Everything Open 2026 – Day 2 – Morning

Peak Text: AI and the Golden Age of Libraries and Archives by Keir Winesmith

  • Finished “EGOT of GLAMs” with latest job
  • Mapping Brisbane
    • 1957 Tram network: based on older tracks, evolved into suburbs. River is fixed
    • Averaged with AI = River + Tramlines
  • Maps of Queensland
    • Merged many maps of Queensland with Model that knows birds.
  • NFSA (National Film and Sound Archive), Machine Learning and AI
    • Pilot to have AI transcribe etc material in the archive
    • Internal Transparency
  • Principals of NFSA AI project
    • Maintain Trust – Train only on stuff they have copyright
    • Build effectively and Transparently
    • Create Public Value
  • AI = Archival Intelligence
    • or maybe “Average Inputs”
  • Stereograms created by AI
    • Defaults to the small subset that is online
    • Previously was 1900 colonial pictures
    • Now still colonial but Google products a Sanfran street scene
  • The perfect Training Data is what archives have been putting out for years with lots of metadata
  • OpenAi Whisper trained on lots of youtube videos it turns mumbles into “Like and subscribe” and music fade outs turn into “Than you for watching”
  • The new golden age
    • Previous Golden Age was films explosion between the wars
    • 1980s and 1990s of Video games
  • Australian stories are no longer being made on celleloid and now being on social media
  • Thinks as boomers die off Facebook is dying off.
    • Other platforms my die in the next few years
    • New sites just algorithmically created content, not stuff shared by friends etc
  • What does NFSA do in response to how things change
  • Ability to search transcripts mean they can find people taking about something or someone, not just titles
  • Mass Transcript + Graph. References to cultural things like movies, quotes in unrelated documents.
  • Transcribed 18.7 years of content
  • Hope to open up more later in 2026
  • But don’t forget openness got us in this mess in the first place
    • Need to think before publishing stuff, since now it will be ingested by everyone

The Evolution of the OCI Artifact Revolution by Andrew Block

  • Modern Eras of Computing
  • What technologies came out of the cloud native era – Containers
  • The power of containers
    • Resource Management
    • Consistency
    • Speed
  • The Container format wars – docker vs rkt
    • Docker Ecosystem tied closely to Docker Inc
  • The Open Container Initiative
    • Image Spec, Runtime Spec, Distribution Spec
    • “Containers are just fancy files and fancy processes”
  • Image Manifest
    • Just a json file
    • Media Type header will come up later
  • Expanding beyond Container images
    • OCI can store Artifacts which are content types other than container images
    • Registry must explicitly support it (most of them do now)
  • New stuff you can store
    • Signature
    • Software packages ( .jar, rpm )
  • OCI Image and Distribution Spec 1.1
    • Released 2024
    • artifactType or mediaType
    • Can refer to other artifacts (ie signature for container) and API supports both directions to discover
  • Benefits of OCI Artifacts
    • Standard
    • Centralised Management
    • Reuse existing tools
    • Evolve existing practices
  • What Projects use it
    • Helm and Homebrew both use it.
    • Notary, Sigstore, etc use it to store signations etc of other Containers
    • Argo CD and Flux CD store manifests within OCI artifacts. Easier to give prod servers access to OCI registry rather than git repo
    • Kubernetes OCI Image Volume – Not exactly a OCI Artifact
  • Tooling
    • skopeo and crane let us inspect OCI metadata
    • ORAS – Create and manipulate OCI artifacts
    • The Evolution of the OCI Artifact Revolution by Andrew Block
  • AI
    • Currently uses git, hugging face, Object Storage to store stuff
    • Challenges. Several types of content, lack of standards ways to store and use
    • ModelPack is potential standard solution
    • Leverages stuff already in OCI
  • Demo with helm (using report software called “zot”)
    • Can push chart to oci: url
  • ORAS
    • ORAS can push a simple artifact . Even a simple plain text file

README: The Developer’s forgotten love letter by Swapnil Ogale

  • Technical Writer at AWS
  • “Customers will jump straight to the README, not to your comprehensive docs” – A Senior Developer
  • Story about how a powerful tool with no documentation doesn’t get any traction. A better documented tool that is less powerful gets more traction.
  • It is the first impression of your product. Sometimes the only impression
  • Anatomy of a good README
    • The Hook
    • Getting Started
    • Examples
    • Beyond the Basics
    • Building Trust
  • The Hook
    • Start with user’s pain point, not your technical achievement
    • Problem Solver not Technical Jargon
  • Getting Started
    • What do I install, what version, command that wroks, One good example, where to get help
  • Beyond the Basics
    • Full Docs, How to contribute
  • Building Trust
    • License information
    • Maybe Contributor list
  • Readme driven development
    • Design for users first
    • Think like a user
  • The User Journey
    • What is this?
    • Will it solve my problem?
    • Can I try it easily?
    • What if I get stuck?
  • The first 30 seconds
    • What makes them stay
    • Clear problem statement
    • Easy setup instructions
    • One problem example
  • What works for users?
    • Write like explaining to a friend
    • Use Screenshots and gifs when helpful
    • Break up walls of text
    • Test on fresh machine
    • update when things change
  • What frustrates users – anti-patterns
    • “It is easy, just”
    • Assuming I know the jargon
    • “See the source for details”
    • Installation steps that don’t work
    • No examples
  • Some Templates and Tools
  • AI Tools
    • Loses personality
    • Make sure it has examples
    • Has example AI prompt and wrapper script that we will share
  • Key Takeaways
    • Users are not lazy, they’re busy solving problems
    • “Obvious” is not obvious to them
    • Examples > Explanations
    • Test instructions ohttp://joinbookwyrm.com/n real users
    • README Maintenance is feature work
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