18:47:36 RRSAgent has joined #breaking-out-of-silos 18:47:40 logging to https://www.w3.org/2026/03/26-breaking-out-of-silos-irc 18:47:40 RRSAgent, do not leave 18:47:41 RRSAgent, this meeting spans midnight 18:47:41 RRSAgent, make logs public 18:47:42 Meeting: Breaking Out of Silos: Seeing Cross-Layer Coordination Failures on the Web 18:47:42 Chair: Daveed Benjamin 18:47:42 Agenda: https://github.com/w3c/breakouts-day-2026/issues/2 18:47:42 Zakim has joined #breaking-out-of-silos 18:47:43 Zakim, clear agenda 18:47:43 agenda cleared 18:47:43 Zakim, agenda+ Pick a scribe 18:47:45 agendum 1 added 18:47:46 Zakim, agenda+ Reminders: code of conduct, health policies, recorded session policy 18:47:46 agendum 2 added 18:47:46 Zakim, agenda+ Goal of this session 18:47:47 agendum 3 added 18:47:47 Zakim, agenda+ Discussion 18:47:47 agendum 4 added 18:47:47 Zakim, agenda+ Next steps / where discussion continues 18:47:48 agendum 5 added 18:47:48 Zakim, agenda+ Adjourn / Use IRC command: Zakim, end meeting 18:47:48 agendum 6 added 18:47:48 breakout-bot has left #breaking-out-of-silos 21:03:58 cpn has joined #breaking-out-of-silos 21:04:07 Meeting: Breaking out of silos 21:04:28 Present+ Daveed Benjamin, Chris Needham, Atsushi Shimono 21:04:40 scribe+ cpn 21:05:09 Daveed: This is a thought experiment. We're in a planetary escape room 21:05:29 ... There are signals, conflicting explanations, nothing feels urgent, but that may change 21:05:55 ... There's a clock that you notice. Systems are hardening, options narrowing. The escape room isn't static, it's in a slow descent 21:06:08 ... Each level you go down it's harder to exit 21:06:19 ... Level 1 is fragmentation. Perceptions are siloed. We're not seeing the same world 21:06:34 ... People and information are fragmented. Little context, or non-existent 21:07:10 ... Level 2 is reality collapse. We can't tell what's true or not. We don't have anchors of truth, things we know to be accurate on the web 21:07:37 ... Looking at an article or a video, is it a deepfake, or an AI thing, is it human created? We don't really know. It's an increasing problem 21:07:54 ... AI didn't cause this, but it's accelerating it 21:08:21 ... Level 3, narratives are more powerful than anything else, drive how people see the world. Visibility replaces legitimacy 21:08:32 ... The ability to see things is what makes them legitimate 21:09:16 ... The way the web works now, we're in narrative channels, for specific points of views, but we don't have strong ways to break out of them if we don't have contextual information 21:10:08 ... Level 4, when you have siloed perception, institutions degrade. Working within false constructs means you're not able to approach your situation in the way you would if there was not this constructed narrative you have to adhere to 21:10:37 ... By adhering to a narrative you're giving away your agency. In the context of institutions, it stops being about what's real and true, and about perpetuating itself 21:11:23 ... It can continue going down, we're not at the bottom yet. In the US it's looking like we don't have any control as people. We're told things by leaders, then they do the opposite 21:12:16 ... When we're in a situation where political parties exercise narrative control, and we don't have ways to verify information, then when things are being surveilled and people deplatformed, you have a difficult environment for people to make informed conscious decisions with agency, and at scale 21:12:26 ... Hard for movements to materialise and counter these things 21:13:17 ... I personally believe, given how AI is going, things may harden in the next couple years, and may be difficult to make structural changes to the system once AI is further entrench 21:13:59 ... What does escape mean? It's not something that one person does, but collectively we must do, to meet the challenges and escape the situation we're in. 21:14:41 ... Not about withdrawing, but instead coordinating to get to collective outcomes we want. For most people, I assume: peace, harmony, unity. We want to get along, be safe, be heard, and express and not get in trouble for the things we say 21:14:50 ... So how to find a viable door we can go through? 21:15:14 ... I'll suggest some new tools we can think about. 21:15:35 ... I call them meta-layer primitives. This is the space above the webpage, a decentralised space. 21:15:52 ... They tend to be siloes. But we need to think layers not silos 21:16:08 ... There are some browser extensions that do this, but they're a horizontal very thin siloed layer 21:16:41 .. With the meta-layer idea, there's a layer of many layers, where each one (whether a sidebar or overlay), it has a community and a governance, which determines who can see it and interact, etc 21:17:14 ... You can also use interaction tags: these represent a piece of code that provides some kind of interaction, e.g., a poll on an image that asks people to give some judgement on the image 21:17:58 ... Imagine a contradictory bridge, a news article to a segment of a video where someone says something that contradicts that sentence. That's an interaction tag 21:18:29 ... You can design in the meta-layer construct whatever interaction tags, or sidebards or overlays you want 21:18:57 ... The context graph allows for context to be attached to be a specific anchor in a piece of content 21:19:26 ... In a page there may be different content anchors, and each may have its own set of context, info on other websites, or interactions helpful for the coordination you're interested in 21:19:57 ... Secure computation could provide a trusted execution environment where you or a community could enforce the set of interactions that an individual can perform 21:20:07 ... You could apply secure computation to a sidebar or overlay, etc. 21:20:46 ... Meta-communities are communities that travel with you wherever you are. We already have this in prototypes. In a webpage, you choose to be visible, and you see who else is visible 21:21:22 ... For example, in the anime or skateboarding communities. When you go to an anime site, you see others from that community who are present or had been there recently 21:21:43 ... What's the missing piece of the web? 21:22:45 ... The ability to annotate. Was taken out in 1995 when Netscape went up against Internet Explorer. Before that, they had the feature 21:23:18 ... In 2021, Andreesen, said he wondered what the web would be like if we'd had this from the beginning 21:23:25 ... It wouldn't be this flat content layer 21:23:50 ... I don't think annotation is the big missing feature. The big missing feature is the space above the webpage 21:23:53 present+ Rachit 21:24:21 ... Hypothesis. A space above every webpage, community governed, essential for coordination. 21:24:48 .... Today's content is just one layer of the web. We have annotation, in some browser extensions. We have Web3 wallets, acting as an overlay 21:25:04 ... We could do computation above web pages, tags, people having presence. Could completely change the web experience 21:25:30 ... What does it look like? The meta-layer with communities of people who're active, interaction, a presence above specific webpages on their common interest 21:26:06 ... How to break out of this system? We're in silos, institutions beginning to degrade 21:46:26 ... [Discussion of some exisitng approaches presented in the Authentic Web Workshop series] 21:50:41 Daveed: We're building Canopi, https://canonpi.live 21:51:53 ... https://themetalayer.org 21:52:40 ... There's discussion, a visibilty list of who's with you on the page at the same time, you can friend people, there's a wayback machine sidebar to see how a page has changed over time 21:53:20 ... We're at the early stage, looking to beta in the next quarter 21:54:28 ... We're starting to build a governance layer too, so communities can say how they want to interact, content that's acceptable or now, whether agents can reach out to them, or know whether an agent is a real human. Hoping to support in Canopi 21:55:05 .... Create communities that have enforcement in terms of how it wants to interact with AI: just for summarisation, or more AI participation, or exclude altogether 23:10:26 [adjourned] 23:10:31 rrsagent, draft minutes 23:10:33 I have made the request to generate https://www.w3.org/2026/03/26-breaking-out-of-silos-minutes.html cpn 23:10:44 rrsagent, make log public 01:53:22 Ian has joined #breaking-out-of-silos 01:53:26 rrsagent, make minutes 01:53:28 I have made the request to generate https://www.w3.org/2026/03/26-breaking-out-of-silos-minutes.html Ian 01:53:34 rrsagent, set logs public 01:53:35 rrsagent, bye 01:53:35 I see no action items 01:53:35 zakim, bye 01:53:35 leaving. As of this point the attendees have been Daveed, Benjamin, Chris, Needham, Atsushi, Shimono, Rachit 01:53:35 Zakim has left #breaking-out-of-silos