Introduction

The internet and social media bring vast new possibilities for curiosity, ingenuity, creativity and resilience. And during the past two decades they have transformed how we find and share our ideas, information and knowledge.

Search engines with Google as the trailblazer offer the fastest way to find answers to many questions.

Open online encyclopedia exist in many languages. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 and is available in over 300 languages.

Micro blogs such as Twitter, launched in 2006, offer incredible sharing possibilities as well as great retrieval options when hashtags are used in a smart way.

In spite of all opportunities enabled by the internet, the localization of knowledge, as described by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz for the inauguration of the Global Development Network (2000), progresses at a slow speed. Information overload in the major languages, and an insufficient provision of content in most languages and on many topics contribute to a slow learning for more sustainable and inclusive development.

What can we do to make a better use of the internet and social media? The mission of Wikinetix is to promote and demonstrate the joint impact of four digital skills:

  • #tagcoding means that one uses standardized hashtags to relate online information to specific topics in order to structure it and retrieve it easily;
  • #xy2wiki is about creating a wiki that explains the tagcoding hashtags in as many languages as possible;
  • #tag2wiki is about creating, maintaining, and coordinating wikis for development communications;
  • #lean2book is about authoring and publishing e-books that leverage #tagcoding and #tag2wiki wikis.

This e-book has integrated links that make navigating the included reference materials as easy as navigating a wiki. At each level of the content hierarchy are tables of contents with links forward to lower level sections and backward to higher levels. In this way, it only takes three or four clicks to get to the specific content of a part, or to go back to the part from the most specific content.

The #tagcoding - #xy2wiki - #tag2wiki - #lean2book knowledge localization model that is elaborated more in chapter 2.7 offers several features for accelerated knowledge localization and public debate. Whereas #tagcoding is a digital skill within the reach of everyone, the #xy2wiki, #tag2wiki and #lean2book skills require some extra investment of time and means. A #xy2wiki mission is the creation of a multi-dimensional topic wiki in any local language via the topic driven translation of a reference wiki. Once such a wiki is available it can support the curation of content - tagged for a country - into the languages of the country, the discovery of neglected topics, and the rapid provision by translation of new reference content.

Hence, a #tagcoding - #xy2wiki - #tag2wiki - #lean2book movement is a general purpose collaborative counter-measure for the information overload, (epistemic) polarization into bubbles that no longer meet, and other imperfections of the mainstream internet and social media. The proposed coding hashtags and the related provisioning of wikis will empower users in the instructive and productive use of the internet, it will enable the willingness to listen and it will help overcoming the polarizing forces of social media algorithms.

How you will exploit #tagcoding and the other digital skills building upon it, is up to you to explore and learn. It depends on where you are in your personal development and what responsibilities you have been endowed with in business or society. This handbook proposes to be a companion for the first episode in your #tagcoding journey.

Guidance and inspiration on your possible uses of the tags and wikis can also be obtained by exploring one of these open access online resources:

The “coding hashtags” cover topics that are of interest to active and reflective people in all possible professions and areas of study, in all countries of the world, and in all languages spoken.

By #tagcoding social media and online content, we can make it globally discoverable and retrievable as if it was put in everyone’s personal library.

On the internet this library is globally accessible. By using territorial #WWlgu hashtags we can create locally relevant sections in the global online library. The #2030library hashtag and a dedicated part of the Wikinetix website explore this topic in more detail.

If the tagged content is open access, it becomes part of the public part of that #2030library.

As long as there will be social media platforms and search engines supporting hashtags, you, your favourite authors, your students, your teachers and your peers can use coding hashtags to share, discover and retrieve content.

Overview

The second chapter elaborates the reasons for #tagcoding and explains the digital skills that are implied if one wants to scale the practice globally. The desire for a global scaling must be understood as a continuation in the history of the creation and making accessible of knowledge. Some pivotal points in that history are described in chapter three and serve as a background for appreciating the benefits of collaborative #tagcoding and wiki creation.

From the third edition onwards, responding to the vision of a platform for collective intelligence described in chapter 3.6, a more elaborate description of the #tagcoding and #xy2wiki theory of change is provided in chapter 3.10 #Tagcoding and decision making journeys.

The fourth chapter presents a number of online tools that I have created in order to simplify finding the coding hashtag for a specific topic. When I am reading articles and posts on the internet, I use these tools to look up the hashtags that I will add in the comment when reposting (usually retweeting). With these hashtags I can retrieve posts even years after I posted them. So why my memory of a post may be vague or gone, by looking up a topic’s hashtagcode, I can retrieve earlier posts in seconds.

Each of the following six chapters introduces the coding hashtags for a specific topic dimension.

The fifth chapter presents the tagcoding hashtags for the sustainable development goals and targets, and the tools created for looking up these hashtags. Annex 5 lists all goals and targets and includes a hyperlink to an online description for each goal.

The sixth chapter presents the tagcoding hashtags for the classes and divisions of the Classification Of the Functions Of Government (COFOG), and the tools for looking them up. Annex 2 lists all classes and divisions and includes a hyperlink to an online description for each Division.

Chapter seven presents the sections and some of the classes of the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC revision 4), and the tools for looking them up. Annex 3 lists all sections and classes and includes a hyperlink to an online description for each of section.

Chapter eight presents the tagcoding hashtags for the sections, divisions, groups and classes of the Central Product Classification. Annex 4 lists all sections, divisions and groups as well as a few classes. It includes a hyperlink to an online description for each of section.

Chapter nine presents the world wide local government unit “#WWlgu” hashtags and illustrates them for a few countries. Annex 1 lists all countries and territories of the world, each with its ISO country code and their generic coding hashtags for each dimension covered in this handbook: #sdg, #cofog, #isic and #lgu.

Chapter ten lists over five hundred languages with their language codes and gives examples of CPC tags that can meaningfully be combined with a language code. An example is #cpc843 for online content in Afar (aa): #cpc843aa.

The annexes one to five define the hashtags for

The #Tagcoding Handbook: an essential e-book?

In its electronic version, the #tagcoding handbook aspires to be a companion in your exploration of new digital skills that have the potential of transforming how we use the internet and social media. At stake is a digital transformation that equips humanity with tools better suited to tackle the great challenges of our time together.

This handbook provides #tagcoding conventions for a globally shared multi-dimensional topic map with over a hundred thousand topics that matter for development, personal, public, and socio-economic. Codes for sustainable development goals, economic activities, functions of government, can be combined with the codes of countries and local government units so as to form hashtags for specific topics such as fighting poverty in a country, state, district, county or municipality. In fact, depending on the specific interest of the users, a unique tag out of billions can be created to support their knowledge sharing.

In a sense we propose a coordinatization of the topic space, which is similar to the Cartesian coordinate geometry for space and time that we are already familiar with. In the topic space, the topic dimensions are sustainable development goals, economic activities, functions of government, territorial locality and language. The coordinatization of the topic space brings a superior expressive adequacy and computational efficiency in the social sharing, the knowledge localization, and the articulation of shared and differentiated responsibility.

Search in this handbook may be a first step in a broader engagement with systematized content that already includes tens of thousands of wikipages (less than 800 of which are referenced in the annexes of this handbook), or when you feel like sharing a good read, bright idea, or when you need high quality or recent content or discourse on a sustainable development goal or target, a city, a municipality, a sector of industry or a function of government in a country.

After the first edition of this book was published I have looked into ways to provide a substantial part of the information via online #tagcoding pivots.

Generic and country-specific #tagcoding pivots can be consulted via the internet in a growing number of languages.

In addition to the #tagcoding pivots some other online tools have been defined to support the quick and easy discovery of the coding hashtag for a specific topic. Consult #tagcoding guidelines for more information about these tools and additional #tagcoding proposals.

Up next

\#tagcoding: why everyone should do it, and how