On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Martin Langhoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 >
I think Carol's point was one of structure, more so than ownership or hierarchy. The hierarchy can be incredibly flat, but lend itself to a good structure. For example, in Drupal, you could use the taxonomy module to set up a structure so that when content is created, it has a home to live in and not be a free floating node in the Wiki sea. Even in the CVS vs Git type argument, there is some structure to the process. Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
