We’re sitting on the sofa and it’s hot. I prepared some nice tea, but it’s so hot I don’t want to pick it up. Radiohead is playing in the kitchen.
Recently I was talking to Greta about wikis. Well, I guess we were talking about many different things, including collaboration. She was wondering about the feasibility of a “hypertext network for friends” that I had mentioned wishing for a while back.
I want a hypertext for a network of friends, maybe a hundred people or so, enabling them to talk to each other, to link to each other. Other media is important but it takes up a lot of space and I’m currently not willing to dedicate a lot of space to this hypertext. Let’s focus on text. – 2022-02-08 NNCP distributed text
2022-02-08 NNCP distributed text
She was thinking about a place where people can edit pages, or comment on articles, or ask questions. She wondered: Do you think there is a place for such a ’co-communicative tool’ to work such things out?
Yes! Yes, I do.
I think there are places where we can see this in action. The simplest example I know is people collaborating on finding the best recipes on sites like chefkoch.de. People contribute thousands of recipes, and leave comments on them. There are plenty of such sites, but they are all driven by ad money. A while ago @wion, @pinkprius and I starting thinking about a new platform and I wrote Food Wiki to illustrate that a wiki allows us to implement all the things we need as long we stay small.
We have various recipes on this site! – Recipes
Needless to say, it hasn’t caught on. 😅
I know that other people keep their own recipe collections online, e.g. @tomasino has a recipe collection on Gopher:
7-Layer Dip, Apple Crisp, Baked Pork Chops and Sauerkraut, Basic Bread, … – Recipe Box
@paul has a recipe collection on the web:
cinnamon rolls, donutmuffins, pasta, baguette, … – Food
Collaboration is less direct. I guess you can try the recipe and send them an email if you have questions or suggestions.
Even this would qualify, though: if the culture is that it’s easy and free to host your own stuff, and to put an email address on things, and the expectation is that emails are answered because everything is small scale, then we don’t need Web 2.0 or better to collaborate. It can be simple stuff and old technology.
What remains hard is to find community of practice that actually wants to use a tool to mediate this exchange. I mean, I don’t talk about my cooking with anybody else unless I’m invited and I’m bringing Tirolercake or making Marillenknödel for them… Let alone via some sort of social media. These needs are perhaps easily met offline, in my immediate circles, so there’s no need.
And that in turn means that online platforms for such learning would be for interests that are hard to find in your immediate circle of friends and family. For most people, that only leaves work, or those precious few years one spends at school and in higher education.
Sometimes I feel that wikis and related platforms are an answer to a question that practically nobody is asking. And if they do, then the technology is such a minor aspect, they’ll happily collaborate using MS Teams or Discord or Slack.
So yes, in theory wikis can serve as the written repository for a community of practice, free form, structured by members of the community. The practitioners act as experts, writing up stuff, and people new to the topic write questions, highlighting the parts that need refining in order to make the entire text an uplifting one: we all get better even though we’re all at different levels of expertise.
Sadly, people with interests that are hard to find in your immediate circle of friends and family, that care about the technology used and the intellectual property regime around it all, that care about the collaborative process, the intersection of all these facets is exceedingly rare. This why I’m starting to think that even if such platforms are interesting teaching platforms, there’s going to be no breakthrough. That’s simply not a problem people have.
The important thing for me is to enjoy what we have without regard for whether other people want or need it, I think.
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If you want to read more by Greta Goetz, take a look at her site:
This is my personal blog and digital garden. – gretzuni
#Wikis