Research institutions face a structural gap between institutional knowledge (formal, slow, siloed) and the personal knowledge networks (informal, fast, distributed) of their faculty and students. The Atmosphere is the first infrastructure that can bridge this gap — not by centralising personal knowledge, but by making both layers speak the same protocol.

Part of Building ATScience (Lounge, 14:45-15:50).

(A repost of v4 of workshop proposal published on my wiki, where the latest version can always be found.).

At the top of my mind is the recognition that the Atmosphere's killer app is not Bluesky - it's interoperability. But it's not enough to have some of your staff using interoperable Atmosphere apps - it requires coordination and knowledge management techniques to get the most out of it.

So in this session we'll try to pick up ideas from all the sessions preceding it, and weave together some ideas and practical steps for research organisations seeking to get the most out of the Atmosphere.

I'd really love your ideas before the event so I can give you the floor on the day, so please post a comment here and/or select some text, click "Share via Bluesky" and post your comment or question to Bluesky, adding @mathewlowry.eurosky.social to ensure I spot it ;)

The Atmosphere provides new opportunities for all organisations to better integrate institutional communications, knowledge management and sensemaking with the personal communications, knowledge management and sensemaking of their staff (past, present and future). For educational institutions, moreover, their students may offer another layer of opportunity.

Getting this right could allow your institution to better tap the knowledge and networks of your staff and students, reinforcing research communities and knowledge transfers. There have been several technological solutions to exploiting this opportunity, from centralised knowledgebases to linked data. I want to explore whether the Atmosphere provides better answers.

The key differences are:

The institution doesn't have to own knowledge to benefit from it

Staff/students don't have to donate anything, or even make extra effort to contribute knowledge - it flows frictionlessly from their personal data servers (PDSs) if they choose

When someone leaves your organisation, connections don't have to break.

Exploiting this opportunity fully, however, means interlinking infrastructure (HR systems, website content management and other IT infrastructure) and encouraging/training staff in the use of a variety of Atmosphere apps, from Bluesky to Semble, Margin to standard.site.

I think, however, that this makes it sound harder than it is. Moreover, you don't have to do everything at once - like any programme, one should start small and build over time, learning as you go.

Last November in Berlin for example, I explored what I now see as many organisations' first real step into the Atmosphere: using Bluesky starter packs and custom feeds, an organisation can both create a powerful Bluesky presence and benefit from the trust in their faculty's personal networks to convene highly valuable conversations arounds topics of importance to the institution.

Building on the personal networks of faculty, this can amplify the work and reputation of the institution and its faculty, and help the institution discover new knowledge and build better networks.

More: How newsrooms, scientific institutions & governments can best use Bluesky (November 2025)

The above strategy, however, is building entirely within Bluesky. Benefiting from other apps requires using your institutional website as scaffolding to integrate your community of staff and students, the apps they use, and the knowledge and networks flowing through them.

Your website, in other words, should be much more than just an online brochure - it should become a node in the Atmosphere, and a "homebase" for your institution's community and the knowledge they're sharing and discussing.

When I first started exploring this, I discovered that farming out your website's interactivity to the Atmosphere brings you greater reach and engagement, while radically simplifying your website publishing technology (Simple sites, powerful communities). I suspect this is just the tip of an iceberg.

Note that that pattern only involved standard.site and Bluesky, and there's much more to the Atmosphere than that.

I'm wondering, for example, how an organisation could aggregate its community's use of Semble, Margin, Skysquare and Seams (all being presented in Vancouver) to tap into the community's collective sensemaking and knowledge discovery, and then add value to it somehow.

Similarly, tools like Sill allow individual users to discover knowledge popular with each user's social graph. What would happen if you aggregated this knowledge together in a form of collective listening?

Unsurprisingly there's a lot going on in the Atmosphere for scientific publishing.

An early workshop, for example, will include a presentation of Chive: "a decentralized preprint service featuring threaded review, formal endorsements, and a community-curated field taxonomy - all as portable ATProto records users own".

With Chive, each researcher's record travels with them as they move between institutions, rather than being locked into a single journal or repository. But I think it's fair to say that the institution which hosted that research would like it to appear on their website as well.

Moreover, from the sounds of it a "community-curated field taxonomy" sounds like distributed sensemaking, echoing the collective listening made possible by Sill, but applied to scholarly categorisation rather than news and links.

Similarly, Morning Session 2 will see:

"Automated science coordination with ATProto", which will present ATProto as "a core component of the coordination.network stack... [enabling] direct nano-publishing from the lab bench" -

"atdata: Distributed datasets over atproto", which will explore "how atproto enables a step-change for the use of large-scale, distributed, open, interoperable scientific datasets"

What I love about all of these apps is that while the data on them is owned by the researchers who put it there, it can not only be used on the app itself. The content's on the users' PDSs, and so can also pulled into other apps, where it can be combined with other knowledge from other apps to add further value.

This is where the idea of University website as scaffolding might become useful: with a University's various researchers creating content on a variety of different apps, it might be helpful to bring it all together in a single website, while respecting the researcher's ownership of the data.

As mentioned before, please help me flesh this out before the event - I would be very happy to give you a slot in this workshop.