Note: I'm just creating this as a stub, to encourage discussion and collaboration. Feel free to add, edit or move as you wish. --Chriswaterguy · talk 23:53, 27 March 2007 (PDT)

Wiki

The MediaWiki wiki is currently the platform used for collaborative creation of content.

A wiki offers the advantage of flexibility. Note the title of Ward Cunningham's talk at WikiSym 2006, which sums it up: Design Principles of Wiki: How can so little do so much?

Drupal

Drupal is currently the platform used for the Appropedia forums and blogs.

Drupal as wiki

This is an alternative which was briefly explored by CurtB (with some involvement by Chriswaterguy) when Curt was setting up the Drupal site.

Drupal can do much of what the wiki does depending how it's set up - even running a "wiki" site under Drupal at KFOL - at the same time offering access to the features/modules available in Drupal. However it probably means a much slower site (the figure of 7 seconds for page loading was mentioned for KFOL).

Features such as voting, and better integration with the Drupal site, are either available to MediaWiki now, with some work, or likely to become available before too long.

Developments/tweaks wanted

  • Social networking: what features exactly? Built in chat feature?
  • Design & project ratings, like Open Architecture Network. Or do we do this on a different site, say Open Design Network (talk to Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr about this.)

Approach

  • Curtbeckmann said, via email, that I think the key to success will be to bootstrap the current state of the art while growing the community. I agree entirely. --Chriswaterguy · talk 23:53, 27 March 2007 (PDT)
  • Scott Albritton & myself discussed using MediaWikiW as a back-end, with a tweaked user interface with extra features. This would give us greater compatibility, and more ability to take advantage of future develoments in MediaWiki. --Chriswaterguy · talk 23:53, 27 March 2007 (PDT)
  • MediaWiki has huge effort and momentum behind it, and is an excellent platform that is growing and changing rapidly. I think it's important to work carefully on changes, always coordinating and submitting code-level changes with the upstream MediaWiki project; otherwise, changes can become a messy hairball and incompatibilities can arise with future versions of MediaWiki. The question "what happens when we upgrade MediaWiki versions?" should always be foremost on the mind when making changes. For social networking, I favour choosing best-of-breed outside services and asking Appropedia members to standardize on those, for example LinkedIn]. Dhart 00:36, 28 March 2007 (PDT)

Tech-focused people involved with the Appropedia/Sustainapedia project and partners

Groups which have expressed interest in collaborating:

Hosting

  • I'd like to propose that Appropedia be hosted on an environmentally sustainable infrastructure, with a commitment to remain on the cutting-edge of environmental sustainability (within the reasonable limits of appropriate technology of course). Given the nice LAMPW stack that powers WikiMedia, the choice of hosting company can be fairly neutral, and the "environmentally sustainable" criteria simply added to the list of regular criteria for hosting. While such hosting is unlikely to be cheap, announcement of a targeted fundraising drive would likely gain better attention than Appropedia announcements alone (e.g. a response from the media/blogosphere along the lines of "Gee, I didn't know anyone could do sustainable hosting! Everyone should be doing that!") . Dhart 19:48, 28 March 2007 (PDT)
I think this is a great idea. We have been talking with http://www.sustainablehosting.com/ about this. --Lonny 23:00, 28 March 2007 (PDT)
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