On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Carol Lerche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The reactions to my post remind me of the story of the lumberjacks
Fantastic story. However, in practice a CMS is often inferior to a wiki in that it appoints "keepers". The cook amongst the lumberjacks has to cook daily and cannot decide not to feed a particular lumberjack. The keepers of the CMS can get antagonistic, or just ignore their duties, and that just kills community collaboration. Same with CVS and SVN - the centralisation spawns politics. Distributed control is the right thing -- for all its flaws, the wiki *social dynamic* rules -- you get lots of contnet, perhaps a bit disorganised, and a thriving community around it. CMSs are hierarchical and mere observation shows what they do to community. All the observations that Linus Torvalds (in various flamerwars :-) ) has made on the social and political flaws of CVS and SVN apply squarely to classic CMSs. Clay Shirky's "Designing social software" essay is also relevant here. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
