We’re all familiar with robots.txt, a standard way to direct the search engine bots to pages we want them to index. A site I stumbled across yesterday adds an interesting twist the idea by introducing a way to give the fleshy non-robotic contributors some love. HumansTXT.org is a simple idea, just a text file (humans.txt) added to the root of the site structure, which lists each person involved in a project along with a summary of what they do.

The humanstxt.org site includes the following instructions for getting set up:

Create a text file called humans.txt (always in lower-case) and make it UTF-8 encoded to avoid issues with special characters and multiple languages.

1. Place a reference to the file in the of the site:
2. For the sake of clarity and to keep a basic visual structure, you can use the headings /*TEAM*/ and /*SITE*/ to separate the human team from other information about the website.
3. Include the following information about every human involved in the project: role, name, contact, twitter, geolocation, etc. Please be aware that you may have to deal with spam if you include email addresses.
4. You can also include additional information about the site, such as the date of the last update (YYYY/MM/DD), its main language, its Doctype and other components, tools and software used on the development.
5. Save the file and place it in your site root.
6. Add the humansTXT button to your site and link it to your humansTXT file.

An example can be found on their site.