On 5/31/06, Thomas Lockney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm thinking more along the lines of persistent group communication. Case in point: with the new book review program, I've been trying to figure out a good place to put the various guidelines for the reviews. Also, it would be nice to have a place to put the various suggestions for how we want to handle the reviews. These sorts of things don't lend themselves well to something that could fit within the catherder.
Heh -- I'm actively working on Herder 2.0 (which I'm happy to collaborate on, though it's basically just an AR model and a handful of Camping controllers at this point) which does include a book review module...but your point is well-taken. Even the features that *are* in the cat herder are quite poorly documented at this point, which I consider a bug. Book reviews are also something I consider to be a special case, as they are inherently pretty different from the "anyone can post and edit" model of a traditional Wiki. Really, you want to solicit reviews only from people who have actually read the book, and once written, each review should be fairly static -- it's not an ongoing conversation, so much as an impression at-the-moment. Regardless of the Cat Herder feature-set, some more "permanent" web presence for the group does seem appropriate, which could be based on a Wiki, blogging engine, or even (*gasp*) simple static HTML, updated as needed via SFTP. The current catch-all behavior of the herder is unfortuante, as it has (for example) precluded putting a read-only archive of the old wiki online.
For that matter, a lot of the ideas related to the foscon/oscamp discussions might also be handy to have in a central place since people tend to ask questions about it on and off over time.
That is also a good point, though it's worth remembering that the relationship between FOSCON and PDX.rb is more or less an historical accident, especially as we start to talk about being more inclusive of other user groups. I can't help but wonder if a Backpack or Basecamp project devoted solely to FOSCON might not be a better fit.
I think there is a lot more going on in the group than there was maybe a year ago (I was only watching the mailing list and wasn't even in Portland at the time, so I can't speak authoritatively). It would be nice to have someplace to post random items of interest for the group as a whole.
The group has certainly grown, but I think that activity levels have always been bursty, which is much of the problem: our percieved need to communication and record-keeping tools at one of the peaks of group activity is very different from that when we're in a lull. When the discussion dies down, we see the old resources (like the previous Wiki, or the cat herder) go stale, and often die out before the next time activity picks up. Case in point: our previous Instiki instance is sitting on the PA server, waiting to be brought back to life, because no one has cared/had time/been able to nurse it back to health. To be fair, the old wiki was, IIRC, based on an early Instiki-AR branch, and basically so flaky as to be unusuable. The point remains, however, that this is a road we've been down before, and I simply want to advise caution before we set off on yet another great Quest for a collaboration tool.
I think one of the keys to maintaining a group wiki is for there to be at least one person (preferrably more) who "sheppards" the wiki. Granted, in our rather loose organization it might be hard to get this going, but I think we're reaching the stage where it is a possibility at least.
This is of course a given, and something that has historically bacially fallen to whoever did the initial setup/hosting for the wiki, as well as anyone who they deputize. In this case, that would probably mean intially anyone with shell access to the pdxruby hosting account at PA, which has been a fairly non-exclusive group AFAIK. I'm not trying to discourage people from setting up resources for the group to share, only cautioning against automatically reaching for a set of tools that have been tried and abandoned in the past. Aside from FOSCON-related information, I'm still just not seeing the big picture for what kinds of information we're going to be maintaining that can't either be added to the herder, or simply archived naturally as list traffic. -Lennon _______________________________________________ PDXRuby mailing list [email protected] IRC: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net http://lists.pdxruby.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxruby
