This is “The Transjovian Council”, a group of people living in the outer reaches of our system, beyond Jupiter. Out here, the light of the sun is dim and we must make due with what we have, watched over by the stern gods of the soil, of the sky, of the sea, of the underworld: Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto… Here we are, in our ice mines, gene labs, in our generation habitats, and all we have is text over low bandwidth connections, with long delays. And yet! And yet, a council has formed: we take council with each other. We deliberate. As Thucydides had Pericles say in his funeral oration, thousands of years ago: “instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.”
This is a wiki. A wiki is a hypertext collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, that is – you. 😃
It's the simplest way to collaborate: we all edit text files, and link them to each other. Instead of all of us "owning" the various files, however, these files live in a collection of pages hosted by the wiki and we edit all the pages without any sense of "ownership".
This ease of use and this freedom brings with it some responsibility:
We cannot rely on the user interface to guide us, we must make our own rules, our wiki culture, and argue for it. On the mundane level of writing that means we need to agree on how to write, how to name the pages, how to organize them, and so on. But beyond that, it also means that we need to decide what's on topic and what's off topic, how to review changes, how to enforce our norms. There are no editors and moderators except for us.
If you're interested in wiki culture, there are two wikis that broadly talk about wiki culture. Meatball Wiki was one of the first wikis to talk about wikis (the first wiki being the Portland Pattern Repository that talked about everything...). Community Wiki grew out of Meatball Wiki and has lain dormant for many years.
Should the Transjovian Council ever expand to more than just one person, then we're going to work out some governance for this space – I'm thinking about a non-profit association according to Swiss law. All we need are two people and some articles of association. 😃
Suggested articles of association