[Home]BarnRaisingNominations

MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories
See BarnRaisingNomination for an explanation of the processes involved. Try to follow a pattern of What, Why, When, Who. See further below for past nominations.

Nominations

New: Debatus.com

What
Inviting Meatball wiki members and readers to join a BarnRaising effort for the [Debatus.com wiki]. This wiki aims to become a/the database for structuring, refining, and rationalizing argumentation and debate. We often try and frame it as the to-be Wikipedia of debate and argumentation. From our perspective, few debate wikis have been created, and, certainly, no debate wiki has been created with the "yes"/"no", question/subquestion, splitscreen methodology that we've developed, which we've concluded is optimal for a debate wiki. We believe that, ultimately, there is no limit to the number of debates that could emerge on the site, and that the unique benefits to the individual trying to rationalize his or her position on debates is limitless as well.

Why
While the basic structure, organization, and style elements of Debatus are mostly complete, we are encountering the chicken-or-the-egg dilemma, finding that we need more debate content to stimulate debaters, their minds, and more content. So, The barnraising effort would be directed specifically at building the interesting debate content of a core of roughly 25 debates that are already up on the main page (far more debates exist on the site that we could approach, but for this effort, we'd probably want to focus on the most important and popular ones.)

How
A big part of the effort includes creating main questions as well as subquestion lines. Any given debate has an average of about 6 or 7 subquestions that break down the main question. Although they can be changed as time goes on, it's best that they are constructed well from the start. In addition to this, we would simply be researching the facts, quotes, and substantiated arguments that fit into these debates in the structure that we've created (you'll have to read our Guiding Principles to understand the rules we've developed as far as acceptable content goes). Fortunately, this process is very interesting, and the structure of Debatus does what it does well as far as helping the individual break down and simplify these debates so that he or she can rationalize a position on them.

When
Well, initially, we'd thought of October as a good time, but nobody has arrived at this nomination yet (10/31/06), so I suppose we'll aim for late November or so, but we'll need a response before we can move forward on obviously.

Who
Brooks Lindsay, founder of Debatus; and the Debatus Team, out of Georgetown University.

Discussion

New:

What
An invitation to all meatball wiki members and readers to join a proposed BarnRaising Party for the DAR wiki. ( http://distributedresearch.net/wiki/) This wiki is concerned with online community building from the point of view of research and action for improvement, in a way which seems to have some relevancy in common with meatball.

Why
The DAR wiki has been deliberately started without a clear structure in order to allow the subject matter to emerge unrestricted. Probably that makes it a bit difficult for new people to contribute. It would be good to have a short discussion and then take some steps to move the wiki forwards and begin to build community around it.

When
The BarnRaising starts on Friday March 10th, 2006 and continues for about 4-5 days, with residual activity possible up until March 24th. This deliberately coincides with an online exhibition of research, in the hope of building critical mass from multiple sources.

Who
AndyRoberts is your host, please indicate interest or intentions below. Thankyou
. . .
Communications
Open to suggestions, can be coordinated from here: http://distributedresearch.net/wiki/index.php/Barn_raising

Discussion
IMHO the project is unclear. It has no clear mission and scope. It answers the question "Why" insufficiently with "without structure". It names an overlap with MeatballWiki, but doesn't even try to resolve it. -- HelmutLeitner

Andy, when you write, "The DAR wiki has been deliberately started without a clear structure in order to allow the subject matter to emerge unrestricted," and then observe, "Probably that makes it a bit difficult for new people to contribute," that is quite an understatement! Remember that whomever organizes the wiki, owns the wiki. You're on the right track by signalling that others will be able to feel ownership over the space, but at the same time you'll need to show some leadership to get the ball rolling and also to integrate yourself into whatever group ends up running the wiki. If you consider, for instance, http://www.openpolitics.ca, this wiki has been taken over from the founders by a particularly, um, keen individual. Be careful with being too hands off. While being controlling and actively organizing is a problem, it's better to lead by example and actively encourage than be afraid to do anything.

So, what you're after is what we call a SeedPosting. In particular, on http://distributedresearch.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page, you have a list of suggested pages. If you provided some examples of the pages you want, that would help people during the BarnRaising self-orient themselves (clearly answer the questions, "What do I do? How can I help?"). Also, so people can quickly assess how much effort to expend on this project, you need a clearly stated objective at the top of the page that explains the intended useful outcome and the potential value for contributors. e.g. "This wiki will serve as a collaborative annotated bibliography of distributed action research to more efficiently organize materials in this burgeoning field and expose researchers to feedback more quickly than through traditional channels." Otherwise, the wiki appears to be about BarnRaising. ;) -- SunirShah

Sunir, thanks for having a look and taking time to give helpful advice. I'll make some changes. Actually, this conversation that we are now having about my invitation is a bit like what I expected might happen at the actual barn raising, hmm. It has indeed proved elusive to get the right balance between over-organising, and lack of leadership. Anyway, to explain a little more background, the somewhat fanciful idea which I started off with, upon discovering that the mediawiki software supports on-the-fly categories, was that it might be possible to grow a non-hierarchical folksonomy of content, rather than pre-defining from an initial index downwards. So the list of suggested pages which you see is in fact a list of those categories which have arisen so far - well that was the idea anyway. Thanks for pointing out that these category pages look like empty pages. The DAR wiki is not quite so empty as it seems, but at present you have to view Special:Allpages http://distributedresearch.net/wiki/index.php/Special:Allpages to see what's in it. -- AndyRoberts

So here's the latest invitation which can be redistributed and linked to.

http://distributedresearch.net/wiki/index.php/Barn_raising#Invitation

I'm going to post a copy of that on my Meatball user page as well. -- AndyRoberts

Past:

CategoryToDo

Past BarnRaising efforts

Few yet, though here is where we could sit about sipping cider, slapping each other on the back, and praising efforts of those involved. Or mope about with heads hung low, dismayed at our efforts. A place for PostMortem?s and CommunityHistory?, so as to guide future nominators.

wantedpages cleanup, April 2001

following is original jottings and notes as this barn was being raised, but it could be summarised into a much better post mortem

What
we take a look at WantedPages, and collect together a bunch that deserve more attention, then we hoe into the task. We could also follow the backlinks and break the LinkPatterns for the sillier wanted pages (or fix spellig errers). Some links could be redirected to the appropriate Wiki:InterWiki page instead of simply breaking the link pattern.

Why
discussion has been slow, wanted pages is long (1376 as at April 25th, 2001)

Please don't take this as an invitation to just start filling in pages spuriously. Having a lot of WantedPages is a lot better than having a lot of shallow, meaningless pages. Only if you have something serious and detailed to say, click on the question mark. But I know you have something serious and detailed to say, so maybe you ought to just say it. -- SunirShah

Agreed - caution as ever when playing with power tools. Further suggestions for another time include: tracking # of wanted pages vs # of real pages (taking action if the balance swings too far); and some way to easily find those solitary pages that have lots of wanted pages (a sign of either an unfulfilled starting point, or an over zealous link writer) --es

When
this month of April, 2001? does the WantedPages script only run once per week - if so then set a goal date as that day.

How
pages crying for some attention, or links asking to be broken. note: the obviously simple have been left in the list for purposes of example

Who
(volunteers and invitations)

DeletedPage verification November 2001

Before PageDeletion was implemented, we need to ensure that the pages that were deleted via the DeletedPage moniker were in fact to be deleted. SunirShah ask the community to verify this, and they did, but the one person who did the vast majority of the work was EricScheid. Much thanks.

Ironically, SunirShah's implementation was buggy so it inadvertently deleted this page. That should be fixed now. We hope.

Discussion

MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories
Edit text of this page | View other revisions
Search: