WikiTing
some of this page has been copied and converted into the EvangelizingSocialSoftware group of pages
Ting 2005-08-21
FreeNode?, #onebigsoup, 18:00 UTC (11:00PM PST) - 4:30PM PST (looong)
DanilaMedvedev, LionKimbro, MarkDilley, xorAxAx, MattisManzel, BrianTempleton, VirianFlux?
Initial conversation:
- Mark Dilley is looking for Helmut's intro-to-wiki article. ref: Meatball:n:NewBie
- Danila has reworked TeachingManual? (http://futures.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/TeachingManual)
- Comments are eagerly awaited

- Mattis shows us Deep Mehta, (http://www.deepamehta.de/install/client/) but it is slow Java.
- Collaborative Editors discussion
- We are eagerly awaiting a working Gobby.
- Lion needs to file a bug report, on the Application Error 0x0000001d.
- Mutante has the problem too. (or a different one?)
- Danila has Gobby crash when logging to is-root.de fails (although I managed to log on there at least once) (sobby connects once and crashes when leaving) It works cross-protocol?! I thought MoonEdit and Gobby had different protocols entirely. – leo ; no/yes. It's just that Gobby works for me 90% of the time. Moonedit also works (separately). ; Gobby can talk with MoonEdit servers, then? (mostly?) ; If is-root.de is a MoonEdit server, then it looks like it can.
- sobby is ???????? (what is sobby?) the standalone server for gobby. is-root has both. moonedit and sobby? jepp. We were tinging on it since february. got it
- xwiki will have wiki integrated collab-editor support soon.
- also: collaborative mode in FreeMind? (http://freemind.sourceforge.net), but it's very weird to work in a tree
- also: SubEthaEdit (the first popular collab editor, born in early 2003), but it's Mac only, and proprietary
Then there was a major change towards structure in conversation.
- newbies (Mark Dilley, protagonist)
- "ok, someone comes into a wiki community. meatball, community, kayak, wikipedia, doesn't matter, they are newer and excited about how easy wiki and weblogs are. how do we use the social software to build the community. Many people currently involved in wiki are excited to do new projects… how do we help with that, while knowing that many are going to be gone. how do retain and build?"
- CW:MassUseOfWiki, CW:WikiAgenda?
- how people get wiki experience *in successful wiki projects. when they know what to do. People come to wikipedia, learn to fix typos, enjoy it, then start communicating, then open their own wikis.
*Wikipedia currently has the most cohesive culture
- people use their personal wikis (NoteStudio?, etc.), people get into this way of organising content, then they naturally want to apply this online
- Lion's "Here's what we do right now:"
- hand out wiki engines to people who know how to run it,
- write pages about how to edit wiki
- write theory on Meatball & CommunityWiki
Conversation shifts to making technical relevant to the socials:
- "Why would I want to get on the Internet?" (used to be a question, but today it's evident - everyone gets on the Net) (not the people making the counter-args!)
- objection: "Internet is just porn and spam."
- "self-serving pricks"
- "I don't want to be a loser in a chat room."
- "I am simply not interested" (what wiki-shmiki?)
- The question is: How is social software useful to these groups?
- How can we get people to spread the word about social software?
- People find computers hard to use. (or, so they seem to say)
Our Objective, Motivations
- Get people to use Social Software.
- help people use social software
- help people realize it's valuable and important (may be impossible, unnecessary)
- help build online super-organization or protocols
Somewhere in converesation, Lion outlined following hierarchy of motivations:
lion 1. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment enlightenment]
lion 2. help build online organism (OnlineSocialOrganizing, HiveMind)
lion 3. build social software, good for everybody
lion At this point, we go ''much'' more particular:
lion 4. help people adopt to the online organization
lion 5. identify what we are doing, and strategy, by answering 5 questions.
lion 6. (the 5 questions) the second which is: "who is our audience?"
lion My apologies if I am projecting too much onto everybody, especially at the "1." or "2." level.
This has been modified a little from the original, to help readers who weren't there.
Our Five Questions
The problems of adopting social software (briefly put) - what needs to be solved about social software to make people use it:
- what use for people?
- who is the target?
- how get people to spread word?
- the critical mass
- hard to use
WhatCanSocialSoftwareDo [la page WhatCanSocialSoftwareDo existe aussi ]
"What use for people? What can Social Software do?"
Brainstorming
SHARING INFO, SHARED MEMORY:
- hyperlinking during regular disussion
- "A link is mighter than a thousand words." --Danila
- sharing info,
- collective exomemory, collective memory saved,
- mentally going over stuff,
- collective memories for organisations
- keeping "stuff" out of the head.
- You can write something once, and then link to it whenever you write on the subject.
- ACCESS to information, extremely quickly
- linking to, coordinating with other projects easily
COMMUNITY-BUILDING:
- automatic list construction (building e-mail lists)
- doing things with people outside of your physical circle of friends.
- maintaining a community
- solidarity to group that is less and less proximity dependent
- getting in touch with likeminded people easily and automatically
- just socialising
- community buidling, with in software and socila networks
- transparent conversion of personal projects into large scale common projects - "overhear"
- hooking up with others, finding people interested in weird rare stuff
- overcoming entry-barriers (compared to non-social software)
SYNERGY
- synchronous action
- different people contribute different strengths in a group
- wisdom of crouds - information sorting, reviews, etc.
AUTOMATION:
- ability to construct artifacts
- augmentation that comes from working in a virtual space
- automated process, source data for information aggregators
- automating "process" (voting, etc)
- ability to see things that were never visible before, awareness
- online sensors of the offline world.
- liquid democracy
CHANGE IN HUMAN
- collective values learned (solidarity relies less on distance)
WORK AROUND TIME AND SPACE-distance working -different times
PERSONAL BENEFITS
- personal benefit "how to develop ppl skills, writing, etc" -is this very significant? maybe we should remove, or move less significant 'reasons'
- CV building
Links
- Groupware Bad (at www.jwz.org)
- as soon as some companies build wiki+blog+rss+etc. web-based easy to deploy software. The ASP model. It can first replace Intranet (search for Tiddly-wiki success stories), and then groupware.
'social software' replacing 'groupware' bureaucracy?
WhoCanUseSocialSoftware [la page WhoCanUseSocialSoftware existe aussi ]
"Who is the target? Who can make use of Social Software?"
- activists?
- teachers?
- it's interesting to see teachers as potential idea virus transmitters.
- Who would be easiest to sell social software to?
Brainstorming
PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN THE SAME AREA
- tenants
- neighbors
- family
- freinds
- small towns - people living there
- housing co-ops
- community groups
OCCUPATIONAL
- people making stuff, workers
- union members, union staff
- professionals
- people who need to collect information on problems and solutions to them
- researchers
- SME - small and medium sized companies
- government services - firefighters?
- worker co-ops
POLITICAL GROUPS
- union members, union staff
- technical organizations
- voting groups
- political parties
- urbanists- people who work on organizing cities and stuff, like, monorail people
- wireless activists
- NGOs
- activist co-ops
- left activists – note conflict w/in re: technology
LEARNING and TEACHING
- educators
- amateurs
- people who are exploring artists and art
- budding artists
PEOPLE WITH SIMILAR VALUES
- One Issue People
- evangelists (!)
- people who share some values
- people within pre-existing groups
- environmentalist, human rights,
CLOSE FRIENDS
- family
- friends
- friends, people who organise some group activities.
PRESUPPOSED PEOPLE IN GENERAL
- people who currently have yahoo groups
- people who have a link into the web already
- people who want to organize
- people who need access to same information, who have shared memories.
- overwhelmed overburdened people
SIMILAR INTERESTS
- music artist fans
- fans of TV shows
- gamers (but they're already doing it…)
- teen hipsters
MEDICAL & SELf-HELP
- patients, people with illnesses, disabilities
– this may be a category in it's own, that we haven't traditionally considered. For example,
- self-help groups
- People who are trying to resolve psychological issues
- people who are caretakers
- as well as caregivers
- rare conditions in particular (several examples, where there are only a few known cases in the world, some famous cases, too;… Yeah.)
5. Hard to use.
- "One of the things is- we're on and evangelizing a train that is just beginning to be built… Kind of, you know- welding the door on, as we cruise down a highway at 75 MPH."
Note network effect.
Much of this requires that EVERYBODY is online in order to work.
Pending discussions
Lion's space
lion's mind of things to hold onto:
- unique online benefits
- education on-the-spot, only possible online
- network effects- many advantages requires lots of other people online, too
- the story of intercepting conversations in the middle, as an activist
- cybernetic conceptualization of the activist organization - what does an activist organization DO, abstractly?