Goal

The goal of the experiment is to make conference proceedings and research papers conversational within a hypermedia network with no central gravity.

Instead of treating proceedings as static PDFs published in a central repository, each paper becomes a living hypermedia object that can be commented on, cited, transcluded, discussed, and republished across independent knowledge nodes.

Core Idea

Each author has their own knowledge node. This node may be hosted on the conference infrastructure, for example:

author.ht26.hyper.media

or on the author’s own domain, for example:

author.com

In both cases, the author controls their identity, authorship, and publication space through hypermedia keys. The conference does not become the central authority of the network; it simply provides shared infrastructure for the proceedings.

Submission and Publication Process

Create a Hypermedia Account

The author creates an account on:

ht26.hyper.media

This generates the author’s hypermedia identity and cryptographic keys.

Create an Author Site

The author creates a personal site for their conference contributions, for example:

author.ht26.hyper.media

Authors who already operate their own server may instead publish from their own domain.

Export the Paper

The author exports their paper from Overleaf or another writing environment into Markdown.

Open the Submission Interface

The author goes to:

https://ht26.hyper.media/submit

Import the Markdown File

The author imports the Markdown version of the paper into Seed. The paper becomes a structured hypermedia document, composed of addressable blocks rather than a single static file.

Publish the Paper

The author publishes the paper on their knowledge node. The published version becomes part of the conference proceedings network.

Conversations Begin

Readers, reviewers, organizers, and other authors can comment on specific sections, paragraphs, claims, figures, or references. Discussion is anchored directly to the paper rather than separated into external channels.

Cross-Node Syncing

The syncing and linking layer handles comments, citations, mentions, and transclusions across servers. A comment made from one node can reference a paper hosted on another node, while preserving authorship, provenance, and attribution.