"A distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.
"It is based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), O'Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.
I've been eagerly waiting to see what comes out of this group for a while now. The principles seem great, but I think they should apply their 12 principles to the initiation phases, as well. It's currently hard to discern from their site what their short term goals are or even where they currently are in the process.
Seems like an enormously positive effort, but I'm remaining skeptical. I wish that they had more public dialogue of what they're doing and more demonstration of getting the general public involved early. Plus, I think their approach may be too grandiose and top down.
I would like to see it first applied effectively at the grassroots. For instance, can the model successfully be applied to a small collective? If that's possible, then try to scale it to city, state, nation, and globe. Also, do they really need funding first to start rolling forward toward some of their objectives? There seems to be a lot of passion in this space and a lot of smart people willing to work for free now, with the right leadership.
Github for law is a much more modest and realizable idea, by comparison.
Hypothes.is annotations are great for legal content, and are similar to the stated goal of the GitLaw project -- namely to see how the laws are created, modified, debated, and by whom.