This planning note outlines a proposed trial in which Seed Hypermedia Network is used as the collaborative hypermedia environment for the Hypertext Summer School and Conference in London 2026 (HT’26).

The goal is to explore how a decentralized hypertext system can support collective knowledge construction, by situating all scholarly activity—before, during, and after the conference—around a shared, living corpus of documents.

The experiment centers on a simple but powerful idea:

All conversations happen around the proceedings.

Rather than treating papers as static outputs, Seed enables them to become active sites of discussion, annotation, and reuse across time.

2.1 Corpus Integration

2.2 Phases of Engagement

3.1 Primary Hosting

Initial corpus hosted on a server at X University

Provides stable entry point and coordination layer. Objects travel from hardware to hardware independently if its a laptop, mobile, or server. However, in order to make web browser resolve the objects, a gateway server is required.

3.2 Republishing and Transclusion Across Nodes

Republishing model:

A node can import (mirror) the corpus or subsets of it

Local annotations remain locally owned but reference shared content

Updates propagate through referencing rather than central control

This results in:

No single point of control

Shared knowledge with distributed ownership

Consistent references across independent nodes

Adoption depends critically on pre-conference onboarding.

4.1 Requirements

4.2 Delivery

Lightweight onboarding sessions prior to paper release

Short tutorials and guided exercises

Example workflows using sample documents

4.3 Key Insight

5.1 Ingesting ACM Papers

5.2 Effort Considerations

The Summer School trial will be organized as a structured exercise:

6.1 Entry Point

6.2 Activities

6.3 Expected Behaviors

Conversations anchored in specific fragments

Use of references instead of duplication

Emergence of shared interpretations

7.1 Measuring Outcomes

7.2 Conditions for Success

7.3 Conditions for Failure

This section provides what the paper currently lacks:

A concrete description of the planned trial

A clear account of practical implementation challenges

Insight into the effort required to reach a usable starting point

Rather than restating known hypertext principles, the value lies in:

Demonstrating their application in a real setting

Exposing the gap between proposal and practice

Providing a reproducible model for future experiments

By the start of the conference, the objective is clear:

A participant can enter Seed for HT’26 and immediately engage with the proceedings as a living, shared hypertext—annotating, linking, and contributing to an evolving body of knowledge.

If achieved, the experiment will demonstrate how decentralized hypermedia can transform academic discourse from static publication into continuous knowledge construction.

Write the note for the summer school case

IDK if there is a Summer School this year, but if we want them to use Seed as part of their experience, we need to consider making some onboarding available before the conference starts. Everyone needs a little practice. Bear in mind that the onboarding will perforce be pre-paper release (starting Saturday 12 Sep, per current planning).

Getting all/most/some papers into Seed falls on your team and has until paper release from TAPS close (c.4 weeks min). Anyway, the user needs to lay out expectations, and this is useful to others considering such tests. These things are always easier in a proposal than in reality, so the planning note, which might seem ordinary, has real value. By the time we've addressed the latter, the paper should be built out.

Establish clear methods for measuring outcomes.

Define the structure of the London Conference Exercise.

Also, what the paper lacks at present is a Section with a description of the actual planned trial, the considerations involved. How will we get the papers into Seed. What are the practical issues this raises?

As you note, much of what were mentionming in the paper is known stuff, so we docn't want to reating it at length. Rather we should make short references to the source with appropriately focussed citations.

the tool value is the tool + support materials (whose form may vary by domain/purpose) + community.

Re using ACM papers we need to put in the paper the challenge of re-use, and the effort (as we've discussed) of not just siplhoning DL.ACM traffic. So, description of remediation into Sed and the consideration we've given it is of real worth for the reader.

We also need to describe the work you'll do just to get to the starting point. HT has a history of trying things like this. People always underestimate the `effort': such a term sidesteps a reductive cost calculation. Effort does have a $ cost, but cost isn't the value criterion here.

So, we need to describe what we envisage doing so that at [start day] someone can go into Seed for HT'26 .... and do what? What onboarding is necessary: if no one engages the effort yield little beyond the (itself separately valuable) experience of setting up such a test.