[Home]MeatballWikiTopic

MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories
Some discussions lately--and the lack of discussions lately--have made me wonder if we should have a small discussion of what people want to talk about here?

To describe what I want to write about personally, I first feel I should say that I feel I am completely offbase with what I have been writing about, such as on IntellectualProperty, HumanRights, the GreyAlbum, OrderChaos, and so on, even though I feel these are critical issues for online culture and ultimately (when I finish unpacking a number of ideas), OnlineCommunities.

Many of us are coders and designers. Meatball has a long tradition of doing design work, and I often characterize it as a design collective. Personally, I would also like to do more design work here as well, but I am currently distracted by my Masters degree which can be loosely topicized as "How to cope with a changing world that conspires to undermine my sense of identity?"

(*) And continuing emotional fall out from when in Baltimore when some posh white fratboy wanted to kill me for being a terrorist sandnigger. (gritting teeth) But I digress. As KuroShin says, I should take that to my diary.

Now that my life is regaining some focus, I think I would like to stop abusing Meatball's good graces with my own life issues. I can quietly move most of what I am writing elsewhere if y'all would like to focus on something else? I am planning to create a new OnlineCommunity for academics. I could move this stuff into that.

I don't dare presume I know what people want or think. What do you want to talk about? I'm tired of talking about social issues with myself. I much rather do my best to help someone else, and shut up if I can't. -- SunirShah

I'm still reading most of what is already here, which is a lot, which will take some time... On my mind are my own masterdegree, ubanisation of my rural community, the link between violence and population density, the oil/cheap energy crisis, finding a parttime job... only some of which are suitable here... -- Gideon FormerContributor?

I think we have to live with a puzzle situation. Most of the parts in our hands don't seem to fit. If some people have fitting parts, the islands won't easily join together. But we know that the puzzle will work out, because it has to - are 10 or 20 years a problem? -- I have a puzzle stone for "Rural Community": [1] founded by FranzNahrada, an intellectual giant and primary rock of OCs in Europe. -- I have a puzzle stone for "Violence", we founded NetworkAgainstViolence? 18 months ago and have gathered about 450 wiki pages about all aspects of violence (mainly in German, but we are about to start the English section, interested?). -- HelmutLeitner

Thank you for you invitation, but I can not read German very well. I also want to remark that most likely rural in The Netherlands is not the same as rural in Germany; everybody is connected to the main grid, at the end of this year every home will have the option of ADSL, cabel television and sewer are the only thing missing at the edges of the rural cities, and then also only there...

The difference between rural and urban life is more the way in which people see the world: the rural view seems to be a lattice of distributed resources, while the urban view is one of hierarchical centralisation and concentration of resources. Trust and social binding vs. Distrust, rules and regulations. PeerPresure? and social networks vs. An Cop at every conner of every street. The real deep diference seems to be something else: the rural view seems to be that there is more then enough goodness for everyone; while the urban view seems to be that there is only a very limited amount of goodness. -- Gideon FormerContributor?

Well, personally I really enjoyed reading GreyAlbum. I'm still interested in a more synthesised view of copyright, rather than the current state of two opposing camps, but CategoryCopyright is big enough, and I need to absorb what's written first. I want a better nym/name pattern language. I want to work on my writing backlog on my name page. Wikipedia will doubtless inspire thoughts on the unpleasant, and some technology solutions to it, as well as the application of TermsOfUse? to login-free or login-optional systems (ie wikis, but we're not using that word ;-)). CategoryReworking needs finishing off. Oh, and I want to deprecate "troll" in WhatIsaTroll, to match the deprecation in WhatIsaWiki, for similar reasons. This is all writing, not discussion. PerformanceArt. --MartinHarper

I feel that 95% of the time I am talking to myself here. Either I'm ahead of the curve or off the tracks, but I have met other people since being in Toronto who put Henri Lefebvre and Douglas Hofstadter on the same bookshelf, so I don't think I'm weird or "unintelligible." I am getting frustrated that no one else seems interested in what I am doing. I am not communicating effectively, but I am at a loss of what else to do. Perhaps it's also because I'm now attacking the system-oriented, top-down, Yourdon/Cartesian software engineering world view that is held by the programmers in the programmer-centric communities I hang out in, and that is doubly worsened by their mass unemployment and consequent bitterness & free time. One thing I am 100% confident of: my sociology + computer science approach is going to become dominant in the age of the DigitalNetwork and SocialSoftware, in the same way that psychology + computer science became dominant in the age of the PersonalComputer? and WimpInterfaces (i.e. human-computer interaction is a branch of ergonomics which is a discipline of psychology). Personally, I'd like Meatball to situate itself is on the forefront of this trend over the next 20 years, but that's only my opinion as a participant-author. It may entice more people if I can convince them that this approach has greater job security and is more impervious to outsourcing than the highly rationalized "abstract mathematical" type of computer science that more often than not builds software that doesn't work. After all, you can't outsource your culture or your personal relationships, nor can you build good software or tailor good suits without personal relationships with your customer. -- SunirShah

I read the material and find it interesting, well-done, and worth doing, fwiw. I hope you keep writing about the stuff for as long as it's interesting, here and/or elsewhere. The arguments with the hyperrational trad compsci are a function of the company kept, or attraction to argument, or both. There's a decent-sized comunity of people with a social computing orientation, they are easy to find, though one needs to apply a bozo filter, same as anywhere. -- AdinaLevin

This morning I woke up with a question: Why is the FileMenu? (I'm looking at Panther right now) still paper orientated? Why doesn't it have a "Checkout from Repository..." and a "Commit to Repository..."? And why doesn't it have a "Publish to Website..."? -- Gideon FormerContributor?

Gideon, you are so right, I am itching to hear more of what you have to say. -- SunirShah

(If someone can think of a apt name for a new page or knows a good location, please move this text there? Thank you.)

I'm thinking NetworkRepository. If you think that sucks, we can change it again. ;) --ss

AndrewCates on AnswerBack posits a theory of why MeatballWiki is stagnating, which presumes two things: 1. it is stagnating, 2. it is stagnating due to the Wiki:WikiIceberg or maybe Wiki:WikiSuccessCanInhibitNewWriters.

I think Meatball is stagnating because it has no one with any exciting energy. You need energy to reinforcing new ideas and take them to new levels. Compare current traffic to September and October when I returned from a long hiatus with new energy and ideas. There was interest in BarnRaising. After that, my energy was drained by many factors coming at me in many directions.

MeatballWiki needs to work on being more fun and relaxed. It needs a clear, motivating SuperordinateGoal that people can agree on. It also needs developer talent to make something happen, like the patches I've proposed. I don't have the time right now to code, especially since I'm working on the soft (yet harder) problem of building a new direction for Meatball and myself whilst dealing with the hard, sucky problems in wikidom like trolling, WikiSpam, and the failure to LimitGrowth. -- SunirShah

Tricky. Maybe best for the community would even be to forget the past: I have to throw anyway my kid's paintings which were heroic achievements for them at the time and its a wrench. The closure of AndStuff, Why and GreenCheese's perpetual breakdown raises all sorts of questions about these sister wiki communities. Selfishly I enjoy ExploreTogether? more than HumblePupil? mode, but that's difficult here.! I guess Wiki:AboutLettertoPeter which is offtopic for C2 would be no more or less off topic here. But somehow being savaged in C2 is more fun than being politely told its already in the manual here. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going any where. But the danger is that the more we achieve here the higher the barrier to entry and actually new people have a disproportionate share of the energy (just like kids they do need to learn I know). -- AndrewCates

We could get into the PostModernist anxiety that everything interesting to be said has already been said before. I don't believe that really, but certainly a lot of interesting things have been said. For the most part, MeatballWiki has a lot of the obvious conventional ideas of wikidom. Wikis perhaps flourish best when writing down obvious ideas, but after that you have to get down to the hard thinking, and that's slower.

Most of the good pages written on MeatballWiki have been motivated by a particular real situation. I mean, we write pages because someone is having a real problem, and we're trying to solve it. As long as there are problems in the world, there will be things to write on MeatballWiki. Look for the pain and alleviate it. WikiSpam, trolls, InformationOverload, and poor UserInterfaces are the biggest sources of agony in wikidom right now, and it's unsuprising that most of the discussions revolve around that.

Another big problem is getting newcomers up to speed on wiki culture and values, and sure that means a lot of visits to the iceberg, but that's where CommunityWiki comes in. MeatballWiki ought to focus on the harder and more entertaining job of solving problems in my opinion. -- SunirShah

CategoryMeatballWiki

Discussion

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