[If you reply, please reply to *only one* list...thanks...] All,
Here are some questions we'll have to decide, and problems to solve, regarding the pilot project I announced earlier this evening. Your input on any of these would be quite welcome, here on the list or in the forums: http://textop.org/smf/index.php?topic=82.0 * For citizendium-tools: how many is a good number for a core technical team with login permissions? Three? Six? What? * Who should be invited to the wiki immediately after the initial installation for a few days to a week (i.e., before opening it up to a wider group of pilot project participants)? * Who, after that, should be invited to the pilot project? What minimum requirements, if any, would you recommend for pilot project participants? Bear in mind two constraints I personally have. (1) We *will* allow authors who are not editors to join the pilot project. (2) I'm leaning toward requiring participants agree to acknowledge and abide by a certain "Statement of Fundamental Policies," a *draft* of which I will be posting soon. It will not contain anything that isn't already in "Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge," however--and it will be a much-stripped-down version of the latter, allowing considerable wiggle-room. * Who should decide who may join the pilot project? Who should actually do the work of allowing them in? What, technically speaking, is the best way to do this? Please help me think creatively here. * Think now to the policy pages that will be necessary. If you're ambitious, you might list what they should include, and then say (1) what may be more or less borrowed from Wikipedia with relatively minor changes, (2) what needs to be completely reworked from Wikipedia, and (3) what entirely new policies need to be elaborated, such as the operation of editorial workgroups. * One additional function/purpose of the pilot project might be the initial formation of editorial workgroups. How do you conceive of that best proceeding? * What do you think should make the adoption of policy *official*, for purposes of the pilot project? My saying so? My saying so without too many howls of protest? The rough consensus of an editorial group? Or of a group of stakeholders I appoint? Something else entirely? * At some point, but presumably not in the first week or so of the pilot project, we should upload all of Wikipedia's articles. Does software/a plugin exist that allows one to refresh a mirror without writing over articles that have been changed locally? Or is this something we'll have to write from scratch, given our requirements? (I address this mainly to citizendium-tools.) * I may want to make our press release include info about recent appointments as well as this pilot program. Some may counsel us to wait to make a "big" announcement when we go public. I'm inclined to think publicity is always good and saving press opportunities for later rarely secures any advantages when you're talking about an open and relatively small project like this one (we're not MySpace...). Journalists will tend to do stories when they notice we exist, not when there's Big News about us. Anyway, your thoughts on that? (I think more press will help bring some editors out of the woodwork.) * Are there any "gotchas" to look out for in the initial installation or the pilot project? Any other deep questions we need to think about? (List them please.) --Larry _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
