While I’m not going to be in Montreal, I am planning to follow some of the activity being posted online. In addition to the obvious wiki coverage, WikiSym is rife with experienced bloggers and (hopefully) a few Twitterers. There are some events that are accessible online, even if the face-to-face discussion is not.
Co-constructing politics
My exposure to wikis in 2005 led to a 6-month experiment, PoliticWiki, that asked participants to build a political platform from scratch. Now, as that project lingers in a near dormant state, I’ve found myself concentrating on the dynamics of community and how emergence can be designed. My panel on Tuesday will touch on those ideas, but here I will just provide an update on the state of politics and wikis.
Innovations in Wiki Use
Wikis are being used more and more as a means of applying the wisdom of the crowds to new domains. Here are a few that popped up in the information stream recently: Keiki, WikiInvest and WikiLeaks
The Evolution of the Biggest Wiki
Think of wiki, and most people automatically add -pedia. The popular understanding of Wikipedia is of this somewhat controversial source of information that is both deep and unreliable, where a few people do the work and everyone else benefits. Of interest recently is how age and acceptance is changing both the perception and activity around Wikipedia.
A world of wiki
This morning in Montreal, WikiSym 2007 kicked off without me. Funding, academic workload, and the bizarre coordination of American train schedules kept me from the trip north. I am most sad about missing a full day today of Open Spaces, an unconference within a conference. However, I will still get to participate in a political wiki panel with Michael Pilling and Kate Raynes-Goldie Tuesday morning, and I’m confident someone will provide updates through Twitter. In the next few posts today, I’ll talk about the biggest wiki—Wikipedia— and recent developments in the world of wiki. Specifically, I’m interested in use of wikis for politics.
Microwind generators blow my mind
In honor of the Bioneers conference—which is being broadcast as a satellite conference in Bloomington this weekend—here’s a very interesting use of the aeroelastic flutter effect. The Windbelt generator was inspired by the infamous collapse of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a standard cautionary tale for physicists and structural engineers.