I see people joining this list, and I want to get some idea about what
people think is the status of ComProj. Do we still have a purpose?
What is that purpose?
Cary
>>> Hi Cary and thanks,
This is quite long so forgive me. I just had to get this off my chest.
I had thought, when joining this list, that it would be the beginnings of a
place where we would be able to improve the communications (tools) between
all the various global communities from which WMF projects are comprised.
After seeing what just one tool (a wiki) and a vision (to build an
encyclopaedia) could do I naturally thought this would be the place to
develop comms tools, particularly the real time ones, which could help them
share an understanding of where things are, if not "the next steps'. As it
is things seem to have become frozen in time. i.e. email lists and IRC.
Over the past 7 years I have seen the development of tools like forums (as
one example), where a group of moderators assist people, from all over, to
get orientated at places like sitepoint (global web designers) and whirlpool
(Australia broadband users). I've also watched as the global research
networks, which support old ways of learning get fatter and fatter.
http://global.dante.net/ , while the real time tools available (only) to
people inside the national institutions have really grown up. E.g.
http://evo.caltech.edu/evoGate/
I had visions of using stuff like EVO to run regular link ups between WMF's
global groups, or at least once a year at wikimania. My hope was that by
doing so our communities could change the face of old educational
institutions, addicted, as they are, to 'delivering' an education rather
than sharing an inquiry, or building an article. You see telcos only build
these kind of 'products' for multinationals. And you have an asterix PBX in
san fran now. You just don't apply the same kind of model to the real time
stuff as Wikipedia or other WMF projects. i.e. the 'global community' model.
In brief, due to the employment of professionals, the old organisational
model of a 'head and branch' replicates an old Rotary rather than globally
distributed multi nationals (like Sun who i worked for decades ago), where
there was really no head office, just global nodes of experts. And please, I
don't mean to criticise anyone personally. You (especially) have my greatest
admiration.
But for WMF to achieve its goals it really needs to provide its global
groups with some collaboration tools, which really can't be afforded by a
charity, and shouldn't be reinvented anyway. So it needs to collaborate with
leaders in their field, and I don't mean, with respect, (just) software
vendors like kaltura. It requires approaching collaboration from the network
level because clouds/grids are replacing the old client server model (as
you know). We are, in short, trying to get the akamai's of this world to
conform to a collaborative model, which is hard when most institutions just
want to publish and "be damned". Even the opencourseware consortia's
members
want to duplicate 200 hundred times rather than building one great
'article'.
Enough. Sorry for the earful. I'll just leave you with this suggestion for
an experiment.
http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator/browse_thread/thread/86979845874
72c02?hl=en
You'll notice that Wayne, one of WMF's advisors makes the comparison in
models quite clear (the link on my second entry).
Hopefully Liam (wittylama) from the Australian chapter might mention a few
of these things while he's over there (in San Fran).
My best, simon