Taking (back) stewardship of this project - and a reboot!

[rufuspollock]

I was the original creator of this along with @nickstenning

I'd like to take back stewardship of this project as it still seems valuable 🙂 and maybe we can resurrect it a bit ... 🎉

Context

• It seems this is now abandoned for about a decade ...
• Hypothesis who originally took it over now seemed focused on their own stuff (afaict).
• I think successor was https://github.com/apache/incubator-annotator but that is now shutdown.
• I was original creator with @nickstenning of this and developed the first version before transferring to hypothesis

[jonnybradley]

Sounds promising, did you see this @marclaporte?

[marclaporte]

I hadn't but I am now watching :-)

[tilgovi]

No objection from me. @rufuspollock what are you requesting, specifically? You're already on @openannotation/owners and therefore an admin of this repository. Are you asking for community consent to some specific change, to remove some other folks, or something else?

[tilgovi]

If it's useful, @apache/incubator-annotator has retired from Apache incubation and I would guess that everyone who made major contributions would be happy to see any amount of that reworked into something useful here. Don't hesitate to reach out if there's any way I can be helpful in discussing roadmap.

[BigBlueHat]

First, I'm super glad to hear someone has time and attention and interest to get this project back on it's feet!

Second, here's a short list of things I wish had gone differently with the Apache Annotator incubation attempt--for learning from history as this project charts a new course:

1. we didn't start it early enough--during the Web Annotation communities most active time
2. too few people (see point 1) came along for the ride
3. commitments/intentions were diffused by job/attention changes
4. people/groups who said they'd participate didn't/couldn't
5. we tried to move the party...but didn't hang enough signage...

Third, given the above, I'd highly recommend whatever the next steps you have planned, @rufuspollock, involve as many people as possible, build momentum, set a vision and some goals, and herd the cats together as often as possible. Ideally, diffuse the governance structure so it's as flat and resilient as possible.

We thought we had that last one sorted at Apache...but with only 3 of us who's lives were taken over by non-Annotation day jobs and/or hobbies, it fizzled...especially given we'd missed the high watermark moment (the Web Annotation WG and spec work at the W3C).

So, I'm 👍 on anyone putting up time/activity here, but it'd be great for any future for annotation technology if it came with some envisioning, etc.

Lastly, there's a high number of related (or near adjacent) projects scattered about here...mostly idle/stalled/unmaintained now. It would be amazing, if whatever fresh coat of pain this space gets does a better job with point # 5 above--get as much buy in from as many places and point all the arrows at the hoped for destination. 😁 Easy peasy. 😜

Thanks for posting here and I look forward to hearing more about your hopes for the future of annotation on the Web (as I still daydream nearly daily about what it could be...)!

Cheers!
🎩

[mitar]

Amazing. I was also active years ago in annotation space and just these days I was again thinking about this and went to check the progress. I am glad to see that there is some interest here.

[mitar]

Personally, I would need only nice out of the box anchoring/remediation library, ideally Web Annotation Data Model compliant), not whole UI and data persistence. So if I could turn a page selection into a (standard) JSON and then giving that JSON back to get back a page selection, that would be an amazing library for me. I think adding UI and persistence and identity management is then always too opinionated and hard to reuse. And each tool does it slightly differently or have different focus.

We would probably have to revive dom-text-mapper, too, no?

[rufuspollock]

@tilgovi sorry - i somehow missed your comment (github notifications!)

Really appreciate your openness.

No objection from me. @rufuspollock what are you requesting, specifically? You're already on @openannotation/owners and therefore an admin of this repository. Are you asking for community consent to some specific change, to remove some other folks, or something else?

More looking for official blessing to take some action here and be "owner". I still really want a simple open source annotation system 😉

@BigBlueHat thanks for the tips. personally i'm more here to get something workable again - not herd to many cats. I also think that if there is some activity and actual forward movement people may get involved.

@mitar would love your involved.

@marclaporte

First step here could be fixing the annotatorjs website 🎉

[rufuspollock]

Update: i'm starting to clean out the cobwebs a bit.

[rufuspollock]

Website back up at https://annotatorjs.com/

More work in progress (see docs folder and https://github.com/openannotation/annotator/blob/main/ASSESSMENT.md)

[marclaporte]

I suggest to add a news item here: https://annotatorjs.com/news