[MG] Mapping Participation in Drupal

[Michael Allan]

Not to interrupt.  Just answering (as I understand) where crossforum
lives, and the concern about the centrality of the pollwikis.

Alex Rollin wrote:
> Fair enough.  I'm merely listening in for what this thing you are
> building does, where it lives, etc, imaging that I am building
> something (in Drupal) that will play along and supply data to
> crossforum.  I am more interested what data it eats right now and
> being able to add "another diff service" and replicating various
> (all necessary pieces of the open architecture so I Can play along
> within a Drupal site down the road.

I guess crossforum theatre lives in a web that it spins across
multiple projects.  Projects like these, for example:
http://metagovernment.org/wiki/Main_Page#Participating_projects

It wants data that's comparable across two or more projects, sites or
forums.  Comparability is the crucial thing.  We need to interweave
strands that have something (however remote) to do with each other.
Our feeds are therefore aggregates.  But you don't have to do the
aggregation yourself.  We can take care of that, if you like.
(Conseo's diff feed is an aggregate across multiple discussion media
and sites, none of which know a thing about crossforum theatre.)

Even if all you know is a single project of interest, then we might be
able to work with that, too.  We can sometimes plug in Votorola's
vote-server as the 2nd facility.  So maybe this is the question: Does
anyone have a favourite project, site or forum?  Has it got
interesting stuff that others might be interested in seeing?  We could
talk about it, and discuss what to do with it.  It's mostly not a
technical decision.

> My main concern from days of old has been the centrality of the
> pollwiki.  I don't really want to register my content there.  I got
> hung up on this before.  I am merely attempting to understand this
> central service, the pollwiki, as we move ahead (beyond crossforum)
> when I say that I really do want to do drafting in Drupal.

Drafting is not unique to the pollwiki, so it's not a centrality
thing.[1] The users can draft in any medium they choose, on any site,
in any format or language.  Grep "free-range drafting".

I'm trying to answer your other concerns about the centrality of the
pollwiki in the other thread.[2] We might end up with an open voting
network that's 100% decentered to the users (pure P2P), but we can't
start it that way.  We need central nodes here and there.  What I
suggest [in 2] is that nothing will go into our own little center (the
prototype pollwiki, or whatever we choose to call it) unless people
understand the need for it and agree to it.

Remember too, the central bits are going into a *wiki*.  We're making
this as radically open as possible given current technology.  We'll
always be pushing the edge of that boundary.

> I am the first to say that my needs are not immediate.  Again, just
> hoping to understand the architecture and the interplay and
> definition of the functions in the open architecture moving
> ahead. And then I was offering to configure a Drupal feed processing
> site if that was useful.

Conseo answers better than I do when it comes to particulars and
details.  I sometimes think it's faster to code than to explain.
Hopefully we can show results at frequent intervals, and those can
speak for themselves.

[1] http://zelea.com/project/outcast/dep.xht#wiki
[2] http://metagovernment.org/pipermail/start_metagovernment.org/2011-January/003459.html

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 416-699-9528
http://zelea.com/



Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org