Hello Nathan,
I have set up an instance of MediaWiki on one of our servers.
The current (temporary) URL to it is:
http://geo.mavedu.com
I think it might be better if we picked the domain via vote. I
recommend leasing the domain from GoDaddy:
http://www.godaddy.com/
as they have the best deals for domains.
I can customize MediaWiki in many ways, would you like the general
public to be able to create accounts or would you like the wiki to be
invite only?
Any other suggestions / requests are welcome.
Many thanks,
Yousif
On 06/08/10 15:05, Nathan Currier wrote:
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.
