Inspired by decentralization and open source software movements, we propose Open Source Attention, a socio-technical framework for “freeing” human attention from control by platforms, through a decentralized eco-system for creating, storing and querying stigmergic markers; the digital traces of human attention.

in the current platform-centric ecology, user annotations (such as likes, retweets, etc) are locked across platforms’ data siloes where they serve to optimize platform growth. OSA aims to empower maker-centric ecologies by employing distributed content creation and storage technology

In stigmergic communication, the environment acts as a kind of distributed memory; modifi- cations left by others provide cybernetic feedback, driving both emergence of novel system-level behavior

The literature broadly distinguishes between two types of modifications: sematectonic stigmergy, which directly alters the environment state (in the digital case: creating new content, such as publishing a blog post), and stigmergic markers, which do not directly modify content, but rather serve as signalling cues (in the digital case: likes, annotations, hyperlinking of text).

Stigmergic markers can be thought of as digital traces of human attention, whose primacy as indicators of epistemic value makes them precious resources, whether for extractive (e.g., ad-tech) or constructive (e.g., collective sense-making) purposes

Healthier epistemic environments involve moving from exploitation of attention to supporting our intentions

where open source software is a movement to “free” software, similarly OSA is a movement to “free” stigmergic markers, starting from basic hypertext primitives: emotional valence (e.g., likes), bi-directional links, span highlighting, semantic categorization (tags, bookmarks), and textual annotation.

Another key question concerns scale: for global-scale sense-making, any proposal must necessarily compete with massive, well established platforms.

OSA is naturally congruent with the promising “protocols, not platforms” approach [ 17 ]; rather than head-to-head competition between PKMs, existing PKM growth can be bootstrapped for CKM by introducing interoperable protocols and storage for stigmergic primitives (e.g., links, tags). In this way, data from across diverse PKM apps could be shared to contribute to collective sense-making efforts.