[MG] Tunisia and activism in general

[conseo]

Please, before we discuss the thread to no end, let us either consent that you 
think we should reach for publicity first, while we (Mike and me) try to find 
interested communities first, to get Crossforum and Votorola's cross-platform 
bits hammered out. This thread in itself shows the weaknesses of current 
discussion media and in itself that you cannot talk each other in unless you 
have common reasoning. It would be a perfect candidate for 
Votorola/Crossforum, so maybe we can either work together on setting it up for 
metagovernment.org to allow consensus building for us on our actions or we go 
seperate ways, you by thinking about ways of promotion and we by trying to set 
it up. Since it is FOSS we are not forced to all work in the same direction, 
but can profit from each other. I really can't and don't want to force you into 
consent.

> " We can setup a demo environment to show off diff-patching. In fact you
> can already see it in Michael's poll wiki. But has it worked to attract
> people that way? How would you concretely do it?"
> 
> I will try to do a powerpoint presentation of the concept, as soon as my
> time allows it. So maybe I'll do it in a couple of weeks.
> 
> " This is documented by Michael in a non-technological way on zelea.com
> imo."
> I think I saw it, but I think it is still to technical.

It is rather very theoretical, not really technical, because there are 
reflections on the theory of communicative action and other philosophical and 
sociological works. Most of the world's population does not agree on consensus 
building yet, otherwise we wouldn't have this discussion, so there is at least 
some kind of reflection involved, which you can reach both from a sociological 
critical perspective and from practical involvement in FOSS and open 
content/democratic communities. The latter is much more likely our candidate, 
although to talk about the concepts we will need some theoretical terms which 
are already built by sociology. So working on Habermas or some of the other 
works involved could help as well. Still I think showing it off is better than 
talking about high-level philosophical discourses.

> 
> " In which community? Votorola is not a social network, it is tools build
> around the general concepts of social networks/forums to allow consensus
> building."
> 
> What exactly is a social network? In theory, using the wiki of votorola,
> you could do everything that is done by other social networks, that is
> linking to different kind of data related to you and offer others to see
> that data... that's possible. So maybe votorola might be more acceptable
> if its offered in "facebook style" or at least as a plugin.

Say anything where an online community uses some web interface for this case. 
I have talked about creating a social network with Votorola's MediaWiki 
already with Michael and maybe it has potential, but it is much more likely to 
fail if we don't hit the nerve of current internet trends and don't get our 
bugs fixed quickly. It is much better for all parties involved if we first try 
to fill in the gap between current communities, before we think about whole new 
web services like facebook successors. It is FOSS, we have all time of the 
world as long as we ourselves can afford it, nobody can run you out and you can 
at any time switch the project if it is more promising. 
We rather have to fix the major drawbacks of todays solutions before we can 
think about creating large communities ourselves. Thomas has worked out the 
concept of the open network approach and I think he definetly has pointed the 
major drawback of todays web for any kind of consensual platform out. It is 
completely cluttered. A new platform would only worsen this situation.
 
> 
> " Well that is obvious, but Votorola is not in itself an interface, it is
> rather a concept of bridging different tools together. So we need to have a
> scenario to show it off or we need some artists to create a promo video
> about diff- patching and crossforum browsing. Crossforum is the promo entry
> point designed with a very intuitve interface in mind, which demos itself
> (which is always the best way) actually so if we can set that up for only
> two communities we can start to show it off with real data, which again is
> much better than some dummy data or screencast. We are near a point where
> we can do it with real data from metagovernment at least."
> 
> Yes, that sound nice :)
> 
> " Are you a CG-guy?"
> 
> Yes, in a way, I am a CG-guy, but overloaded with so much work to do, that
> I think I might find time helping to develop something useful in a couple
> of months. I'm into visualization stuff, currently working at "Fraunhofer
> IGD" on a project called SEMAVIS.
> (www.semavis.com)

I guess you know that the by far most innovative project for semantic data on 
the desktop is the nepomuk project which is only progressing so well, because 
it is settled in a large FOSS environment (KDE)? Still there is a lot of 
pioneering work involved. Votorola also builds on the semantic media wiki, 
which might be an interesting bridge to your current work. Crossforum 
visualizes communicational data and might be a case to explore intuitive 
visualization concepts.
But it all depends on how much work you are willing to put in. We are working 
full time on this atm. and it takes me too much time to hold this discussion 
here, so please either try to talk to me personally to get to common grounds 
directly or define a workspace where you are willing to put time in, for 
example by setting the pollwiki up on metagovernment.org. You can define any 
amount of time you are planning to put in, but I really don't want to discuss 
here forever and in the end you lose interest and I haven't put my time into 
Crossforum. As I guess that you can program, Crossforum is Java code, so it 
should also be able for you to dive in and create the necessary plugs for 
communities you are interested in yourself. It is not really difficult.


conseo



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