Posts with keyword: wiki

10 entries

Politicopia: Participatory Legislation

Mon Jan 22 11:02:00 2007

Steve Urquhart is the Rules Chairman of the Utah House of Representative. Before I worked in the Governor's office, I had no idea what that meant. It's a very powerful position because the Rules Committee essentially decides what bills make it to the floor and can be voted on. In other words, they're the gatekeepers who decide what legislation gets to a vote. Rep. Urquhart is also one of the Utah politicians most committed to transparency in Government. He was one of the first politician bloggers in Utah or anywhere. Now, he's taken a big step toward making the
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We Are Smarter Than Me

Wed Nov 29 15:57:00 2006

Wade Billings sent me a link to the we are smarter than me project. The goal is to collaboratively write a business book. If you've got something to say, sign up and say it. The book will be published by Pearson Publishing and there's a meet-up planned for March for anyone who's contributed. The book is being written using book wiki, a tool for creating books on a wiki (not surprisingly). The founders have set up chapters and written some starter text for each chapter to get them going. New chapters can be proposed, but the founders exert some
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HTML to Kwiki Markup Conversion

Thu Sep 7 09:44:00 2006

I use Kwiki for lecture notes, homework and other Web pages I need to teach my class. Here's an example: the lectures for my programming language design class. Today I needed to convert some old pages (embedded in PHP) for use on the wiki. I did one by hand and thought that I ought to write a Perl program to convert the HTML to Kwiki mark-up. Then I got smart and realized someone must have already done it--I was right. David Iberri has a HTML to Kwiki module for Perl that with a little scaffolding did the job nicely:
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SocialText Open

Mon Jul 31 05:30:00 2006

With OSCON happening last week, there were some important open-source announcements. One I wanted to highlight was SocialText Open. SocialText is a very capable commercial wiki. Now, you can download the code at SourceForge. SocialText Open isn't SocialText's first play in the open source space. They've been a big supporter of Kwiki, a wiki system written in Perl that is highly modular and customizable. Ross Mayfield, SocialText's CEO commented on the change on his blog. Socialtext Open changes everything. Including the way we are going to communicate, with nothing to hide and sharing our Public Roadmap. While Open is
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Wiki Wednesday

Wed May 3 20:19:00 2006

After the day was over at IIW, Eugene Kim was headed down to SocialText to speak at Wiki Wednesday, so some of us tagged along. The evening was nice enough that we moved it outside. A very informal and nice conversation. Eugene was being controversial and said that recent improvements to wikis are missing the point. Wikis are transformational tools for communities. They are neutral space. So what features are needed and central to the notion of a wiki? Yet wikis need single sign on. Lightweight SSO solutions are viable. If wikis are supposed to be about community, then
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OpenID and MediaWiki

Wed Apr 5 20:30:00 2006

Ross Mayfield generously donated a wiki for the Internet Identity Workshop and we used it to good effect for the event last October. This time there was some interest in using OpenID (and even Yadis, if possible) to do authentication and it just so happens that Jonathan Daugherty has created an OpenID patch for MediaWiki. With some help from the group at #openid on Freenode, especially Jonathan, I was able to get a patched copy of MediaWiki up and configured to use OpenID. It's now the official Internet Identity Workshop Wiki. Here's what I did to make it all
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Social Software and eGovernment

Tue Feb 21 10:25:00 2006

In a recent Government Technology News article Wayne Hanson asks "Can Social Software Improve eGovernment?" One interesting thing that struck me in the opening paragraph is that he throws RSS into the pool of accepted technology. That's saying something for RSS that I'm not sure is acknowledged much. The article talks about blogs, referencing an article from last February that spoke about our blogging experiment in Utah when I was CIO. It also mentions wikis, del.icio.us, Flickr, and collaborative editing tools like Subetha and Moon Edit. Unfortunately, the article reaches no conclusions and even makes a few blatant errors
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Wikibooks

Tue Dec 13 14:59:00 2005

Wikibooks is an effort to do to books what Wikipedia did to the encyclopedia: build them using shared, open source collaboration. I think this could have some real application to texts and class notes. From the few I checked out, it seems like it's still more idea than reality. Books are bigger than encyclopedia entries, so they will be more likely to be incomplete. This will negatively affect user's perception of quality. Wikibooks could probably use some way of segmenting works in progress from those in production and some community based way to promote books from the draft bookshelf
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The Writable Web

Mon Nov 14 18:19:00 2005

Several interesting pieces on writable Web in the last few days: Tim Bray: Why would anyone want a word processor any more? Dan Bricklin releases WikiCalc Add these to things like hCards in Kwiki and Jot. That only scratches the surface, of course. The whole "writable web" thing includes wikis of all sorts and even blogs.
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Business Continuity Planning for Academics

Tue Nov 8 15:33:00 2005

Writing about business continuity planning in light of avian flu scares for Between the Lines made me think about the same subject in the context of what I'm doing now: teaching classes, doing research, and interacting with students. I came to the conclusion that we could actually manage fairly well. My students are already using email and instant messaging to contact me. Naturally, we still meet face to face a good deal as well, using IM mainly for quick discussions, setting up appointments and so on, but in an emergency we could move more to IM and email. My
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