Thanks very much, Yousif, Ron and Christopher, for your positive responses. Yousif, to your kind offer, yes, let's indeed start up a MediaWiki site.
I have been waiting and hoping that maybe Ken Caldiera or Mike MacCracken would comment on the idea, too, because I suspect that getting something like this rolling effectively might initially require some cajoling. After all, a fundamental difference between something like Wikipedia and what I am proposing is that scientists will not just be helping to refine others’ information, but sharing what could stay closely guarded as their own property, and then potentially become proprietary secrets of large corporations and the sources of large sums of money. On the other hand, I hope that many following this site would agree that geoengineering will need to be unlike other science in various respects: while it will likely involve a wide variety of activities undertaken through a large variety of means and legal instruments, it is hard to imagine any geoengineering seeming publicly acceptable – or ever getting enacted except unilaterally under hostile conditions - while involving the kinds of trade secrets of business-as-usual. Thus it will need to be an immensely transparent process for the world to see, and as it aspires towards an emergency restoration and preservation of the commons, it will perhaps need to invoke an ‘intellectual commons’ as well, and thus a Wiki site could be a useful vehicle for its development. Because of the creative nature of some of the hoped for contributions, though, I think that a somewhat customized version of standard open- source practice should probably involve increased visibility of attribution. If practicing scientists are really to post their ideas to such a site, they should get recognition for their contributions. Further, with Wikipedia, the discussion tabs leave disagreements about an entry “under the hood,” as it were, and it might be better to alter that model a little for the present purposes, perhaps with multiple versions of a given idea displayed one aside the other - I would be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this and other aspects of how it should be designed. There’s a non-profit in San Francisco called Creative Commons that could perhaps be appropriate for helping to set it up. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
