Hello you lovely human being!

Great that you made it to our repository and that you are interested in learning more about the WorldBrain Project! Woouhou!

1. About
2. How to get started/Next Milestones
3. What is the status of the concept?
4. Who is behind this project?
5. Licence

WorldBrain Webmarks is a book webmarking tool for heavy web researchers like skeptics, (science-)bloggers and (science-)journalists.

This tool is the first of 3 steps to our goal of developing a browser plugin, which let's users check the facts of web-articles on the internet. For more information on this see our Vision

Coming back to the Webmarking tool:

Our users are taking notes on the internet very unefficiently. They have 2 main problems:

1. Not being able to save bookmarks with contextual information like titles, annotations, comments, tags or meta-data. Also they cannot efficiently structure them for research projects like an upcoming blog post or a repository for good studies. To overcome this, they save all this information in huge word and excel files, structured by topic and project.

2. In the massive files users gather, finding their notes/resources/links again to back up their claims in comments or in the articles they write is time consuming and inefficient.

On the basis of Hypothes.is, we are developing a bookmarking service, which lets users add all this contextual information and organise them with Webmarks in individual research projects like an upcoming blog post or a repository of good studies.

Also users will be able to export these notes to any writing application with ease. It won't matter, if they use Microsoft Office, Open Office, Evernote, Zotero, Mendeley or simple Text files.

For a more detailed description of the features visit our website

The hypothes.is software on which WorldBrain's Webmarks will be built on is developed in Python and Javascript. We are continuing with this language stack.

The project JUST got started with opening up for open-source development. The next step is to set up the server environment and to adjust the documentation, so that new developers have an easy time installing Webmarks and to start contributing. For more on the details of this task, see milestone 1.

From there on we can start the actual development on the tool. The tasks for this are already collected in Milestone 2.

Thanks for your help on the fundamentals!

2015 was the year of validating the concept. 2016 is the time to execute. Means: Now, February 2016, the time is right to gather a diverse team and to start development.

One year ago, the idea manifested itself on how cool (and extremely helpful) it would be to have a browser plugin, which lets you easily see, if an article or blog post is trustworthy based on how it represents scientific findings.

But as you can imagine, developing the plugin itself is not the real challenge. To make it work, we have to get the necessary data, provided by thousands of users..

So my work of the last year was to find answers to two fundamental questions:

1. Who is providing the content? (And why should they?)
2. How do we scale the verification to millions of articles?

After a year of hard work, I finally got the answers to those questions. See the Roadmap to find out more on how those challenges are tackled.

I am Oliver Sauter, the founder of WorldBrain - Thinker, problem-solver and internet fan boy, who found his true home in Berlin, the city of freedom, great minds and extraordinary vibes.

My professional background is in UX Design, marketing and economic and studied Physics and Civil Engineering at Ludwig Maximilian University and the Technical University in Munich.

I am a 2nd time entrepreneur and for the last 2,5 years, I have been studying the dynamics of misinformation on the internet intensely. This is why I consider misinformation as one of the biggest structural problems our global society has today. As for myself, It is clear to me, that I have and want to dedicate at least the next 25 years in tackling this issue. This is a long con.

Up to this point I was the only one working full-time on this project. The last year was dedicated on refining and validating the concept. Now I am convinced that it can be pulled off.

The time is right to gather a diverse team around the project.

This project would have not been possible with the help, goodwill, constructive criticism and insights of many people along this journey. I am endlessly grateful for living in a society, which gave me the security and intellectual freedom to think about solving social problems like this.

<----That's me!

To decide which is the appropriate licence under which WorldBrain's Webmarks should be published, should be discussed as a team. So there is no final decisions made by now.

To discuss this matter, I openend up an Issue on GitHub and happily invite you to discuss and give your opinion on it.