Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 11:15:36 +0100 From: "Sean B. Palmer" To: "Tav Ino" Subject: The Espian Websites 24weeks centric dox or espian centric dox? What I wanted was for the structures to reflect reality. We know that 24weeks is a project of the espians, so we want other people to know that too, and as instantly as possible! http://espia.com/24weeks/ That's where you should've had the website. Then you could have changed the espia.com frontpage to say "what's going on right now is 24weeks! check it the hell out dudes!". All of this makes it very clear that 24weeks is a project of the espians. The counterargument is that a dotcom gives you greater visibility and more professionalism. That is true, but people like the W3C get by with just one single website for thousands of initiatives. When you have one site per project, each of those sites only gets as much rep as the project; but when you have one site for all the projects, that site gets the rep for all the projects. Since 24weeks.com was already registered before the project began, though, there wasn't much anybody could say about this! This was a failing that has already occured; I'm not sure if I would advocate getting rid of 24weeks.com now because it's too late, but this is a good example of the sort of things that should've been thought of, and hence also the things that you should still be thinking of. The question now is where to put the wiki, and that's a very confusing thing for people because they were thinking solely in terms of 24weeks, and now that there's the idea of having a Central Espian Respository/Archive, they're even more confused because they think they'll have to divide things up *arbitrarily* between the two. This is the pain of separating 24weeks from espia. They aren't separate entities at all! The former is a project of the latter. Even the developers can't conceptualise that though; what are the public to think? To decide where to put things now, we have to think a little more subtly. For example, there's the related question of where to *converse*; another seemingly arbitrary question, though I can prove that it isn't. irc, wiki what else do we need? irc + wiki is what i came to too Agreed too, *but*! A thought experiment: what if someone one day sends an email and sparks off an awesome email conversation? Do you say "no, we can't do it here because we're using irc + wiki only", or do you just take the pain and roll with it for the benefit of having the conversation continue? Conversation shifts between fora sometimes at random. Generally you should try not to have it shift, but if it's going to shift, don't force it back because you'll kill conversation! Thankfully, there is a way of dealing with this. Think of the model of how 24weeks as a site works. People come to it, they get interested, and they want to contribute. Then what? So we tell them 1) what we are; and 2) how to contribute, right? The how to contribute is the important bit because that's the gateway for all the people coming in. In other words, the model looks a bit like this... http://inamidst.com/stuff/esp/participation Heh, that's a good diagram. That's probably worth more than a thousand words, which is good since it saves me the typing. Now as for "THE ESPIAN WEBSITE (proposed site of...)", I've been thinking about just what such a site could consist of; this is my dream of it, if you like, but it's just one possible dream, and they can merge and evolve and phantasmagorise. The espian website should be, to start with, a very good espian domain name--espians.com or espia.com or something like that. Then, you should open as many accounts on it as possible and give it to all the key espians. Each espian will have espia.com/theirname and be allowed to post whatever they like to it. The only stipulation is that things uploaded must be static--in other words, nothing should write to the disc. Anything dynamic can go at a subdomain such as service.espia.com; all the wikis and trac and whatever junk we come up with and then abandon. The central, subdomainless, part of the site is our pristine archival space. People can upload all their favourite memories of espia already: jeffarch has got some stuff hanging about; evangineer can probably get some of the old wiki material out. There should be no robots.txt. Not only should everything be public, but there should be a hierarchy (I use /list/ on inamidst) that mirrors the whole rest of the site but gives a clear document index for it all. That way, every single file posted to the site will become available on search engines. There will be no hiding whatsoever. If people want to create things on the site, they can do so in three places: 1) Their own userspace, espia.com/username 2) The current yearspace, espia.com/2007 3) The current projectspace, espia.com/24weeks To make it easy to know what to do about one another's files, the default policy on the site should be: don't edit or remove anything that anyone else does, even to edit a typo. That way, we're being conservative by default which means protecting our data. But! There's a method we can use to override this. We have "policy" files, literally a file such as espia.com/username/policy which is created by the person who owns or made the directory, and which contains just a brief blurb about what's acceptable--"you may change typos here but please don't make big changes or delete anything", or "you can go nuts in here; do what you want!", or whatever. That means you don't have to keep going around asking for permission; only if you want to do something that's not yet in a policy file. And, well, etc. This is the sort of thing that I've been thinking about, and that I've been trying to get out in the open so that we can discuss and evolve the ideas and so on, but I've laid the first part of the path and people have merely run off screaming. We should already have discussed the ideas I've just outlined above, but nobody has even sniffed the bait yet, let alone taken it! So there's a good explanation of why I was very pissed off yesterday, cunningly disguised as a plan for you to do whatever you want with as long as it's something useful. Or, perhaps, a plan disguised as an explanation... you decide! :-) -- Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/