News Challenge - How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation? - Open Annotations for the Web

"Together, Hypothesis and the W3C propose to deliver the software and standards necessary for sharable, distributed annotations on all Web content, enabling citizens, journalists and publishers to engage with information in a way that has not yet been possible. We will produce a reference implementation that web users can carry with them anywhere in their browsers, and that publishers and journalists can add to web sites.  The concept of a pervasive conversation layer over the Web is as old as the idea of the Web.  With the emergence of the Open Annotation data model and the large community of developers and platforms that are adopting it, we finally are in a place to realize this vision. Our aim is to make this functionality a core part of the Web.   Hypothes.is and the W3C propose to build on recent progress and deliver a fully functional implementation of annotation that works across websites, and enables a threaded conversation model with rich front-end and back-end capabilities.  This implementation will be packaged as a browser-specific extension, and as code that can be embedded natively into pages; it will also provide an annotation server that stores and delivers annotations to clients.  The open-source and distributed nature of the architecture mean that anyone can download and run their own installation for use by their own users or as a service across other websites ..."