[wsfii-coord] discussion of the front page of the Wsfii site

[Jo Walsh]

dear Wsfii coordinators,

as part of my fiddling around with the
http://okfn.org/wsfii/wiki/WsfiiPublication i hacked a little bit on 
http://okfn.org/wsfii/wiki/WhatIsWsfii and added some quotes and a
little bit of commentary on the end. i know it's not three paragraphs
any more, sigh.

work on the publication thing, due to a complete but probably inevitable
communication systems failure, was started the day *after* the deadline.
it was an intense rush and there wasn't time to do more than focus on
people and material that would very likely be available to help out right
away and appropriate pieces more or less already prepared in at least
base form. in retrospect i am sorry i was not able to consult more
widely on this, i hope people like what it turned out. I was asked to
drop one piece, the open content one, from the nodel book, for space
reasons. i would like to do a separate 'Wsfii handbook' version of
just this material, maybe some more visuals, with that missing piece in
it too, maybe gather a few more contributions if there are more blank
spaces ... ?

i appreciate that if Wsfii is to have a new kind of respectability,
there are ways in which you don't want your decision making to look
like flanneling, unorganised. It's so nice to talk to people and make
decisions though conversation, face to face, but then those
conversations dont get documented. 

back in London Paul Sanders spoke to me repeatedly and convincingly 
but in a way i didn't really get about 'vagueness'. I have always been
a bit compulsive about information modelling. And it is easy to get
carried away and wind up designing and implementing something that
just looks like a better control system. And that would suck.

Where am i going with this? Oh, i wanted to complain about the front
page again ;P and suggest that if people are not holding or at least
recording conversations because they dont have a forum to but dont
want those conversations to be totally publically broadcast then that
makes sense to me. One could have this list limited to stuff that was
'meta', that in some ways does extend beyond administrivia, but have
an RSS feed of mail going through it that is publically suscribable
to, and a clearly documented means of 'getting over the bar' in terms
of becoming involved in Wsfii coordination in any place.

I am trying to help bootstrap a Wsfii spinoff with a "civic engineering"
focus this summer... http://frot.org/ has a draft that i accidentally
uploaded over the root of my webserver and now don't have the heart to
take down. I guess when it has a better domain to live on and a wiki
and all the trimmings i wuold like it to be in the Wsfii calendar.


-jo

p.s. i think if any of the people who are on this list are NOT also on 
the wsfii-discuss list then they deserve to be pelted in the stocks.



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