Sorry cannot read the questions in full as I cannot get my sidebar to collapse. I cannot speak for developers but from my perspective the page-based group seems a good starter because it seems more straight forward and is less likely to change in the future but still shows off a hint of the full capabilities of hypothesis.

The mock ups are great. The copyright notice on the bottom of the annotations that the "Annotations can be used freely by anyone for any purpose" sort of defeats the idea of private readership of groups.

Still not convinced that sharing a link will be secure enough for the initial audience of lawyers, educators, researchers that you had in your user stories. Would having the link illicitly allow you to view the annotations without being detected.

This seems a sensible first step as a sort of soft launch but the capability of future progression to groups with limitations on annotators yet public readership will need to be considered in development.

Will be an important part of groups if groups are to to become important in establishing credibility or reputation in publicly visible groups with a limitations on annotators.

Is this stream the annotations in the sidebar or a stream that is independent of the sidebar. This independent stream will be important for inter-page groups if used by say research or educational groups..

I have not explained this part well. It is important so I will try again. In my opinion the way groups are set up is crucial to the development of reputation for annotators on Hypothesis. Annotators’ reputations will be strongly related to the Groups they belong. Trusted groups will need to have private annotator membership that is extended by invitation only but these groups need to be able to choose between public or private readership. Other groups will have different requirements for annotators and readers in terms of the public, private, link mix. Bridge