  The web has become a dominant epistemic environment, influencing people's
beliefs at a global scale. However, online epistemic environments are
increasingly polluted, impairing societies' ability to coordinate effectively
in the face of global crises. We argue that centralized platforms are a main
source of epistemic pollution, and that healthier environments require
redesigning how we collectively govern attention. Inspired by decentralization
and open source software movements, we propose Open Source Attention, a
socio-technical framework for "freeing" human attention from control by
platforms, through a decentralized eco-system for creating, storing and
querying stigmergic markers; the digital traces of human attention.
