Kendraio

@Jon Richter Thanks for all the great pointers. There is some really good synergy with all these.

I really must update the repo descriptions and Kendraio App Features page. We are no longer using Drupal for main development. Our main website is Drupal but that's not where our main development is happening. We are using Angular for Kendraio App. We could have used any PWA framework but for various reasons choice Angular. We are building an App first and foremost. It has to be able to run locally and in offline mode. There may be a scenario where each person has the Kendraio App running on their multiple devices and headless in the cloud – each acting as an agent for the personal collective.

In the Kendraio world, Adapters and Flows are configuration (currently JSON) not code so no need to push a new version of the App (through the app stores) to integrate with a new service. We are not integrating any service provider SDKs – which they are so fond of producing – that way lies bloat and we have to stay lean.

We are building the App: interface first. This is about humans doing what they do now but better and more efficiently. So this is much less about automation and much more about how humans interface with their online life. One thing we've found is that most human interaction is about listing stuff they have or want, performing an action on it, adding a new one or editing an old one. And I want the same interface no matter what service I am interacting with. And I want to control the interface.

In my ideal world I have one "App" where I manage all my online interaction. Yes, I know this is just an analogy for a semantically aware world. But that world is not there yet. So, we have to "fake" it. But I think the world is there enough (with APIs) to do this. And regardless I want to control my own data and my own interface.

And yes I am now intrigued about how we align Adapters and Flows with other projects which have equivalents. And at least have a way to translate between them.

Yes I think that #smalldata is better than #littledata. I was looking for the opposite of "big" but little could be sparse but small could be lots of tiny things and, of course, it iss beautiful. 🙂

I second the notion that it is small data that we are aiming here for.

I'm receiving interested feedback by practitioners from the field, so your app seems to resonate with people out there.

For me personally, the technological underpinnings are of much more interest. I see that you remained on the drupal path (kendra_home, kendra_hub)and use its API mode to drive a web-native app, neat.

After reading through many of the links, it appears to me you are building an automation platform/workflow engine like Apache Airflow, grappe.io / https://github.com/assemblee-virtuelle/Semantic-Bus, using serverless "lambda" components on now.sh as adapters in an ETL pipeline, which brings specific features for the music business domain.

Indeed the Signpost with mapping vocabularies similar to what dswarm.org / demo.dswarm.org does is of high interest.

What would a data browser do for you, i.e. visualise data as Apache Superset does?

I'm interested in seeing where this conversation goes, esp. with aligning data models and protocols.

Hi @pospi thanks for all the info. I will see if it makes sense to me but I'll also pass this on to my devs. My takeaway is to implement GraphQL in Kendraio App! ;-) In terms of coding/language/framework, I wouldn't get hung up on it. Yes, we are building in Angular right now. It's given us some speed of development. But I don't think we are religious about it. One point of interest might be: we have taken a solemn oath not to include a service provider's SDK within the App. Otherwise we'll bloat before we've even started. So, I think I'm correct in saying, as far as we're concerned we are only interested in API/protocol definitions and endpoints and secrets and we'll configure the Adapters and Flows with all the logic. That way we can add new service provider APIs without the need to push an update through the app stores. That way anyone can add or modify the Adapters and Flows and share them to others. Cheers!

@Lynn Foster @pospi reading between the lines, it could be that if Kendraio App could speak GraphQL then it may alleviate the issue. I'll check out with my devs if that is feasible. Would it be better for us to speak native GraphQL?

@Daniel Harris and all, sorry I've been totally tied up for several days, but will happily wade through everything here soon and catch up. Just a quick note. I don't mind adding titles to all the data elements in the VF json-schemas. Manual atm (as you can tell by "sybmol", aack), but that's ok. :) Or maybe we'll come up with something automated, thanks for looking into it @pospi .

Hey @mike_hales I'd love to see your design blueprint. Do you have mockup screens of what it looks like? I mean how do people interact with systems in your utopia? I'd love to see what those look like. If not, I can help you design them, yes? It's from the human interface that I understand what people are talking about.

Thanks Daniel. I like the idea but I have a monthsworth of thinking and writing commitments that I have to get some order into, before I can afford to go into free fall 😕 Fun, another time. Do come back on this.

Cool @mike_hales . I would like to a call and document party with you. It's where we have a Zoom call and talk through the various vectors that have come up here and write these down in the document and give our opinions on them. I think it would be useful and fun for both of us. Yes?

Thanks Daniel for taking this time and moving through my load of stuff. Lots to digest - and I likewise have a lot of slow reading and responding on my plate. So perhaps no more responses from me for a while - you’ll note that while you were replying I added further points in other comments!

I appreciate the manner of your responding and likewise hope for dialogue and practical alignment, if not agreement or full approval. For now, best wishes.

PS Metaphysics . . I don’t invoke ‘masses’, quite the opposite: “the future is a pluriverse” of many lives lived in many ways. It’s just that I promote a mutualist, not an individualist, engagement. And ‘realism’ isn’t supposed to mean buckling-under to what’s dominant, it’s supposed to mean the very largest (poetic, dreaming) imagination that mobilises absolutely all capabilities and takes the fullest account of how big and weighty (and often toxic) stuff in fact is even if it was well-intended and seemed to be under control. It’s a pessimist trouble-scanning layer on top, with a profound optimist layer beneath.

I certainly get the intent, and the need, for ‘small data’ tools that an individual actor can use to ‘scrape sense’ off-of platforms that were not designed to present the desired, mashed-up perspective and meet that particular need, in that particular location. That’s how the world is, most of it wasn’t designed to meet the particular need that you or I happen to have right here. But I don’t support the basic anarcho-libertarian, object oriented ideal of a universe of monad-agents, each autonomously owning and explicitly (perhaps algorithmically) manipulating a system of private assets. To that extent, I regard the whole semantic web project as deeply problematic.

It’s not that we don’t need such tools. But this is not the world imo we need to live in, it’s the world that we need to escape from (of privatisation, of small vision, of fantasies of 100% control over objects via super-smart objects that scrape and crawl the web). So . . we also need the equivalent of Big data delivered by public platforms, which face platform users (publics, confederations, communities, activist formations, mutuals, associations) with mirror-analytics on the entire collective and its major components and the place within that of the individual actor, rather than serving platform owner-exploiters only, as current, commercial-platform, Big Data is designed and funded to do.

It’s called Commons. Everybody contributes to what is in the commons (data, explicit metadata, tacit traffic data), everybody mobilises & enjoys what is commoned, everybody directs and regulates the commoning: not as a pyramid of autonomes but as mutualised participants in collectives, in which stewarding and mutual aid rather than ownership and control are primary. Commons of data and metadata are not at all the same thing as universes of powerfully tooled-up individuals? Commons of skilfully stewarded material are what our species and other species need, not a fully digitised supermarket of traded property and tooled-up shopper-vendors. That’s what online commodity trading does, for goodness sake - and who trusts that trustless system?

We need both projects running alongside each other. Where are the big data commons projects?

Hi Mike,

This looks intriguing, thanks Daniel. After checking out your links, here are a couple of Qs. Pardon my lack of understanding, I’m a culture hacker and ’new economy’ activist, rather than a code hacker or tech wannabee.

I really appreciate that you took the time to investigate. Thanks for all your questions. I'll go through one by one.

I don't think there's one way to get to utopia. And there is safety/resilience in many ways being pursued simultaneously. And better still if all those "ways" interconnect and are complimentary and overlap too.

I am a slow reader and writer. I tend to read through everything many times to check and recheck. So, if you send me a big message then it will take me a while to respond. That's why I prefer small messages. It's also why I prefer building documents collaboratively rather than messages/email. I love talking about the content of a document – then we are collaboratively building a common creation. And then that document becomes a resource for others to use/read. Just so you know.

Your questions are deep. But there's no way I can give you all the info you need in one shot.

Me? I don't code. I studied art for one year at Camberwell. Didn't do a degree. Phew! ;-) Then worked in video as a lowly tape-op. Then started an ISP in the mid 90s with some friends. Lucked out. Sold it. Been Kendraio and many other projects ever since. Yes, I've spread myself thin. And that could be frustrating for people. But I like relationships and building them. That's what I'm doing now. Onwards...

When I found the Internet I fell in love because it was the same peer to peer construct that I'd been creating with interconnecting matchstick sculptures. Then realising that the Internet is an open protocol – a language. I fell in love with that too. Then I thought we should have open protocols for everywhere. Then I spent 20 years trying to get the media/music industry to build an open protocol. But along the way I realised that it wasn't really the open protocol part that I was interested in but the benefits and freedoms that it brings me and others as sovereign human beings. I want to be in control of my life. So, we started building interface first. And realising that the Semantic Web was difficult to build I wondered how we could get there another way. By meeting people at their own doorstep. Luckily, many companies have APIs but they are all using different objects and methods. What if I could do the translation within my own app? Then they wouldn't need to change...

• What kind of organisation are you? A coop? A startup with commercial venture funding? What kind of ownership and governance structure of the company, and what kind of assets? (Obviously code product is open source.)

Kendraio Foundation is a UK company limited by guarantee (not by shares). Hence, there are no shares to sell and so no investment can be made. I am the sole director and sole signatory to the legal construct. Assets are just code and all open source on GitHub. Yes, that can bring up governance issues but we'll deal with that when it becomes a deal breaker. It hasn't yet AFAIK.

D’you have a business plan

No, it seems like we are working from more of a place of having a grand vision and seeing what iterative steps can be taken to get there. But the grand vision is not fleshed out totally in any one place. So, yes, I get your comments about lack of transparency. It's not intentional. More just the way it has grown.

and does it involve core revenue

No, no revenue model. Phew! I can pay developers if I have money from grants, sponsorship or donations. And that's that. We are funded by grants and sponsorship and when there's no money development stops and we take a break. That's the story so far but hopefully people will see the value and the universe will provide consistent funding from now on. Funding so far:

https://www.kendra.io/funding

from specific services added on to the opens-source code, which are labour- and skill-intensive or rooted in proprietary process knowhow?

Hence: nope.

Why is info on Kendraio-the-venture (which needs material resources and funding) - as distinct from Kendraio App, the code repo - not on your website?

Because no one ever asked before. And also because it's very very simple. But it's there:

https://www.kendra.io/orgs/kendraio-foundation

Is it that you believe that open source code output is a sufficient definition of the nature of a project, on which folks might decide to foster links and contribute collaboration?

I don't believe or not believe. There is only so much time in the day and we are generally responding to who makes suggestions or asks questions. So, thanks for yours.

imo this is not so, the story is a bigger one.

I agree. I have seen far too many "open source" projects being sold (they were hosted by for profit companies) and then forked by the community leaving multiple and duplicated effort. Which I guess is OK given my earlier statement about multiple ways. But it just seems like wasted effort. 

• What would a user actually do with the app and its scripted variants? This doesn’t seem obvious. “A personal mashup engine” is a description that seems wthout an obvious meaning - mashing-up what, why, what for?

You're right. It's not obvious. If you'd tried explaining a web browser to people in the early 90s they won't understand. Look up IPaaS. I only found the term a week ago. I'm learning so much on the job. These IPaaS are systems that businesses are using to connect with each other: to interoperate. I now realise that I want to bring the power of those IPaaS systems to individuals and groups – from cloud to app. Also, have a look at IFTTT and Zapier. These are building blocks. But they are all services and so can be switched off. I want to use tools that can't be switched off. As long as the Internet stays switched on. ;-)

A dashboard “for rights owners . . enabling users to manage and track their digital media assets [and] collaborations” is a description here that’s not transparent to someone who isn’t in the commercially-exploitable rights business. For example, not transparent to a commons developer

Do I? Don't I? Do I? Don't I? Go down the rabbit hole of conversational techniques? I could let it go but then is that an opportunity missed? Have you asked me for this? I feel into my body and I am nervous because I don't want to create antagonism. So, I'm taking a chance, that we can talk about "talking about". Because I find it fascinating. I am interested in the power of language and how we use it. So this might be off topic but so be it. I find I expand when asked a question. And I contract when told about other people who think or react in some way to something I'm involved in or have responsibility for. As I understand it "invoking the masses" is a conversational technique that is used to gain power by proxy where an unspecified number of unspecific people are used to justify an argument. The technique is based on the fact that these "people" are not in the conversation and they cannot be questioned nor negotiated with – they are an immovable block. But we're just having a gentle conversation and finding out about each other. I value your opinion. I don't need you to justify your opinions by citing others that agree with you, just so you know.

That said, any open source developer knows exactly what rights are about. Oh dear, am I invoking the masses too? ;-) Open source licenses are deep legal constructs that only work because there is are solid legal frameworks in our world.

All that said, I hear that you don't understand what the heck I'm talk about. And that's OK. We can work together to put it in language that you can understand. I'm up for doing that work.

It is the choice of any person to decide how they want to live their life. If they want to sell their creations then great. If they want to give it all away then great. If they want to do a bit of both then great. I want and desire people to be free to decide who they are and what they do. And I want and desire to assist in that process.

or a person who believes that digital media can’t be exploited as commercial assets without being tied to associated, chargeable, custom labour services or process technologies that are supplier-specific, and in that sense non-public, if not actually proprietary.

There's a lot of juice in what you are saying and I really hope that we can get to a point where we can get an understanding going because I think it would be beneficial to both of us.

I'm not trying to tell anyone what they can do with their creations. I love all art and I want to support all artists/creators in doing what they want to do. In fact, I want to support all people in self organising, whether as individuals or collectives or sometimes in between. I want to see interoperability and data portability and open protocols and APIs everywhere. I want people to be able to do what they want to do. I want technology to enable that freedom of expression and ideas.

• What documentation exists, for the broader ‘new’ interpretation that you offer above, of Kendraio “in any environment and any sector. Hence #databrowser”? There doesn’t seem to be any such documentation on your site, which seems to be cast in terms of the original narrower vision.

Yes, that is true. I'm only selectively talk about the bigger vision within environments where I know they will be more appreciated – like this one! Also, this revelation that what we are building is bigger than originally thought, is very recent. I just haven't had time to update much text. But also I'm cautious and I would much rather have conversations like this right now than launching big bold statements that I'm not even sure are true. So, peer review and peer testing is what I want to do now.

impute a generic relationship between #data and ‘rights/assets’: how do you make this bridge? ‘Rights/assets’ is a quite specific (propertarian, individualist) framing, while ‘data’ typically invites a far broader, less value-laden interpretation.

There are many opinions. It's all data I guess and some people will see value in some data. And maybe they'll share one of their home grown carrots for a song?

Is the app only useful for folks trying to trade in (develop revenue streams from) digital media within a larger, dominant, commercial, digital media market?

I guess that's for us all to decide. I see that there is a possibility that the app (and apps like it) could become our main interfaces for dealing with services we use.

Most people making most money these days are doing through large aggregator constructs. I want to allow them to experiment with new, more fluid, ways of doing things whilst still working with these old/current constructs. An easeful bridge rather than an all or nothing leap. 

Is the #data you refer to (to be browsed by media asset-owners using Kendraio App) the specific spectrum of data published in the apps/interfaces of market players in rights-based media industries, accessible thro their APIs? Or is it the data accessible thro the API of any platform - in which case, this needs some use cases before a nonhacker might begin to imagine its significance?

Yes, we need use cases. Yes, we need collaborators. Yes, we need to have conversations. Yes, this is a journey of discovery.

For example, instead of me buying stuff from Amazon – yes I use Amazon, it's so darn convenient, sorry – I want to connect to 100,000 shops directly from my own private app. And it's very doable. Most of those shops have an API because most of them use an off the shelf shopping/cart system and most of those have APIs.  

Maybe that’s what you’re inviting us to provide: use-cases, where Adapters and Flows might be scripted and widely shared? In that case, I feel Adapters and Flows need more description than your site provides, of a more expansive, less tech kind: use-case oriented rather than oriented to API script-hacking.

What I'm really enjoying at the moment is building lots of mini projects with people. Some of these are with organisations. Some of these are with individuals. In each case we are creating use cases which we can build too. That's what gives me the most joy: actually building what we are dreaming about with more and more people and the app becomes more and more useful. It is through building and then using what we have built that inspiration happens and lessons are learnt. So, we are learning about where we are going at every iteration. It's art I tell you! ;-)

Overall, I have a sense of Kendraio as a venture that’s basically code-oriented (with UI-hacking apparently at the core) rather than oriented to the various practical worlds of non-tech, non-dev folks. And perhaps oriented to attempts at revenue thro the enclosure of digital media assets - or of auxiliary services associated with such assets - rather than to the construction of commons of digital media. Am I mistaken Daniel, in either of these perceptions?

I don't want to tell you or anyone how you should live your life. What I want to do is provide you with tools to make it easier for you to make choices. Is this tool going to help you make choices? How will we find out? It's a ride.

It would be great to feel that there was a core here, of technology for person-centred, locally focused, ‘small data’ derived by data-scraping from corporate web platforms, and easily useable by non-hacker (non-scripting) users in diverse communities,

What would it "feel" like? What would that feeling feel like? And what would give you that feeling? Can you describe it in human terms? As in: my hand touches a screen. And drags an icon. And creates a search. And shares it with others... If we can dream about what the interface does then we can build it from interface first.

in significant opposition to the Big Data approaches of the platform-capitalist corporations we love to hate. 

I don't hate anyone or anything. I love everyone and everything. We are all doing the best we can given the information that we have to hand. I'll grant you that sometimes it seems that the "ones in power" seem to have very limited "information" indeed. ;-) And, yeah, I think they do. But we are all humans. And if we want to live on a planet that has a human sustaining sustainable biosphere – and I do – then we all have to win. The strategy of how we get to utopia is just as important as the blueprint for utopia itself. The means creates the ends. The energetics of positive change are extremely sensitive – everyone has to feel like they are winning. Otherwise people feel resentful and the whole cycle starts again. We need balance. Love is the only way here. For sustainability. That's logic by the way. Not hippy emotional. Just raw logic.

Is the potential of Kendraio really THAT big?

What if I could shop the world through my own interface that I could configure to look how I wanted? What if I could change all my notification settings for all my services in bulk on one page, with one click? What if I could see/filter all my outstanding issues/tasks on all my platforms in my own app? What if I could administer all my financial accounting in one app that I was in control of (that wasn't a service)? You tell me!

Is it the case, that you need more applications before you know the answer to this?

Yes.

Isn’t there something in the huge algorithmic capability and traffic-scraping throughput of the corporate back-office systems and server farms, that makes for a huge assymetry here?

If I understand your question then there is a lot on enterprise tools to riff on.

It would be good to be realistic in our expectations?

Interesting statement, no question, no statement, no question... Whatever it is, it's interesting. Again, I'm calling you on a conversational device called "let's be realistic". ;-) No, let's not! At all. Ever. Being realistic is limiting and keeps us in our boxes. We cannot know what is possible. But to dream is a wonderful thing. And to be lucky enough to build the dreams is incredible. Artists don't start a creation with the idea of being realistic. They dream big. And sometimes get some of the way there. And also, let's not have expectations. Expectations only lead to frustration when they are not met. Instead let's have desires. Let's dream big.

And also, let's not do anything one way. Diversity is safety. ;-)

Cheers Daniel

Seems to me that Kendraio Signpost may be of more significance than Kendraio App. Specifically, this seems to be where your speculation about the large impact of the app/architecture might be founded, outside the digital music sector, as regards #data and semantic web in general. @Daniel Harris tell us more about Signpost and translating between ontologies? Ontology is certainly a big deal in ValueFlows @Lynn Foster? Is there documentation of Signpost? Is Signpost funded along with App, or a distinct project, with or without funding and partners?

@Daniel Harris How about a link to your EU funding source/program/grant? Cheers

Later: thanks for your funding link Daniel. You’re doing a whole bunch of Euro grant juggling there! For me, one project and six partners was enough to do my head in! Lots of Southern and Eastern Europe I see - still a strong EU criterion for funding. Do they feel like major partners? - I mean, like, I sense there’s a whole bunch of stuff going on in Turkey.

Thanks for connecting us with this work... it's very exciting! Kendraio looks like the kind of effort that could likely save everyone months of effort, if not years (:

I can see how the project has evolved in the way it has, and I share your perspective that implementation and experimentation at the UI level is where most innovation is likely to occur in the next few years. As you say- interface first, human centric, not service centric. You might be interested in this article from one of the Holochain core devs, or some of our team's reflections on what this implies in terms of system modularity and UI application dependencies.

More broadly, along with ourselves most distributed systems projects I'm seeing are converging on GraphQL as an API interface. This is a great trend as it means that plugging together disparate systems is going to get easier. I have also observed that network-to-network protocol bridging carries a high technical complexity and yields narrow progress. Examples of this can be seen in the development timelines that yielded Ethereum-to-Bitcoin transaction bridges, for example: very slow work for a single pairing, let alone multiple integrations.

So my educated guess is that most multi-platform apps will handle integrations between distributed systems at the UI layer. Much easier to translate between two data formats at the app level than trying to make different internals talk to each other. And that gets easier again if apps are being built to align to the same GraphQL schemas to begin with... indeed, it's just a few lines of wiring to combine multiple data sources once the foundations are laid, and no other application code needs to be modified outside of the schema bindings.

One of the other main goals of the ValueFlows UI project we're just now starting is to remain platform-agnostic. We don't want vendor lock-in at any layer of our stack. It looks like Kendraio is using Angular, and though we aim to support Angular, we want to do this in a way that can also integrate with React and other ecosystems. I have started feelers into the Svelte community to explore what a truly universal UI component build system might look like, but have been unimpressed with the responses so far. We're happy to build Angular or React apps whilst prototyping, but eventually we want this framework to deliver packaged React, Angular, Vue & WebComponents (at a minimum).

Hey @Daniel Harris (: This is really exciting, and prompted me to do something. I haven't pushed one to NPM yet, but if you clone the vf-graphql repo and npm run build you should now end up with json-schema.json that contains a definition for the entire API. I have noticed it doesn't seem to generate title attributes for fields (found 2 different libraries to handle the conversion on NPM; neither added them)... you might want to consider a pre-processing step that injects an "uppercase first" version of the field name as the title for the form to pick up?

This looks intriguing, thanks Daniel. After checking out your links, here are a couple of Qs. Pardon my lack of understanding, I’m a culture hacker and ’new economy’ activist, rather than a code hacker or tech wannabee.

• What kind of organisation are you? A coop? A startup with commercial venture funding? What kind of ownership and governance structure of the company, and what kind of assets? (Obviously code product is open source.) D’you have a business plan, and does it involve core revenue from specific services added on to the opens-source code, which are labour- and skill-intensive or rooted in proprietary process knowhow? Why is info on Kendraio-the-venture (which needs material resources and funding) - as distinct from Kendraio App, the code repo - not on your website? Is it that you believe that open source code output is a sufficient definition of the nature of a project, on which folks might decide to foster links and contribute collaboration? imo this is not so, the story is a bigger one.

• What would a user actually do with the app and its scripted variants? This doesn’t seem obvious. “A personal mashup engine” is a description that seems wthout an obvious meaning - mashing-up what, why, what for? A dashboard "for rights owners . . enabling users to manage and track their digital media assets [and] collaborations” is a description here that’s not transparent to someone who isn’t in the commercially-exploitable rights business. For example, not transparent to a commons developer, or a person who believes that digital media can’t be exploited as commercial assets without being tied to associated, chargeable, custom labour services or process technologies that are supplier-specific, and in that sense non-public, if not actually proprietary.

• What documentation exists, for the broader ‘new’ interpretation that you offer above, of Kendraio “in any environment and any sector. Hence #databrowser”? There doesn’t seem to be any such documentation on your site, which seems to be cast in terms of the original narrower vision. You impute a generic relationship between #data and ‘rights/assets’: how do you make this bridge? 'Rights/assets' is a quite specific (propertarian, individualist) framing, while ‘data' typically invites a far broader, less value-laden interpretation. Is the app only useful for folks trying to trade in (develop revenue streams from) digital media within a larger, dominant, commercial, digital media market? Is the #data you refer to (to be browsed by media asset-owners using Kendraio App) the specific spectrum of data published in the apps/interfaces of market players in rights-based media industries, accessible thro their APIs? Or is it the data accessible thro the API of any platform - in which case, this needs some use cases before a nonhacker might begin to imagine its significance? Maybe that’s what you’re inviting us to provide: use-cases, where Adapters and Flows might be scripted and widely shared? In that case, I feel Adapters and Flows need more description than your site provides, of a more expansive, less tech kind: use-case oriented rather than oriented to API script-hacking.

Overall, I have a sense of Kendraio as a venture that's basically code-oriented (with UI-hacking apparently at the core) rather than oriented to the various practical worlds of non-tech, non-dev folks. And perhaps oriented to attempts at revenue thro the enclosure of digital media assets - or of auxiliary services associated with such assets - rather than to the construction of commons of digital media. Am I mistaken Daniel, in either of these perceptions?

It would be great to feel that there was a core here, of technology for person-centred, locally focused, ‘small data’ derived by data-scraping from corporate web platforms, and easily useable by non-hacker (non-scripting) users in diverse communities, in significant opposition to the Big Data approaches of the platform-capitalist corporations we love to hate. Is the potential of Kendraio really THAT big? Is it the case, that you need more applications before you know the answer to this? Isn’t there something in the huge algorithmic capability and traffic-scraping throughput of the corporate back-office systems and server farms, that makes for a huge assymetry here? It would be good to be realistic in our expectations?

I took a look, but will wait for Lynn or Pospi to respond with more intelligence. In the meantime, thanks a lot, it's a nice demo of your form builder.

But but what, you don't like sybmols? 😉

Hi @Lynn Foster . I'm looking at ways we can take your ValueFlows schema and integrate it with Kendraio App. By way of an initial example I'm taking a JSON representation from your GitHub repo and seeing how our form builder interprets it. If you click on this you'll see what form is generated. If you click on the cog you'll see your JSON schema driving the form. Like this:

What would it take to add titles to all of the JSON elements in the schema? Is it a purely manual thing?

PS: I think "sybmol" is spelt wrong but I don't have the guts to change it on GitHub. 🙂

cc @Bob Haugen @elf Pavlik @pospi