicate URL using the schema member of relationship and the object URL to collaborative.tech. So then that shows up here in the relationship, which is generated. And you can see it there. So then what I do is I take this whole file, copy it, everything from the curly braces right through to curly braces. copy that, paste it into a text file, save it as open.json, and then upload it to my web server. So now we’ve got this file and it is living here. Then what I need to do is take this URL and I need to tell the Memorations Index that it’s there and that it’s a valid JSON file. So I go back to tools and I go to the top and I use this index update a tool and post the profile just by whacking it in here. So it’s already there and it won’t work if I do it this time, but I’ll just do a check on it instead and just check its status. You can see that this pings the index. It recognizes that it’s got there, that it’s stated is posted and it’s got a last updated time sample. So that is how you would add a profile which you wanted to host yourself. I’m now going to flick over to the Memorations website. So here we’ve now got the six things on the map, and I’m going to try and add another one. So the Memorations website itself, if I just go back to the front end so you get the idea, this is where this all lives, memorations.network, and it is a WordPress website. So if I flip to the back end, I have installed the Memorations Maps and the Memorations Profile plugin, which you can download from GitHub. And that gives you the same thing exactly that we just looked at, but wrapped up with a nice bit of React inside of a WordPress plugin. So here you can flick between if you want to do things on the test index or the live index. We’re using the live index for the map. And the same as we saw previously, I can select this. I want to make an organization. Then I just fill in all the fields. You can also make people and offers and wants this way, but that’s another story. But here is a memorations profile, which I’ve already created. So I’m just going to click modify on that. And it fills out the form with everything I’ve already added. There’s all of the information about memorations. However, what I don’t have here is a relationship to the CTA, which is why I’m not showing up. So if I just come in here and stick in the relationship, and then now I’ve got that, I can just submit it to the live index. We wait a second for this to do its business processing, and now its last updated timestamp has changed. So it might take a minute to flow through because the index takes a second to update, but we’ll just check here anyway. And there it is. Got there already. So now we see the memorations profile as well as the open card profile, tip test and catalyst, seven things on the map, coming from four different places.
Tibet Sprague Amazing.
Oliver Sylvester-Bradley Maybe we go back over to the presentation for the last.