Oliver Sauter has a vision where our society can make decisions based on verifiable facts instead of misinformation and rumours. I met Oliver at the Berlin Open Science Meetup where he presented WorldBrain, his plan for a browser plugin that verifies the trustworthiness of an article.
His idea was so compelling that Richard, a Mozilla Fellow for Science, approached me before Oliver had left the stage and suggested we add WorldBrain to our collection of open source software for science. We not only listed WorldBrain Webmarks, but we made space for Oliver to join our first Working Open Workshop and have been working with him ever since!
I interviewed Oliver so you can learn more about WorldBrain and how you can help during our Global Sprint, June 2-3.
Why did you start WorldBrain?
I started WorldBrain because I was frustrated to see how our world is torn apart by misinformation. I consider it as one of the (if not the) most fundamental structural problems our hyperconnected society has today.
It was clear that the source of all this is the content we consume every day in form of articles, blog posts and videos on the internet. There, people have the first contact point with bad information and this is where WorldBrain has to interfere to make a difference.
Why is WorldBrain the solution to misinformation online today?
Right now, people have to proactively research to get facts checked, that seems suspect. To do so they can use various sites like snopes.com, politifacts.org or factcheck.org. But this leaves out the majority of the content we just passively consume without checking it. And this is where misinformation can creep in easily – on everyone of us.
With WorldBrain’s plugin, we want to make it transparent to the users which statements are correct and get a glimpse on the overall trustworthiness of the content they currently consume. All that without them having to leave to another site. With that, our goal is to prevent misinformation from being consumed, shared and eventually integrated into a person’s and our society’s belief systems.
This is an extremely complex problem that will be hard to pull off. After a year of talking to dozens of experts in various relevant fields, we have a promising approach on making this plugin a reality. As a first step, we are developing a bookmarking service for the literate crowd needed to make the verifications trustworthy, namely skeptics, science journalists, STEM students and scientist.
Tell me about WorldBrain Webmarks. How will this help web researchers and skeptics?
To verify millions of articles and videos with tens of millions of claims, it’s clear that WorldBrain cannot be another volunteer run platform like Wikipedia. We have to provide a fact verification service that gives value to the user while they are producing valuable data for the community. .
This service is an advanced bookmarking tool for scientists, skeptics, (science)journalists and STEM-students that lets people annotate, share and discuss bookmarks directly on the web. For the first time, web researchers and skeptics will be able to save bookmarks with annotating text, images or videos and add comments, images, files tags and metadata to them – all directly on the website itself.
On this endeavour we are collaborating with Hypothes.is, which already has developed much of the needed functionalities. In fact, for the coming months, the WorldBrain team will contribute to the development of Hypothes.is, so that become the platform it needs to for us and can be for many other projects like ours in the future.
This service, WorldBrain’s Webmarks, will lay the foundation to enter a stage of collaborative text analysis, which will allow us to develop algorithms to find the most common claims on the internet. With the help of the crowd, we then can verify in crowd sourced templates and link them back, where we found them. This will allow us to scale up fact-checking to millions of articles.
What roadblocks or problems have you run into while working on WorldBrain?
The biggest roadblock so far was to get the concept laid out so that it is a doable approach.
It took me over a year and dozens of conversations with experts in the fields to get it “right”.As you can imagine, just the idea of the plugin is 0.005% of the actual project. Without a clear concept it was hard for people to see that it can be pulled off. Because of this, it was equally hard to get people motivated to invest time in me and the project.
This has fortunately changed in the last months as people see the validity of the WorldBrain approach to tackle the sheer amount of content to verify. Persistence, laborious investigation and consistency are starting to pay out :)
And at the moment?
The most pressing roadblock at the moment is to improve the installation time for Hypothes.is.
To install hypothes.is in a local developer environment at the moment, it can take 1-2 hours.We want to develop a docker compose file that reduces this to a few minutes.Here we actually could need some help from people experienced with Docker, Ansible or CircleCI.
How can I keep up to date with the work you’re doing on WorldBrain?
Every 2nd Wednesday, we publish a 2 minutes sprint report video and a blog post, where we talk about what we have been working on in the last 2 weeks and what we are up to in the coming 2.
In the coming weeks, we will also add a public sprint call via a Live Google Hangout.
What skills do I need to help you build WorldBrain Webmarks?
Right now we are mainly looking for PHP, Javascript and Python developers and people experienced with working on and managing open source projects. To get an overview, just visit our CONTRIBUTING.md
We want to build a vibrant developer community around WorldBrain and Hypothes.is. Basically with both projects we are working around the idea of improving the structure of the internet by increasing transparency and quality.
On a technical level, Hypothes.is and Webmarks are built with Javascript(AngularJS) and Python. But the language and frameworks are not as important as a drive for solving the problem and the strong urge to learn new things. So just jump in and we’ll find something for you to unleash your potential!
What kind of tasks can others help you with during the Mozilla Science Global Sprint, June 2-3?
We are just figuring out the first pilot task, to test how our collaboration with Hypothes.is in the development process works ideally.
When the Global Sprint starts, we assume, that there are quite some features, we will have in the pipeline. If you want to contribute already now, just visit our GitHub repo for more information. To stay updated, you can subscribe to our 2 minutes sprint report video, we publish every 2nd Wednesday.
Bonus question: Where is your Research Fox sticker?
haha. On the left side under the apple :)
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Come join us wherever you are June 2-3 at the Mozilla Science Global Sprint to work on WorldBrain and pick up your own Research Fox! Have your own project or want to host a site? Submissions are open for projects and site hosts.