01 / 09
The Emergence of Shared Meaning in Hypermedia Networks with No Central Gravity.
Case: Hypertext Conference 2026
02 / 09
Hypertext’s unfinished revolution
The Web made publishing open. It did not make collaboration open.
We can link documents, but we still struggle to build durable shared meaning across people, tools, communities, and time.
TRANSCLUDED · TED NELSON · EXACT BLOCK ↗“The Web is intrinsically broken: the links go only one way, you can't link to spans of things, you can't link to parts of things, you can't quote things.”Ted on the web · Xanadu’s Creator at 60 · The New York Times, 1997
03 / 09
The gravity we acquired
Central platforms now control:
- identity
- conversation
- discovery
- memory
- tooling
- ownership
Although effective at large-scale distribution and attention capture, these systems restrict ownership and limit the possibilities for human collaboration.
04 / 09
What are the problems from today’s Web?
- How can we connect and associate without limitation?
- How can we keep ownership of our knowledge without giving it away to a central platform or gatekeeper?
- How can we prevent AI from having us building in closed boxes?
- How can we build our own communities without being trapped in a server?
- How can we bootstrap our own tools to help knowledge communities share meaning better?
05 / 09
A Network with No Central Gravity:
No single authority controls identity, addressing, storage, or interaction.
We need more than an open link base. We need hypermedia objects that can move across the Internet without losing identity, authorship, version history, or links.
- documents are signed by authors
- object operations are sync locally or remote following the same protocol and schemas.
- protocol and schemas can be extended to invent new resources
- versions are immutable
- content is be replicated across peers
- each user has their own graph
- many tools can interpret the same protocol
Objects can exchange messages and interact directly, whether hosted locally or synchronised across peers. Coordination emerges from protocols and shared representations rather than centralised infrastructure. Control is not anchored to any specific server, platform, or authority.Gabo Beaumont · Mark Anderson · HT ’26 paper
06 / 09
How Shared Meaning Emerges
Engelbart's Augmentation Conceptual model: It is still valid
Engelbart's augmentation framework provides a pragmatic model of human augmentation, defining the co-evolution of tools, language, and practices.
We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework · 1962
- Conversation, where communities engage in argumentation, express perspectives, and negotiate shared understanding;
- Concept creation, where concepts are introduced and refined, serving as tools for the augmentation process;
- Structure formation, where knowledge emerging from these interactions is captured and organised into hierarchically open hypertext documents and ontologies;
- Reorganisation, where structures evolve as understanding deepens and knowledge emerges as knowledge output.
The construction of shared meaning within intellectual communities is not static, but an ongoing process shaped by continuous categorisation, negotiation, and restructuring during argumentation.The Emergence of Shared Meaning… · Abstract · Gabo Beaumont & Mark Anderson
07 / 09
Hypertext Conference 2026 as the case
What would it look like to apply Engelbart’s augmentation process to the Hypertext Conference?
What if a conference were not just an event, website, or proceedings volume, but a living hypermedia knowledge space?
Examples:
- papers connected to discussions
- comments as reusable context
- sessions linked to questions and themes
- future conferences inheriting structured memory
- other communities able to reuse and extend the knowledge
08 / 09
To support shared meaning, open hypermedia needs:
- Web of Trust — people own their identity and social graph
- Provenance and Digital Rights — authorship, versions, and reuse are traceable
- Unbreakable Links — references survive across servers, tools, and time
- Fine-grain linking — every entity down to a character can be addressed
- Bootstrapping: Building Tools for Thought — Apps, Views, Tools interpret the same protocol of blobs
09 / 09
Questions for the Hypertext community
- What is the goal of the community?
- What should our knowledge repository help answer?
- How should papers, conversations, and debates connect?
- Is Hypertext a community of communities maybe?
- Is the Hypertext Conference the central node of all hypertext practioners accross the world universities?
- Shouldn't other hypertext communities be able to interact and reuse our knowledge.
- Should our knowledge repositories help train hypertext practioners?
The unfinished revolution of hypertext is not only better links. It is giving communities the ability to think together without surrendering their knowledge, identity, or tools.