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FrontPage

Welcome to the CommunityWiki!

This is a jam-session.
We don’t know where we are going.

We talk about communities both online and offline: Management, teaching, conflicts, mediation, and some tech talk mostly about tools used for online communities.

Feel free to join in; see WelcomeVisitors to get started as a contributor.

The page that you are looking at right now is our group blog. See front page discussion for more information about this page.

OrganizedCulture

Organized Culture is our name for the idea that society will compartmentalize into groups.

The theory is that it will do so because social affiliations will be ExplicitInformation, or "reified." That is, that they will be encoded, written down, inside computers. This is in contrast to how they are mostly spoken, and “in our heads,” at present. What is written is recorded, referenced, visible, and revisited. What is spoken is ephemeral, frequently intended for a small audience, and heard only once. (See: DocumentsVsMessages.)

Learn more...

SudburySchoolForAdults

We need to collaborate.

As of 2007, collaborating online is far more difficult than collaborating face-to-face. So there are 2 things we need to work on:

  • Setting up physical places where people can come out of their cocoon and collaborate on educational and cool stuff
  • Improving online collaboration.

Learn more...

CommunityWikiBank

A proposal to conduct a real experiment into WhatIsMoney & AlternativeCurrency, by creating a CommunityWikiBank (one possible CwB entity). This proposal is quite serious, hence…

  • The Bank’s first loan of $1,000.us will be used to purchase shares in CommunityWikiBusiness?.
    • The proposal for the allocation of these shares will be decided by a Vote conducted according to the CommunityWiki Governance methodology.
  • Until specific Authorities are formally delegated, proposals to raise additional capital and expand the scope of the Bank’s activities will also required this type of approval.
    • There is a “Pledges” section under which individuals can indicate their willingness to “deposit” funds, once the Terms & Conditions required for the Bank’s operation have been established.

Learn more...

LocalNames

Local Names is a project to use wiki-like linking just about everywhere.

Imagine: You’re reading a web page you like, such as: http://slashdot.org/

You are going to talk about it in your blog, so you click a bookmarklet, and name the page, “SlashDot.”

Then you go to your blog, or your favorite wiki, or are writing a comment somewhere, and you say, “I was just looking at SlashDot the other day, and I saw this idea, …”

When you hit “Save” (or “submit” or “comment”), your blog automatically hyperlinks “SlashDot” to http://slashdot.org/ for you.

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InformationOverload

I feel this is one of the big up and coming problems with society (well, first world society, but in a way that affects its dealings with the rest of society).

InformationOverload is the problem of dealing with the sheer amount of information available. It is the common ground between sorting through the news, sorting through email spam, and the problem of how to build a search engine. It is the problem of reading articles on the web, and getting the feeling that each one was important and valuable, and then afterwards deciding that you spent too much time reading articles on the web. The first problem is that there is too much junk to sort through; the deeper problem is that there is too much good stuff to sort through.

There are many ConsequencesOfInformationOverload.

I feel wikis are a powerful weapon in the battle against InformationOverload, and I feel they could become even more so in the future. See WikisVsInformationOverload.

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ConversationProcess

On the CommunityWiki, we ask ourselves, “How do we want to talk? What’s our conversation process?” With those questions come other questions: “What do we want in DocumentMode? How do we ensure reworking?”

This wiki includes wiki itself as a subject, and we experiment with conversational forms on this wiki. Our answers to the questions on this page are by no means settled.

PageMaintainer: LionKimbro

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MicroContribution

The principal of microcontribution: people should be able to make a small contribution to discussion or decision-making on an issue (rather than being forced to either contribute nothing or to pledge tons of time to it).

In decision-making, this allows a broader spectrum of people to be represented in the decision.

The extent to which MicroContribution is possible is limited by the structure of the medium. For example, the internet allows the ideal of MicroContribution to be better achieved because one can write as little as a sentence in a single post. Prior to the internet, the shortest written form of communication was something like a letter, or a pamphlet.

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PageMaintainer

Here on CommunityWiki, we are performing an experiment that we call, “Page Maintainer.”

When you see a page that says “PageMaintainer: Foo” near the top of the page, that means that “Foo” (a person) is maintaining the page.

That person may be operating as:

  • secretary & notekeeper – keeping track of key ideas, questions, insights, and so on
  • continuous reworking – building up DocumentMode content as people write
  • discussion leader – asking people questions, directing conversation, and so on
  • dashboard intelligence – looking up relevant information and links within the wiki & on the Internet, and posting it
  • moderator – making sure that some specific conversation process is being followed, making sure that people are getting fair share in discussion
  • …or something else!

The page maintainer should, in some way, be helping the conversation or final document. (We like final documents.)

PageMaintainer: LionKimbro

Learn more...

CommunityWikiBank

A proposal to conduct a real experiment into WhatIsMoney & AlternativeCurrency, by creating a CommunityWikiBank (one possible CwB entity). This proposal is quite serious, hence…

  • The Bank’s first loan of $1,000.us will be used to purchase shares in CommunityWikiBusiness?.
    • The proposal for the allocation of these shares will be decided by a Vote conducted according to the CommunityWiki Governance methodology.
  • Until specific Authorities are formally delegated, proposals to raise additional capital and expand the scope of the Bank’s activities will also required this type of approval.
    • There is a “Pledges” section under which individuals can indicate their willingness to “deposit” funds, once the Terms & Conditions required for the Bank’s operation have been established.

Learn more...

SocialMapApril2006

The connections between CommunityWiki, and related communities, circa April 2006.

SocialMapApril2006Image

Our friends at CraoWiki have also created a map:

http://static.flickr.com/49/126073212_62bbd4edd4_o.jpg

(original)

Learn more...

CriticismOfWiki

The page criticism of wiki is for critical remarks about wiki. For the positive aspects of wiki see praise of wiki.

Things that often fail in wikis:

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BlogControlledByWiki

“While the wiki allows for collaboration, it makes it difficult for the observer to follow developments. Thus the idea for using a blog as the tip of the wiki iceberg. Makes sense to me.”Tom Lowenhaupt (?) on Beyond Voting wiki: New Tools of Democracy

People read news in blogs, but not wiki. Why is that?

We blame RecentChanges. RecentChanges is good for tracking the minutai of wiki edits, but bad if you want to read news.

Here’s what you get when you read a blog:

  • news stories
  • announcements
  • personal anecdotes

And here’s what you get when you read RecentChanges:

  • spelling corrections
  • an extra item, attached to a list
  • someone commented on something

These things in RecentChanges are good for the WikiCommunity regulars, but we are skeptical that outsiders are as interested in them.

It may even be true that wiki’s don’t participate as much in the “global conversation” as blogs do, simply because people have a hard time following what’s going on in them.

Our idea to correct this, we call: “BlogControlledByWiki.” You can see it demonstrated here, on the FrontPage. You can also see the SideBar, which helps people to understand who writes here, and how this community is connected with other communities.

If more wiki get into BlogControlledByWiki, we could aggregate them all with an aggregator like Planet Planet. It may also lead to increased InterCommunityCooperation between wiki, since it would be easier to follow other people’s wiki.

Learn more...

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