Ariel Zambelich / WIRED
All that stuff you post to Facebook and Twitter and so many other social media sites? Ben Werdmuller and Erin Richey want put it back in your hands.
Werdmuller and Richey are part of the Indie Web movement, a loose knit group of hackers and designers reclaiming control over their online lives, grabbing them back from the big name web companies. They run a company called Known, and its first product plays right into this ethic. It’s an open source publishing tool designed to provide a way of more easily publishing status updates, blog posts, and photos to a wide range of social media services, including Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. But it comes with a twist: it lets you keep a copy of whatever you publish and post on your own site.
The idea is that you can more easily organize all your digital info in one place, and more easily show it to others.
Ben Werdmuller and Erin Richey Known
Although Known can be used with almost any kind of website, the company is targeting tools offered by higher education—at least initially. The tool integrates with the “learning management systems” used by many universities—tools such as Blackboard or Moodle. In this way, it lets students post assignments, questions, and ideas on their own websites. But since Known also dovetails with popular social media services, it can act as a central hub where students can manage all of their online content, from homework to photos from last night’s party.
Part of the pitch is that the tool offers fine-grained privacy controls, so that you can reclaim some of the privacy stolen away by the giants of the web. And once the students graduate, Known can act as a complete portfolio of their work and life, while continuing to double as a way of handling status updates and photos on social networks.
The Road to Better Blogging
Richey says the Known team is also aiming to provide a blogging service that’s much easier to use than other typical open source tools. Part of that involved designing the tool for mobile devices as well as the web, but the team also built it from the ground up to work with social networks. Most other tools handle cross-posting with third party plugins that could break at any time.
At the very least, the tool is an improvement over most of the learning management systems used by universities. These are a nightmare, says Jim Groom, director of learning technology at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, which is running on of the first Known pilots. “No one actually wants to use Blackboard,” he says. “Known is an elegant solution.”
But building a slick user interface is only half the battle for Known. One of the big problems with the indie web movement is that it typically produces tools that are difficult for less technically minded people to setup and configure. It’s dead simple to sign-up for a Twitter account, but getting an open source alternative running on your own server, and registering your own domain name, requires more work. That’s one of the reasons Known is partnering with universities.
The Brutal Narrative of the Digital Native
In a way, people like Groom and and his assistant, Timothy Owens, can then help push Known into the larger world. They run a digital literacy initiative aimed at helping Mary Washington students better understand life on the web. “There’s been this brutal narrative of the digital native,” says Owens. “People think they already supposed to know this stuff, but they don’t.” But Known and other tools can help change that.
In addition to providing web space where students can automatically install open source software such as WordPress, MediaWiki, and Known, the school buys every student their own internet domain name. The school even became an official reseller of domain names in order to facilitate the process. It’s an idea that Groom is so passionate about, he co-founded Reclaim Your Domain to promote the idea outside of the university as well.
By giving students their own domain, Groom and Owens hope to help students maintain their own web presence after graduating. Once their content has been migrated from the campus servers to a new hosting service—or Known’s hosting service—all students will need to do is point their domains to the new location.
That’s all months, or years, down the road. University of Mary Washington has only just begun its Known pilot program. Owens is using it as part of a class he teaches on digital storytelling, and a few students have already started playing around with it. But it could be another small step forward for the indie web.
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