Dan Whaley is the founder of Hypothes.is, an open-source distributed framework for the collaborative annotation and merit-based filtering of news, legislation, scientific articles, software code, terms of service and many other types of information. His prime motivation in life is to witness what humanity is capable of if it is truly working together.
In 1994 Dan launched the online travel industry, as the coder and entrepreneur who founded the Internet Travel Network (ITN, later renamed GetThere). The first airline reservation made over the web was booked via a server in his living room in 1995. GetThere pioneered a number of the key technical and business concepts in widespread use on the Internet today. It went public in 1999 (NASDAQ: GTHR) and was purchased in 2000 by Sabre, Inc. (NYSE: TSG). GetThere still handles over 60% of the B2B market for online travel services and is one of the largest transaction processing systems in the world.
More recently, Dan spent five years working in climate, and is a founder and team member of the ISIS Consortium, a group of 13 oceanographic and atmospheric research institutions that have come together to explore the role of iron in the ocean, and whether there are opportunities for us to play a more active role in our response climate change.
He has a degree in Rhetoric from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a licensed private pilot, a ham radio operator and an avid inline skater.
I'd love to learn more about how news organizations moderate, listen to, incorporate, and generally rely on reader interaction as part of the newsmaking process. I'd also like to understand better their receptivity to a high-quality, open-source framework for annotation and how that might be integrated into the variety of different work flows inside and outside the newsroom.
It seems clear however, that the news is increasingly shifting beyond the newsroom. That trend seems likely to continue, and perhaps even to accelerate. How are blogs and smaller news teams a part of this evolving equation? How do established news organizations continue to play a role as producers and curators of high-quality content even as other paradigms (flipboard-style social curation for instance) emerge.
