Z Blace and I talked further after the end of the call. Here is a doable slice of a project proposal that would be grant-worthy.
Imagine two small data sets: One has tables listing about 60 Croatian cultural institutions and 200 of their projects. The other is of a similar size, and has , WMF affiliates and offices and projects.
We can envision a Wikispore project with some common aspects to bring those databases to life:
* Develop templates and forms to describe small organizations (institutions) and projects, each on one wiki page.
* Draw from Wikidata entries about them where possible. (You can see some examples on Wikispore now, as separate pages, not much integrated yet.)
* Show network relations among them, e.g. that some project is in common, or that one replaced another. (Relations would be stored in Cargo tables.)
* Manage intelligently the fact that a project might have start and end dates, so it existed in 2019 but not in 2020.
* Show this information on maps and/or timelines and/or network graphs.
* Do so in a way that works reasonably in multiple languages.
Our common Wikispore project would be about development of that COMMON set of templates, tables, and installation of the necessary extensions and tools.
And then demonstrate that it works in these two cases. (I have done some of this..)
IF we filed a grant that included those elements, we can deliver the content, and it could be make a nice demonstration of something a little bit new, and all open-source.
To show that Wikispore is useful as R&D for collaborative projects it will be nice to show that we developed something that is usable for multiple purposes, and the two different applications will achieve that. My instinct is to focus on this midsize networks of 60-200 elements, not promise to scale them up in the short run.
Are there others of you who could use such a “layer” of support? Let’s develop something useful for a more applications, if we can.
If we went in the direction of filing a grant it must include support for research on the back end wiki side of it: Kartographer? Puppet? Ansible? Docker? General upgrades? I heard a lot of options in the meeting. What would be smart/interesting/relevant to include there? — Peter / user”:econterms