I (like so many) have been obsessed with tackling the decentralized web for many years. It was not until a few years ago that I began to consider that the decentralized curation of human language might have something to teach us.

I call it “social linguistic consensus” — our ability to agree on the methods of communication without the need for a designated centralized authority over any aspect of any of these methods.

In the human realm, the existence of social linguistic consensus is so familiar that it’s easy to overlook how remarkable that it exists at all. Pick a random word from the dictionary or a random rule of grammar and ask: who decided that? Assuming it’s a non controversial detail, the answer is everyone (we all agree) and no one (no one has the power to change or enforce this definition or rule).

But in the digital realm, it’s the reverse. Every repo has a maintainer. Every computer language, every ontology, every standard has someone — a company, a committee, someone — in charge. And the absence of social linguistic consensus in the digital realm is so stark that it’s easy to overlook that it could be any other way.

So I’m writing up a paper right now where I describe what I call the tapestry method, which is a way to represent knowledge (encoded topologically in a graph) and curate knowledge (using a web of trust) designed specifically for the purpose of building social linguistic consensus. I postulate two things: that the central nervous system already uses the tapestry method; and that if we want to build the decentralized web, we ought to build apps that employ the tapestry method.

I’ve already built an app using this method, but it’s too big a task for one person. (Well, maybe Pablo could do it lol … but it’s too big for me!) Needs a team. So I’m hoping my paper will motivate one or more teams to do it.