Curation is storytelling using available knowledge and information. We create narratives through content that impart feelings, insights, results, etc. Curation has a conductive quality – curators act as lightning rods that ground the information, focus it and communicate it to other entities of the system. The qualities of good curation are relevance, salience, discernment and communication.
At the moment curators are woefully under equipped to communicate those stories or insights with the most relevance across communities due to the fractured quality of both our content and of those communities themselves.
At this point let’s define federation as “aggregating without filtering”, in other words, the structuring of information without biases of the algorithmic presentation of information.
By using federated systems of information organization, we can vastly bootstrap our ability to curate relevant information, interact with it and communicate those insights through a wide spectrum of forms and mediums.
Further, content curation inside a federated system implies bringing together fractured communities. Communities at the moment are spread across platforms and tools, some with interoperability in the form of APIs, some not, with no guarantee that the content will stay on that platform or that the platform will continue to exist. Content is often on multiple platforms or services at the same time, fracturing the conversation and interaction with the content itself.
By dealing with the fundamentals of knowledge and content organization, we can provide the means to bring together these fractured communities and conversations, therefore allowing the communities themselves to better curate their own content and communicate that to a vastly larger audience.
We are all curators of our own content ecologies – by being given an infinitely stronger system to interact with the exaflood of content available to us, share our personal insights with others and be allowed access to theirs, we can vastly increase our ability to access those stories most important to us – not to mention to grow and learn, individually and collectively.
