[p2p-research] Fwd: important message to all p2p foundation sympathizers

Tue Aug 10 10:33:03 CEST 2010

This thread is a public discussion.  Sam Rose made some good points
that wiki formatting and collaboration between editors makes for a
good discussion and I agree.

All of the direction and substance of my current efforts is open to
discussion.  I hope this is true for other authors and historical
conventions, too, but I don't mean to say I have the right to decide
anything for anyone.

I make statements about the P2PStack and the P2PCC because that is how
they are, right now, but this is not meant to imply that they cannot
be changed.

I did my best to understand Michel's organization before I started,
and iterated from there.  I may have made some mistakes along the way
and these should be corrected.

My attempts are, generally, additive, and non-destructive.  In places
where this is not the case I hope that calm discussion can aid us in
discovering what corrections can be done.

For the purposes of discussion it might be helpful to simply consider
everything "just a wiki page" to start with, and to then look at how
the concept diverges from that point.  Regardless of how we do it, I
hope we can discover together what is important about the wiki and
what can be done to make those important things accessible and useful
to the folks who rely on them.  I have fears about this process
hinging on one person's unwillingness to participate, a fear that I
see Michel expressing in his own way.  I hope that as we examine the
wiki together that we can all find a willingness to discover and
learn.

Alex

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Michel Bauwens
<michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear friends,
>
> I can imagine that most of you find some of the squabbles of the list
> tedious, and have not been following it in detail.
>
> However, we are now clearly reaching an infection point,
>
> Mr. Alex Rollin, much of whose contributions I otherwise appreciate, intends
> to take the P2P Foundation wiki in directions which I do not wish to see,
> which have not been discussed, and are alien and in many ways anti-thetical
> to all I have tried to achieve so far.
>
> The declarations below of Alex give a good view of where Alex wants to take
> the wiki. While some of it may make sense, it is also clear that the
> statement is declarative, beyond discussion, and a call for everybody to
> conform to a new direction. Personally, the changes I object to have been
> quite negative and have nearly broken my intellectual productivity on the
> wiki, and Alex has been particularly unresponsive to any of my concerns,
> both public and private. Apart from any differences it seems that we also
> have incompatible personalities.
>
> I have proposed the creation of two wiki's, following the model of Linux, in
> which technologically oriented people like Alex can do their
> experimentations, without harm to more editorially oriented people like
> myself who prefer the utmost simplicity in the editorial process. There
> seems to be a lack of enthusiasm and response to this, but the alternative,
> that I have to live under a new regime which represents to opposite of my
> aims, is impossible to accept.
>
> So I'm writing this to make clear that if I have no support, I will have to
> look for another venue to continue my work. This would be quite catastrophic
> in my mind. So if you value the work that has been done, and oppose a
> authoritarian change to the processes that were in place before, please let
> your voice be heard now.
>
> The P2P Foundation has no clear governance rules and the level of conflict
> is unprecedented. So this is really a moment where your input is important.
> Since I can not solve the conflict on my own, your participation in finding
> a solution is vital.
>
> But let me be clear, I cannot accept any solution in which I have to conform
> to unilateral changes imposed by Mr. Alex Rollin. If Alex is unwilling to
> deal with any of my suggestions and criticisms of the new practices, then
> the best solution is to create an area where Alex can work as he wishes, and
> people can join, and so approaches can be compared, and changes can
> eventually be imported from one to the other.
>
> Michel
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 2:51 PM
> Subject: Re: [p2p-research] some wiki editing rules
> To: p2p research network <p2presearch at listcultures.org>
> Cc: james burke <lifesized at gmail.com>
>
>
> well, Alex, I think your response illustrates what I'm trying to say about
> my communication,
>
> - all the edits are yours, yet you revert my 'changes', which are presumable
> of an inferior category since they are not edits
>
> - you revert all of it back to the way you want it, meaning that we can only
> have an edit war, but don't worry, you win, I don't have time for it
>
> - the rest of the email is all in declarative format, you know what users
> want, what their expectations are, these readers are of course generic, like
> consumers, there's nothing like a constructed p2p community with its own
> norms and approach
>
> - you of course, know the answer to all their needs, you proceed to
> implement them, and you help us poor beginners to make sense of all these
> enlightened changes
>
> - you have also decided that our methodology is action research, well thank
> you very much Alex, I'm really happy to know how we are now all supposed to
> work
>
> - and we are all going to use wikipedia formatting since that is what all
> users expect and want ...
>
> - and there is the first public course in Commons-Based Peer Production, I'm
> happy to learn, which requires that all major pages are changed in a way
> that I disapprove of ..
>
>
> I'm I really the only person to find problematic that one person steps in,
> and declares how everybody is going to work, and be damned all the legacy
> work that has been done before, be damned any other options that may be
> taken,
>
> Sam, I'm sorry, but this is a breaking point for me, this is a hostile
> takeover, and I can neither accept Alex's authority over me, nor over the
> community, I cannot accept such a stance and behaviour ..
>
> So, what do we do? This is one hundred percent incompatible with all my
> wishes for the P2P Foundation ..
>
> Is everybody else happy to live under the enligthened rule of Mr. Alex
> Rollin?
>
> I find it absolutely imperative that a second wiki fork is created, if the
> majority of people feel Alex' way is the future and they are willing to
> follow the new rules, they can join Alex, I don't even mind that this would
> be the first wiki,
>
> but I cannot continue my work in an alien environment in which I have no say
> at all,
>
> I thank Alex though for making it crystal clear what his plans and attitudes
> are,
>
> As far as I know, if I find no support for the approach that was followed so
> far, I'll have to work on my own
>
> Michel
>
> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 2:23 PM, Alex Rollin <alex.rollin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> For clarification purposes, all edits to the State Capitalism page
>> were performed by me.
>>
>> I reverted all of Michel's changes.  You can review the history here:
>>
>>
>> http://p2pfoundation.net/State_Capitalism?title=State_Capitalism&action=history
>>
>> I wish that there were more red links, but I will find time to add the
>> pages when I get a chance.  I just wish there were more red links so
>> others could see them as pointers so they would feel free and invited
>> to add them, too.  Patrick noticed them immediately and added a
>> definition.  That's what I'm talking about.  he and I regularly add to
>> the recent changes and interlink pages.
>>
>> I do not intend to redo all the pages on the wiki with this
>> formatting, but I do intend to do this and more for important articles
>> that serve the purpose of supporting materials that are used in the
>> "Commons Based Peer Production" definitional framework.  The local
>> name for this is the "P2P Collaboration Stack" (P2PStack), a resource
>> collection of tools, methods, and protocol to aid individuals and
>> groups in using a Commons-Based Peer Production approach.  The
>> educational approach fo the curriculum and resource is
>> action-research.  Users are contributors on the wiki and regularly
>> update wiki pages with research and findings for review by the peer
>> community.
>>
>> This is the first public course in Commons-Based Peer Production, and
>> it draws on material from the P2P Foundation Wiki heavily.  Users of
>> the P2P Stack are going to be moving back and forth between a lot of
>> sites.  Their needs are mixed between adding pasted definitions that
>> meet with historical usage on the wiki as well as crafting nuanced
>> additions that wouldn't be possible in the same pages on Wikipedia.
>> Not only this, but there are structured sections to be added that
>> explicitly declare P2P perspectives on the term/article/subject under
>> scrutiny.  Clean pages with clear markup and easily replicated
>> templates are important for this endeavor.  The articles are more
>> complex than the traditional paste job, and contain different
>> perspectives within different sections.  Users want their pages to
>> look professional as they are sharing them with outside organizations,
>> where users are familiar with wikipedia formatting.  The outside users
>> compare our site to other informational sites and the articles are
>> formatted to allay their expectations with documents that they can
>> easily traverse with a sensible information flow.
>>
>> I can understand that the use of =,==,===, and ==== headings could be
>> seen as additional complexity, but structured documents with external
>> links and inline citations using the cite extension make for a
>> pleasant reading experience.  It's professional looking, and allows
>> other editors to easily insert what they need into the page by using
>> additional sections.  Those editors are allowed to use any citation
>> format they like, but I encourage them to use the cite extension
>> because it is easy and creates a professional looking page they can be
>> proud to share.  It is more like MLA formatting than the historical
>> option of inline URLs and allows the re-use of a reference without
>> retyping it or cluttering the body of the page.
>>
>> Because there are so few editors on the wiki it is important that
>> there be an agreement about how to use things, yes, and controlling
>> the formatting for every page would seem to be a losing battle as long
>> as new editors come in.  New editors will always make mistakes.  In
>> most cases these are not disastrous.  If they are on an important
>> subject, we fix them, and educate where possible.  Using wanted pages
>> is great.  Wanted categories, anyone?
>>
>>
>> http://p2pfoundation.net/Special:WantedCategories?title=Special:WantedCategories&limit=500&offset=0
>>
>> Delete or add to another category as subcategory, please!
>>
>> A
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > hi sam, alex, james and others,
>> >
>> > I'm responding to sam's 2 specific paragraphs,
>> >
>> > to see the code I objected too, you have to go to the full original code
>> > before I changed it, I did mention it previously but I want to make my
>> > issues clear again
>> >
>> > my problems were:
>> >
>> > - very long copy of wikipedia article, which I mistakenly though were
>> > the
>> > whole article (alex corrected me on this)
>> >
>> > - this article had multiple dead links in the wikpedia format which is
>> > not
>> > the one we have used, and judging form the links, they would never have
>> > been
>> > activated .. my strong impression is that both the links and the article
>> > were just a decontextualized copy of the wikipedia, copied from the
>> > edited
>> > rather than visible page of the wikipedia article
>> >
>> > the whole thing just didn't feel right  .. it was like an alien body
>> > that
>> > was dumped decontextualized ...
>> >
>> > the issue was,  apart form that  judgment, that the categories were
>> > invisible as well,
>> >
>> > - furthermore, there was a lot of extra code, that would stream
>> > commentary
>> > from other places in our wiki ... I'm not sure what it was, but apart
>> > from
>> > never being used in the past and unlikely to be used in the future, it
>> > seems
>> > it was this code who wreaked havoc in the visibility of the other parts
>> > of
>> > the article
>> >
>> > - everything was done in wikipedia format, not our traditional wiki
>> > format
>> >
>> > now the latter can be discussed, but has implications,
>> >
>> > * a lot more code is needed, even for simple things as
>> > titling/subtitling
>> >
>> > about every wikipedia convention means more work for editors for
>> > example,
>> > lots mofe == to use, distinguishing between types of links, etc.. if we
>> > change, what do we do with 13,000 previous articles ??
>> >
>> > why changes things that worked already pretty well, etc...
>> >
>> >
>> > Then Sam offers a solution, but I wonder why that is necessary
>> >
>> > but, got to stop, my wife is hitting me with a newspaper because I'm not
>> > coming to eat ...
>> >
>> > more on that 2nd point later
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > PROBLEM 1
>> >
>> > Michel wrote there:
>> > "Personally, I find the new way of loading content with tons of
>> > incomprehensible code that takes hours to edit away, absolutely awful,
>> > and a real degradation of our wiki"
>> > Michel, can you please clarify on this page which code you are seeing
>> > a problem with, and help us understand more how it impedes your
>> > effective usage of the wiki. The goal with this question is to figure
>> > out a way that allows useful technical affordances to be employed,
>> > while making sure that you can still effectively edit the wiki. But
>> > first, we need to understand the problem through your eyes.
>> > I think, of course, we should also understand what is being employed
>> > on these pages through Alex's eyes, too.
>> > Michel also said:
>> > "Please let's not copy wholesale articles from the wikipedia and
>> > especially ton's of dead links. The policy of our wiki has always been
>> > not to create dead links."
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > SOLUTION OF SAM
>> >
>> >
>> > I would like to suggest that we could maybe do the following on dead
>> > links:
>> > 1. We need a way to contact active wiki participants as a group
>> > 2. We audit them once per month, by viewing
>> > http://p2pfoundation.net/Special:WantedPages and then put out a call
>> > on front page of wiki, and to this list, etc, for people to help build
>> > those pages, with a stated deadline, and a description of what is
>> > minimally needed (should be part of wiki policy somewhere as to what a
>> > stub should minimally contain).
>> > 3. If at the end of "x" amount of time, a page is not created (1
>> > month? 1 week?), a bot is used to remove it from
>> > http://p2pfoundation.net/Special:WantedPages list (which removes the
>> > dead link)
>> >
>> > On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 11:52 PM, Samuel Rose <samuel.rose at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Thanks Alex, a few replies:
>> >>
>> >> On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Alex Rollin <alex.rollin at gmail.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >> > Feel free to defend him.  I tend to create policy on the wiki that
>> >> > others can read.  I tend to create the policies by using what Michel
>> >> > has stated to me was useful in the past.  Then I send out links for
>> >> > him and everyone else to read and change.  If you feel like it
>> >> > perhaps
>> >> > you could move in that direction as well so that there is something
>> >> > to
>> >> > look at besides Michel's hearsay.  What he has told me of how the
>> >> > wiki
>> >> > 'is' has been added to articles I created in several categories
>> >> > including help, operations, and administration.  You and anyone else
>> >> > can now traverse these documents easily from:
>> >> > http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Foundation
>> >> >
>> >> > I do not dismiss Michel's concerns.  He was putting words in my mouth
>> >> > when he quoted me.  His quote might give you the impression that I
>> >> > dismiss his concerns or that I don't alter my behavior in order to
>> >> > show consideration for his approach and needs.  His is a cry for
>> >> > help,
>> >> > but it has negative consequences for me.  He broadcasts policy to
>> >> > this
>> >> > list that is not written anywhere else.  I go and put it into the
>> >> > wiki
>> >> > and follow it when I do the kinds of activities he does on the wiki.
>> >> > I call him on Skype to understand what he is getting at so I can help
>> >> > to put it in place.  I do this as a community member and
>> >> > collaborator.
>> >> >
>> >> > I would gladly participate in any other productive way to help in the
>> >> > creation of documents and process that preserve Michel's ability to
>> >> > edit the wiki in a way that he has traditionally been comfortable
>> >> > with.  That's why I'm writing back now to the public list, sharing
>> >> > the
>> >> > documents I have created.
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >> Alex, I clipped out the rest of what you wrote. I believe you that it
>> >> may be a valid concern in a debate between you and Michel. It seems
>> >> you both have some sore feelings over this for whatever reasons.
>> >> You're both good people and have good intentions. Any of us can get
>> >> angry and lash out at one another. Yet, we've all proven in the past
>> >> we can transcend personal problems and move on together, and Alex
>> >> Rollins is no exception to being able to do that from what I have
>> >> seen. There's no doubt that Alex is a good person with good
>> >> intentions.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Michel, Alex, James, perhaps we can use this public discussion to
>> >> resolve this in a way that everyone can live happily with? (I realize
>> >> you've all already said you can).
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> There's no doubt that as content grows on the wiki, that automation,
>> >> and code-based tools will help make the growing volume of content more
>> >> manageable.  Yet, the findability and usability of content in edit
>> >> mode could create a barrier for Michel, and users like him that are
>> >> averse to working in programmatic modes.
>> >>
>> >> I think that it is vital that these modes can exist in the same wiki,
>> >> in the same space.
>> >>
>> >> Let's take an objective look at one page that Michel raised concerns
>> >> on, and use it as way to come to an understanding.
>> >>
>> >> (I realize that Alex and Michel have already discussed this, and
>> >> perhaps even objectively, but I am going to try and re-initiate
>> >> discussion)
>> >>
>> >> http://p2pfoundation.net/State_Capitalism
>> >>
>> >> The changes Alex made where to add some wiki markup for categories,
>> >> and to import content from wikipedia in the definition area.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> http://p2pfoundation.net/State_Capitalism?title=State_Capitalism&diff=42199&oldid=42189
>> >>
>> >> Michel's concerns were stated on discussion page:
>> >>
>> >> http://p2pfoundation.net/Talk:State_Capitalism
>> >>
>> >> Michel wrote there:
>> >>
>> >> "Personally, I find the new way of loading content with tons of
>> >> incomprehensible code that takes hours to edit away, absolutely awful,
>> >> and a real degradation of our wiki"
>> >>
>> >> Michel, can you please clarify on this page which code you are seeing
>> >> a problem with, and help us understand more how it impedes your
>> >> effective usage of the wiki. The goal with this question is to figure
>> >> out a way that allows useful technical affordances to be employed,
>> >> while making sure that you can still effectively edit the wiki. But
>> >> first, we need to understand the problem through your eyes.
>> >>
>> >> I think, of course, we should also understand what is being employed
>> >> on these pages through Alex's eyes, too.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Michel also said:
>> >>
>> >> "Please let's not copy wholesale articles from the wikipedia and
>> >> especially ton's of dead links. The policy of our wiki has always been
>> >> not to create dead links."
>> >>
>> >> I would like to suggest that we could maybe do the following on dead
>> >> links:
>> >>
>> >> 1. We need a way to contact active wiki participants as a group
>> >>
>> >> 2. We audit them once per month, by viewing
>> >> http://p2pfoundation.net/Special:WantedPages and then put out a call
>> >> on front page of wiki, and to this list, etc, for people to help build
>> >> those pages, with a stated deadline, and a description of what is
>> >> minimally needed (should be part of wiki policy somewhere as to what a
>> >> stub should minimally contain).
>> >>
>> >> 3. If at the end of "x" amount of time, a page is not created (1
>> >> month? 1 week?), a bot is used to remove it from
>> >> http://p2pfoundation.net/Special:WantedPages list (which removes the
>> >> dead link)
>> >>
>> >> We can research a way together to automate this (and automate making
>> >> interested people aware of the dead links and opportunity to create
>> >> content)
>> >>
>> >> What do you think about that?
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> ___________
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> --
>> >> Sam Rose
>> >> Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation
>> >> Tel:+1(517) 639-1552
>> >> Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451
>> >> skype: samuelrose
>> >> email: samuel.rose at gmail.com
>> >> http://forwardfound.org
>> >> http://futureforwardinstitute.org
>> >> http://socialsynergyweb.org/culturing
>> >> http://flowsbook.panarchy.com/
>> >> http://socialmediaclassroom.com
>> >> http://localfoodsystems.org
>> >> http://notanemployee.net
>> >> http://communitywiki.org
>> >> http://p2pfoundation.net
>> >>
>> >> "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human
>> >> ambition." - Carl Sagan
>> >>
>> >> _______________________________________________
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>> >
>> >
>> >
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>> >
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>> >
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>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
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