Green Paper Idea

I know I have a laughably microscopic following here. But I have been working on this “Green Paper” for the past few days and I felt the desire to dump it at least somewhere online to hear some feedback on it. I think it can be an interesting idea, and would love to just hear the ideas about it.

The name LEAF stands for Literature Economics Anthropology & Futures, as I first read about from this tweet here. With that title encompassing a large amount of the human existence, but at the same time having a fairly understood epistemological approach to that human existence, I am hoping to help create, or at least find if there exists, a community to share information, ideas, or memes in this vein. Relaxed but informed, it will hopefully be a community driven by curiosity and a light-hearted sense of humor. Though I state it in the piece itself, this has just been typed up during my commute recently so it is nothing special to look at, it is just the idea that matters here:

Green Paper - LEAF News
Literature
Economics
Anthropology
Futures or Futurology

In recent years I have had a bit of a struggle to identify online communities that share some tenants of my academic-leaning worldview. Far from the elitist Ivory Tower opinions coming from places like Quora or, god forbid, Facebook, I have often hoped to find a community where memes about Hegal, a podcast about the anthropological importance of 90 Day Fiance, and “BreadTube” style videos would all be shared to equal enjoyment. Furthermore, I have often wished to see the highlighting of the Personal Academic genre of writing: a personal meta analysis of a few studies someone has read, a reflection of Greek Philosophical notions present in Frozen II, a book review of a recently released textbook. Many individual scholars can have great and exciting ideas about such things, but due to the slow-moving and intimidating process of academic publishing, they are stuck in the blogosphere or, worse, the author’s personal notebooks. Looking at communities online such as MetaFilter, Lobste.rs or Hacker News, I was rather envious that the Social Sciences and Humanities lacked such an active and interesting community. And, thus, an idea to create one was born.

Leaf News – tentative name – modestly wishes to become a central forum or launch page for those of semi-academic inclination. Leaf News does not wish to be heavily academic, as it wishes to maintain as much of a neutrality as possible (though it is never possible to be truly neutral). Utilising simple influences from pages such as Hacker News from Y Combinator or StackExchange styles of news and community.

Being built upon phpbb and hosted on very affordable cloud server hosting, the aims of the group are modest in scope. Simple bulletin board styles, like that of the Golden Years of Web 1.0, will provide the foundations of the community with a taxonomy of sections that is open to discussion. Some ideas for sections and subsections include:

Leafsheets – a section that will provide community edited and contributed “one pagers” in a certain field, specialisation, or topic. Part summary, part meta-analysis and bibliography for further reading, these LeafSheets will be able to be shared easily outside of the network, and due to their collaborative character, will be updated as consistently as the community dictates. These sheets can focus upon a broader specialisation, for example Space Archaeology, or can be geared towards specific theories or findings in a reactionary fashion, that is, as a response to a media highlight of an idea (Younger Dryas or Coronavirus, for instance).

Discussion of news and current events are encouraged on almost all social media. Leaf News will not be different here, allowing for the sharing of links and developments pertaining to a wide variety of news – though if the target demographic is reached these stories will remain political or academic in character. What Leaf News can offer in this area is perhaps views on Industry-level news or perhaps even OSINT for discussion of breaking news. The focus of news would come from those who know what the breaking news within a field is, and to share those larger to those willing to understand them, but who would otherwise probably not hear of them until they have matriculated through the deep Journalism of the Academy loophole.

For more personal discussions, there will remain dedicated community areas for discussions of cinema, book reviews, video game theory (#archaeogaming), and, of course, the fabled off-topic section of the boards.

More uniquely, Leaf News will hope to one day promote file sharing for those lacking institutional access to academic journals or paywalled journalism. Though we do not wish to become a piracy website (there are plenty others anyway) the pillars of Freedom of Information and Privacy, much like those of the International Pirate Party, will be lauded by Leaf News.

I am open to any and all criticism, feedback, ideas, collaboration, or even just some websites that are already doing this better than I am envisioning. If this ever takes off, there could exist ideas to build it out more (with help from proper web developers) and added features. I do wish to keep this network as open-source as possible, not wishing to monetise it in any way shape or form (if it gets large enough, I might personally ask for a few dollars once in a while, but that is a large if) and I have no interest in Paid Accounts or similar ideas.

This was hastily written on a few train rides between work, but I would love to hear any ideas from the community, I have a hard time imagining I am the only one who wishes to see something like this.