Curating the Smol Earth Compedium

The Smol Earth Compendium is created and maintained by a team of volunteer curators. Each curator hosts a small file in a simple format somewhere in Gopherspace or Geminispace, and updates it with URLs and tags as they discover new content. The smol.earth server polls each curator's file once per 24 hours and records new additions. Information from all curators is combined into a single database. After each daily polling of the files, the database is examined for consensus and a new daily "edition" of the Compendium is published. A link makes it into an edition if more than one curator has added it, and the link is published with all the tags which have been applied by more than one curator.

Read more about the curation file format here

Importantly, the entire compendium is republished in precisely the same file format as the individual curator's files it is built from. This means the same or similar software tools could be used to produce a meta-compendium aggregating the Smol Earth Compendium with other, similar projects on topics likely to be of interest to the same audience. In principle this whole workflow scales both up and down to help build decentralised and remixable content directories.