“Sam Ruby”:https://www.intertwingly.net has posted the “slides”:https://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/etcon/ from his “presentation”:https://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4613 at “ETCon”:https://conferences.oreillynet.com/etech/ on lessons learned from running the “!Echo wiki”:https://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage He notes:
bq.:https://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/etcon/20.html If you have a coherently aligned and focused community, a wiki can be a very powerful thing, allowing collaboration to proceed at an astounding pace.
If you have a community in imperfect alignment, a wiki will accurately reflect this state. Given a group with a genuine desire to align, a wiki can provide a powerful and positive feedback loop.
But what happens when you have an unbounded community with divergent goals?
He also mentions the enormous energy that has gone in to the project, resulting in over 1000 pages on the Wiki – some of that energy is deliberately disruptive or destructive – resulting in the need for a role he describes:
bq.:https://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/etcon/37.html In addition to host, a role that I have played is one of lightning rod. A number of hurtful and untrue things have been said about me, and the company I work for.
“A grounded metal rod placed high on a structure to prevent damage by conducting lightning to the ground.”
Note the recurring theme of energy production, absorption, and dissipation…
He compares the characteristics of “mailing lists”:https://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/etcon/39.html and “blogs”:https://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/etcon/49.html with the wiki; flags the importance of “snapshots”:https://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/etcon/52.html ;and concludes with the following lessons:
# “Time counts”:https://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/etcon/59.html
# “Cultivate contributors”:https://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/etcon/63.html
# “Use a mix of strategies”:https://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/etcon/64.html
It strikes me that there are some good candidate “collaboration patterns”:https://www.synesthesia.co.uk/blog/archives/systems/000336.php here – I’ll play around on the “Synesthesia wiki”:https://synesthesia.co.uk/tiki/ and blog when I have some drafts…
