digest-2016-01-20

Welcome to Federated Wiki video chat on 2016-01-20

Attending today:

  • Ward
  • Allen Wirfs-Brock
  • David Ing
  • Paul
  • Donaldt Noyes
  • Mike Caulfield

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Now scraping the whole federation
  • SOLR

Page hoarding?
  • 28,000 pages on local host

Learning Javascript
  • Ward had learned with D3

Mike is building some hacky things, less ambitious than fed wiki
  • Faculty member (French colonial history) wants footnotes, says Wikipedia has it
  • Ward has some writing on footnotes in the past
  • Faculty idiom, backward looking
  • If you want a lengthy footnote, write another page ... but it looks weird

Ward shared screen to show some D3 visualizations
  • Upscale visualization
  • Bundled connections
  • Showed org chart, will show who worked in the company when they joined
  • Hierarchy:  interested in how people are communicating across the hierarchy, mining of job titles across chat rooms
  • Ward started with an example in D3, and rejiggered it to the data set

David talked about Hubzilla, Friendica, Diaspora*

Pods come from Mike
  • Pods were more successful with non-students, than students
  • Students had expectations -- no communications problems to solve
  • Didn't know why you would choose people in your network

Ward showed some pods
  • ward.asia.wiki.org
  • When see recent changes, can see what's going on
  • Temporal view ... but then what I think is important

Mike's innovation:  There needs to be some almost dictatorial control over a pod.  
  • There needs to be a charter, we're in a pod for a purpose
  • What do you need to be a member of the pod
  • Also need a way for people who are reading the pod, who aren't members
  • Whoever owns the site owns the original members of the pod
  • A study group, someone has leadership as owning the roster, then other people can copy that in
  • If Ward kicks out Mike, then he disappears from the community
  • Can specify someone who will maintain a list of members of a community
  • Could pull in a roster from someone else, add some people to the bottom, e.g. Paul could add Mike back in
  • Roster-plugin:  Command-i gives instructions

life.ward.asia.wiki.org -- for an interview that Ward had
  • Created a pod
  • Then can look at recent changes
  • Don't ask me a question, without telling me what you're interested in
  • Books is about the knowledge commons (as opposed life with information liberation)
  • Interview Pod Charter ... Experimental Interview
  • Interest in Elinor Ostrom, so discovered rules

Putting all of the students in one roster really simplified the first day in class
  • Students would all create wikis, and then immediately went into the roster
  • Had little interest in creating their own rosters

David Bovill has been working on videos, could help explain farms
  • Paul was interviewed on tutorials, stepping through Digital Ocean to harden the site

Unhappy people in Wikimedia Foundation, over the last month:  board changes
  • Wikipedia signpost has a take on this
  • After years of trying to address issues of editors falling off, maybe question-and-answer sites are where young people are going
  • That's a direction they wanted to explore, got a Knight Foundation grant, but some directors didn't want directed grants

Connection between rise of Quora and Stack Overflow, and idea of federated wiki
  • Question is the title, then people give answers
  • Attraction: someone can present a really coherent take on something, without arguing about the issue
  • On Quora, get more experts, as they can say something and not bicker on it

A talk at the Wikimedia Foundation, video getting around
  • Stack Overflow has as many editors as Wikipedia
  • How do we reuse things, and have personal voice (as per Quora)

In discussion groups, want a process when can have a revolution
  • Could try to take over a wildlife refuge, but noone might be there

Discussion has been on mechanisms:  is there a theory?

The Design of Inquiring Systems, C. West Churchman

Two styles:  
  • Publication, someone creating a positon, for others to ponder
  • Discussion
  • Goes back to footnote discussion:  ancillary
  • A way in a software tool to copresent that?

Try to so something that hasn't been done before, because not profitable, and try out principles:  an experiment