People have tried and failed to get WoT to work since the introduction of pgp in 1991. Here’s my stab at why they’ve failed, and what we must do to succeed.

The problem is that people have always jumped to the end goal, and skipped the beginning, the foundation.

The end goal is for your WoT to curate facts and information. Everything from what’s the best coffee shop to what’s happening at the front lines of a war zone. Everything from subjective opinion to objective facts.

But we have skipped the foundation, which is this: your WoT needs to curate the language itself. The digital tools that we use to talk about facts and information. Currently these tools are curated by digital stewards: repo managers, w3c committees on standards, etc. We need our WoT to take over the responsibilities of every one of these digital stewards. Only then will we see WoT reach its potential.

This is what I’m working on, btw.