At 11:10 PM 1/9/00 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
....
>BTW, does anyone know what the purpose of rebol.org is? I see no mission
>statement there. Nor, do I understand why the material on rebol.org has to
>be separate from rebol.com, that is, why not just have one website?
>
>Hope this helps,
>
>Cheryl
It is there to distinguish/separate company position
from user or general public comments. The opinions and code
that appear on rebol.org do not represent the company.
rebol.org does provide a venue for folks to add value
who are not associated with the company.
That alone is enough reason to have a separate site.
short form ^above^ long form below \/
Often you can get valuable insight from somebody
who is not restricted by a company relationship.
Either they can speak without asking for permission
or they can make an observation that those on the inside
cannot see because they are too close to it.
After reading discussions here about "do on strings",
"locals", "statics", "context" and binding I realized that
I could offer up a code snippet as an example
that was not purely academic (foo this/that)
but instead derived from real live code.
I just updated the page on 'do' at rebol.org -
http://rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/wiki.r?wiki=do
I did not have to wait for company approval or endorsement.
Similarly, the company is not liable for things I have
contributed to the public site without this approval.
why have a rebol.org ? why not just a mailing list?
If you want to stimulate adoption of a product (rebol)
then there must be provisions for adherents and
user-groups to interact - to promote the free
exchange of information.
A mailing list like this one can do part of that -
and it doesn't matter what follows the @ (rebol.org .com or .net)
in the list name or if the product is even part of the list name.
Since the sender of a message to a mailing list is a clear part
of each message, it is easy to tell who represents the company.
Not so with web pages.
A mailing list or newsgroup has no permanence however.
(At least not without an archive and even an archive
has little for navigation aides.) Late comers lose.
A website offers information permanence and navigational
structure - late comers win because the information
targets them. It allows them to get up-to-speed.
Now back to your question:
Assuming it is good to encourage permanence of public
information exchange why not put it all on one website?
Why not have a wiki at rebol.com?
[ being one of the authors of a wiki it's hard for me
to say "no" to this idea ]
On a combined website, it would be difficult
to determine which pages were written/endorsed
by company people and which were written
by the public with no endorsement.
Delineating the supported stuff is critical
in a commercial venture.
You could define a user-contributed area or path prefix
within the site (or several) and or delegate
areas of responsibility to those who have shown
responsibility in their replies to the mailing list.
This is easy in a wiki that works with the server
and basic-authentication to do delegation.
If we leave liability out of the picture,
you still have missed accrediting and graffiti potential.
Publicly edited pages tend to get started by one and
completed by a different one or several others.
While a good wiki _can_ notate or tag _who_ last modified
a page and who is its author/maintainer is, it becomes
difficult to define the boundaries to that information.
Who takes the credit if several tweakers edit a page?
And who gets to do the writing?
How do you keep your site from getting inappropriate content?
(graffiti)
Both of these are solved with a wiki that supports
authentication and has a delegation model.
But why bother if for little or no cost (just another domain)
you can have an entirely separate site maintained
by real users for real users?
When rebol (the company) is ready to delegate more
they will make the move to allow external folk
to edit their content. Till then they have to work
with the more limited documentation
resources (people) that they have and submissions
come through controlled channels.
I am inclined to believe that the doc folks
do look at rebol.org from time to time.
-bobr
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[EMAIL PROTECTED]
