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The Importance of Collaborative Development

Posted by Hemos on from the working-together-for-bettering-us-all dept.

Eugene Eric Kim writes: "A few months ago, I wrote an essay entitled, "A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools," outlining a vision for how we can and should be making collaborative tools more interoperable. The article was published in the May issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal and is now available on the web." This manifesto is a good one, particularly if you aren't as a familiar with Doug Engelbart as you should be. There's also some interesting links to learn more about the Semantic Web, and social networks, well worth checking out as well.

2 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. If you're interested in Semantic Web software... by tcopeland · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...check out SemWebCentral, which is a GForge installation hosting a fair number of Semantic Web-related projects. There's even an OWL mode for Emacs!

    And there are also some tutorials and such-like.

    --
    The Army reading list
  2. Help us to improve MediaWiki by Eloquence · · Score: 5, Informative
    MediaWiki is the open source software running Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Disinfopedia, the MozillaZine Knowledgebase, and many other wikis. Eugene is correct in noting that we need to work together in improving our collaborative tools. Wiki technology is one of them. Use it for your open source software documentation. Add a link to your documentation wiki to the software's "Help" menu, so that your users are encouraged to fill the gaps.

    MediaWiki in particular implements many ideas that were already envisioned by Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. It does show backlinks, but perhaps more importantly, it also allows dynamic inclusion of any page in the current development version. For example, you could have a header and footer in your documentation that is the same for every page. What's more, you can add parameters to these templates to dynamically search and replace patterns of text in the template before transcluding it. This will allow us to replace the currently statically hacked Wikipedia infoboxes with dynamically included and parametrized templates, for example. One long term feature that might be worth hacking on top of this would be transclusion of labeled sections from another page, or interwiki transclusion.

    Check out the current feature list and the development roadmap. Subscribe to wikitech-l to help us in improving the software. In true wiki spirit, we are fairly liberal at handing out CVS access (over 40 developers with CVS access at present), so please do ask if you want to work on a larger project.

    There are many other wiki engines that are worth working on, such as TWiki and MoinMoin. Their main deficiency, in my opinion, is that they do rely primarily on the traditional wiki link pattern of CamelCase, which is nice for geeks but very ugly for everyone else, and also useless for search engines. MediaWiki uses [[free links]] instead, which are harder to type, but look just like normal links to the reader. Still, working on any other wiki engine is a lot better than starting yet another one.

    A collaborative tool which is badly needed is a free software clone of SubEthaEdit. Combine wikis with real-time editing and the fun really begins. I imagine something like that might be hackable on top of a powerful graphical editor like Kate. For now WebDAV-support for MediaWiki would also be very cool, as Kate/KDE already supports editing WebDAV resources. So many worthwhile hacks, so little time.

    This is an area where open source coders can make a big difference while corporations are still bewildered by the fact that open wikis can produce useful content. So please, let's work together on these tools.