where we store articles, white papers, case studies, and other research materials. we crowdsource summaries amongst the team to create a digest of relevent material.

@jmlubin and I were discussing this morning a ‘news summary’ project that would be useful for ConsenSys now, and can also form the basis of a future DApp, called HiveMind. We are all sharing lots of articles amongst ourselves, and it would be a full time job to read and dissect them all. Instead we can split them up and people can claim the articles they want to read and write summaries for them to share with the group.

For the time being, does anyone have suggestions for a collaborative tool to organize this? Of tools that I have used, Asana seems the best, because you can assign/claim articles, and people can easily comment on them, so that we can form discussions around them, and they are automatically dated. However I would prefer us to not have to use a whole new tool. Workflowy seems too difficult because you don’t have user names and you have to add dates and times yourself, although that could be set up beforehand. Joe suggested Github as an option which I am exploring as well. For now I am going to create an inbox where articles that we would potentially want to read are sent, and then add them into a collaborative space.

HiveMind as a DApp: You can imagine a DApp where writers take in news articles from a wide variety of sources and write short pithy summaries. People can subscribe to certain summarizers. You can also get matched with the highest ranked summarizers of certain articles that you want to read.

Eventually I can see a tool that would take an aggregate of articles from your inbox, pulling from daily news summaries (mailing lists, medium, twitter, etc), and even articles your friends have sent you, and places them into a nice user interface where you can decide to read them as you please. They can be ranked accordingly to your preferences, people you follow, and other factors.

Micropayments control spam factors. It’s an interesting layer on top of existing news organizations that fits better with the modern reading lifestyle. And forces writers to be creative in the way that they want to summarize news stories. For a current example of a certain tone of summary that people like — TheSkimm is a daily news summary that captures a certain audience.