Werd I/O

I started my career in education, writing e-learning tools for the University of Edinburgh. It was there that I met my Elgg co-founder, Dave Tosh (because they placed us together in an ex-broom closet with a window that didn't shut; a kind of gallows bonding experience). Elgg was designed as a community platform for education, that took the informal learning that was happening on the nascent social web in 2003 and applied it to the formal education space. It did well, and it's still in wide use in institutions today. Through Elgg, I've written and spoken widely about social learning environments.

The educational technology community has developed the dual concepts of the Personal Learning Environment and the eportfolio. The first is a tool that puts students at the center of their learning; the second is a way for them to represent themselves and their learning, to themselves, to their peers at their institution, and to the outside world once they graduate. In an educational setting, I think Known is very clearly both a PLE and an eportfolio:

• Known profiles allow you to post to a space that represents you, using a variety of media, from any device
• Known's syndication feature lets you post to your own profile, while syndicating to external sites and applications - like your campus's Learning Management System.
  

Educators agree. The Reclaim Your Domain project is a particular evolution of eportfolio thinking, where members of a campus's community own the domains that represent them (just like indieweb!), and we've developed a good relationship with this community. And we're discovering that more and more institutions around the world are coming to us, because they see how Known can help them to empower their students.

Universities have discovered that providing a social space that allows for personal reflection allows for deeper learning than a Learning Management System can provide. Known provides a layer for this that can either work with a campus's LMS or as a stand-alone product. It's easier for teachers to administer, and because it uses the latest modern web technologies, it works with the mobile devices that students are using to access the Internet more than 50% of the time.

Known works well as an educational product. Our experience building awesome social tools for education over the last decade allows us to more quickly understand the challenges involved, and to provide something that fits in with the culture of education. We're also aware that there are startups whose aim is to own a part of the education stack, and our grounding in indieweb and open source means that we reject that entirely. We have an open project that we have designed to empower; the intention is to provide more control, not remove it.

I couldn't be more excited to work deeply with educators to help them make electronic learning a more personal experience - and we want to hear from you. Software is a collaborative experience, and we couldn't think of better collaborators than the people who are helping to make the world a more informed and educated place.

Here's how I post from my Known site.

When I log in, Known gives me the option to post lots of different kinds of things: status updates, photos, streaming media, and so on. Because it's what's called a "responsive interface", it adapts to whichever device you're looking at it on: it works just as well on a phone as on a desktop browser. These buttons work great on a touch-based interface, and I post on my phone at least as often as I post from my computer.

This morning, I decided to write a status update:

I decided to post it to my friends on the traditional social media sites too. Above, I've selected Twitter - after I took the picture, I decided to post to Facebook as well.

Known posts the status update to my own site:

But because I selected Twitter, it posts it there too:

And because I selected Facebook, another copy ends up there:

My friends can interact with me over on those sites:

And those replies - whether they're from Facebook, Twitter, or my friends' own websites (running Known or something else) - will show up on my site too, thanks to great indieweb technologies like brid.gy:

This way, I have all of my interactions around that content in one place.

If I want to reply to my friends on the silos, I can do that too. I can just do that from my site using the bank of buttons you've already seen, but if I'm using Firefox, I can use a direct "reply" button integrated with my browser:

Or there's a "bookmarklet" - a button that I drag to my browser's bookmarks toolbar - that makes it easier, which works with every browser.

Either way, those replies will show up on the site my friends replied from, as well as on my own site.

Because I post everything from my own site, I have an archive of everything I've ever written to social media. That means I can look to see everything I've written about "Wimbledon", for example:

And I can filter my search to particular kinds of content:

Because this archive is hosted on my own site, people are likely to find it when they search for me. That means I have more control over how I'm represented on the web. One of the ways I can customize my appearance online is through themes:

But if I'm a developer (and I am!) I can build my own themes and plugins to integrate Known into my existing site, create new kinds of content or radically change the look and feel. It's a pretty great toolbox.

My archive of everything I've posted and all my replies lets me analyze my data in all kinds of ways, that let me post better and participate more directly with my community. I'll be talking more about that another time.

In the meantime, you should sign up to our beta list.

Journalism and the indieweb were made for each other.

Because of the way we've been describing Known - particularly focusing on our ability to syndicate content to third-party social networks and important social interactions using brid.gy - we've received a lot of feedback that this is how we should describe ourselves as a business:

Known is a social media marketing application that allows marketing departments to justify ROI using aggregated data from audiences across multiple platforms

For all kinds of reasons, this isn't what we want to do. There are solid business reasons - social media marketing is a crowded market, for one - but there are deeper reasons, too. It's not why we got into this. It's not, on a fundamental level, what we're trying to do.

After all, this is how you could describe the product:

Known lets you own your own social website without having to give up talking to your friends on the web.

I believe in the indieweb as a movement that will empower people to own their own representations on the web. I know that will have broad implications over time, and that the success of these ideas and technologies will make a profound impact on the way the web works. I also think that running a commercial business based on indie web principles is a great thing.

I also think that certain groups of people are ahead of the curve when it comes to privacy and ownership - and journalists are very much among them.

There is a long-term trend towards greater ownership and privacy. Partially this is due to post-Snowden sentiment, but it's also driven by factors like generational differences, a growing commercial dissatisfaction with Facebook, and security breaches at companies like Target. Providing a service that is as easy to use as Facebook, while being respectful to its users, mindful of privacy, and yours, is a good idea. There will be a tipping point where people will be looking for something new, and we will be there for them, alongside other software in the indieweb ecosystem.

But there's also a growing need for this right now. Edward Snowden's whistleblowing was, of course, an important moment in journalism. We participated in a workshop run by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism on newsgathering in a post-Snowden world this week, and were inspired by the renewed focus on protecting sources and swiftly building stories, while being simultaneously dismayed by the lack of effective software to support them. Journalists value ownership, privacy, control and ease of communication - which, of course, are indieweb fundamentals.

We're investigating how Known, and the indieweb, can be effectively harnessed for journalism. This includes heavy research into the workflows people are using today. My experience with latakoo (which is used by professional newsrooms around the world) has told me that every organization is different - but then, my experience with Elgg tells me that it's possible to build a light-touch tool that allows people to customize it for their own needs. In fact, that's what Known already is, whether you take the open source code and build on top of it, or use the hosted service we'll launch this summer.

Journalism is fundamental to democracy. We need to know what's happening in the world around us to make effective democratic decisions. We're also living in a world where journalism is being pinched by changing models and rapidly evolving audiences. If we can help, we would love to.

If you're a journalist, or if you work in a media or news organization, we would love to talk to you. You can email me at ben@withknown.com.