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Outlining in MediaWiki

December 30, 2008 in Berkman, Blogging, Ideas | 10 comments

Earlier this month I blogged about something I’d like called a “Micki”: a wiki that works like an outliner. Now, thanks to mind-opening help from Dave, I’m looking to edit existing wikis with an outliner. That’s a great place to start. I’m writing this blog in an outliner. Why not a wiki?

MediaWiki is what we like to use at the Berkman Center. It’s what we use for ProjectVRM, and it’s what Wikipedia uses. And it has an API. This is good.

The first thing I want to do is edit pages. Wiki pages have outline characteristics. For example: section headings, subsections and smaller subsections. Each is a level — same as with outlining — and each is created by flanking the heading with larger numbers of equal signs:

  ==section heading==
  ===subsection heading===
  ====smaller subsection heading===

Lists also follow an outline mode, again with levels. As it explains here,

  * ”Unordered lists” are easy to do:
** Start every line with a star.
*** More stars indicate a deeper level.
*: Previous item continues.
** A new line
* in a list
marks the end of the list.

And…

  # ”Numbered lists” are:
## Very organized
## Easy to follow
#: Previous item continues
A new line marks the end of the list.
# New numbering starts with 1.

No, that wasn’t all too clear to me either, but what matters is that wikis do outlining. So it only makes sense that outliners can do wikis. Why not? That was Dave’s question for me, and I’m running with it.

There is another reason, in addition to my own personal wants and needs here. I think outlines are excellent ways to organize personal data stores — a subject of work and discussion at ProjectVRM.

Along those lines I had an interesting conversation with Brian Behlendorf yesterday, about how we manage receipts for online purchases. I think what most of us do is just search through old emails for keywords, or sort by moving receipts and other commercial correspondence to a dedicated mailbox.

I’d like to organize them in outline form. And re-organize them as well. By vendor. By date. By item purchased. By category. By how much I paid. The list can go on. If we come up with a standard or consistent way for vendors to report the data to us, so much the better. (That’s downstream, but it’s very much in the scope of our ambitions for VRM. We want to tell vendors how to help us in consistent ways, instead of different ways inside each of their silos.)

That’s a digression, but it’s relevant to the degree that outlining is a model for organizing the miscellaneous-yet-organizable nature of all the subects we care about more deeply than at a single level.

There’s something about the flat nature of wikis that serves to disorganize things. I think outlining can help with that. So let’s start inside individual pages and see what new we can do.

Back to the API. I see stuff here about searching, actions such as login and logout, doing queries for text, data, edits and site info, formatting output…

I don’t see anything here that looks like it welcomes editors. So here’s where the dumb questions start. Can you use text editors such as vi or emacs to edit wikis? Or are wikis so bound to their own editing system, with its own markup conventions, that they don’t welcome editors (including outliners, which I think of as a kind of editor, though that might be too limiting)? Dunno yet. Just starting here.

Rethinking out loud about infrastructure

December 7, 2008 in Berkman, Blogging, Business, infrastructure, Life, Past, Politics, problems, Science | 11 comments

One of the most common expressions in geology is “not well understood”. Which is understandable, because most rocks were formed millions to billions of years ago, often under conditions, and in locations, that can only be guessed at. One of the reasons I love geology is that the detective work is of a very high order. The work is both highly scientific and highly creative. Also, it will never be done. Its best mysteries are rooted too deeply in the one thing humans — relative to rock — severely lack: time

Anyway, I’m here to suggest that two overlapping subjects — infrastructure and internet — are not well understood, even though both are made by humans and can be studied within the human timescale. The term “infrastructure” has been in common use only since the 1970s. While widely used, there are relatively few books about the subject itself. I’d say, in fact, that is more a subject in many fields than a field in itself. And I think it needs to be. Same with the Internet. Look it up on Google and see how many different definitions you get. Yet nothing could be more infrastructural without being physical, which the Internet is not.

Anyway, as I write and think about this stuff, I like to keep track of what I’ve already said, even though I’ve moved beyond some of it. So here goes:

More from allied sources:

And now I have to fly to Paris, to have fun at LeWeb. We’ll pick up this and other subjects there.

Tags:

Talking VRM in Cambridge & Amsterdam

November 18, 2008 in Berkman, Past, Places, Travel, VRM | 3 comments

This afternoon at 4:30 I’ll be talking (though not alone… it’s a discussion, not a lecture) at the in Cambridge (the new one with and , born in 1630-something; not the older one The topic will be The Intention Economy: What happens when free customers prove more valuable than captive ones.

Are you tired of carrying around “loyalty cards” for retailers who speak to themselves about “acquiring,” “owning” and “controlling” their “relationship” with you? — and do little more than clog your wallet and slow down checkout lines?

Are you tired of login and password hell? In the everyday world you don’t have to become a “member” of a store to shop there, or to click “accept” after not reading “agreements” that are anything but.

Wouldn’t it be cool to rent exactly the car you want (for example, one that seats six and has an AUX input for your iPhone), rather than whatever the rental car agency decides to give you?

If you answer Yes to any of those questions, you should know about VRM, for Vendor Relationship Management. It’s how we manage them at least as well as they manage us.

VRM tools are being developed right now by a community of developers and other volunteers, organized around ProjectVRM at Harvard’s Berkman Center and led by Doc Searls, the originator of the VRM concept and a fellow at the center.

More here.

That same pitch would also do for the in Amsterdam on Thursday. I’ll be there too. Big thanks to Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald and friends for putting that together, even as Maarten continues to withstand medical insults in the midst.

An immodest proposal

October 30, 2008 in Berkman, Future, Ideas, Past, Science | 5 comments

FORWARD WITH FIBER: An Infrastructure Investment Plan for the New Administration is my second essay at the Publius Project. The first was FRAMING THE NET.

This one is a bold proposal: putting $300 billion into bringing fiber to every possible premise in America. Unlike other proposals of this sort, this one goes out of its way to embrace rather than to exclude the phone and cable companies. It challenges them to look past “triple play”, toward supporting an infinitude of businesses and opportunities that will open up when we all break free of telecom’s regulatory boat-anchors and conceptual blinders, and start thinking about wide open connectivity and capacity as a new frontier: the 21st Century equivalent of the Louisiana Purchase. And about as cheap.

Against all the ways it might not work — expectations of government incompetence and industry provincialism correctly run high — the idea is easy to dismiss as naive. But I still think it’s worth considering.

The problem isn’t what’s wrong with the current system. It’s what’s not right with it yet. That’s where we need to start looking for solutions. And that’s the direction I’m pointing here.

Seems like last millenium

September 13, 2008 in Berkman, Ideas, Past, Photography, Places | Permalink

Sitting and shooting at U.S. v. Microsoft, 10 Years Later, at Austin Hall in Harvard Law School. Extremely interesting, and free as well. If you’re nearby, stop by.

Markets under reconstruction

July 17, 2008 in Berkman, Business, Events, Uncategorized, VRM | 1 comment

Here’s my report (with links to as much as I could gather in a short time) on the VRM Workshop, over at the ProjectVRM blog.

It was an outstanding event. Lots of projects and subjects were not only vetted with the whole group, but moved forward very effectively. Thanks to everybody who came, or participated over the Web.

And thanks to the Berkman Center for hosting the event, and to Harvard Law School for providing excellent facilities. Well done.

Pulling the scales from our whys

July 7, 2008 in Berkman, Future, Ideas, problems, VRM | 10 comments

Noah Brier has an interesting post titled Metcalfe’s Plateau, which he describes as —

a place where the value of the network no longer increases with each additional node. In fact, thanks to spam (as deemed by me), the value of the network had started to decline, I was looking for other places to spend my time online.

In it he cites a variety of sourses, including quotage from Bob Metcalfe, Paul Saffo and Clay Shirky’s A Group is its Own Worst Enemy. Here’s that excerpt:

You have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe’s law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.

Good stuff. I responded with a comment that is currently in moderation, while Noah (we hope) figures out it’s not spam. (And he’s right: having to do that is a big value-subtract.) Meanwhile, I thought I’d go ahead and post my comment here. It goes —

Metcalfe is right about networks, while Clay and Paul are right about groups.
I submit that groups are also different than “social networks,” a term that used to be synonymous with groups but now means two things: personally collected associations, also called “social graphs,” and online habitats such as Linkedin and Facebook. Both of the latter prove Clay’s point.
For what it’s worth, Linkedin has no conversation density for me because I do no conversation there. It’s just a CV viewer, and it’s good enough at that. Facebook also has no conversation density for me because keeping up with it takes too much work. This might be my fault, for somehow allowing myself to have 396 “friends,” when the number of my actual friends is far lower than that — and most of them aren’t on Facebook. Add “2 friend suggestions, 187 friend requests, 2 event invitations, 1 u-netted nations invitation, 1 blog ownership request, 180 other requests” and “23 new notifications” … plus more “pokes” than I’ll bother to count, and Facebook compounds what it already is: a gridlock of obligations in an environment architected, blatantly, to drag my eyeballs across advertising, most of which is irrelevant beyond the verge of absurdity. (On my entry page is an ad for dresses by American Apparel. It replaces one for singles. I’m male and married. You’d think Facebook could at least get *that* much right.)
The only way we can immunize ourselves from overly “scaled” services — or improve them in ways that are useful for us and not just their clueproof “business models” — is by equipping ourselves as individuals with tools by which each of us controls our ends of relationships. That means we assert rules of engagement, terms of service, preferences, additional service requests and the rest of it. This is what we are working on with ProjectVRM.
While it’s hard to imagine a world where a free market is not “your choice of silo” or “your choice of walled garden”, imagining one is necessary if we wish to fulfill the original promise of the Net and the Web.

And with that I’m outa here. Should be landing at Logan around midnight, and in Cambridge for most of the rest of the month.

Discovering Columbus, cont’d

May 21, 2008 in Berkman, Ideas | 1 comment

Flying out now. They have free wifi here. No spash page, no goofy PR. Just an open hot spot. Or a bunch of them. A major high five for that to the CMH folks.

ROFLFP

April 26, 2008 in Art, Berkman, Events, Fun, Future, Ideas, Life, problems, VRM | 3 comments

At , this time for more than a few minutes. Observations…

I can’t post a question using the question tool.

I’m at a panel on fame, and I don’t know any of the panelists. (They are, in fact, moot of 4chan, Randall Munroe, and Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics. They are arranged according to size: moot, Randall, Ryan.)

I am >2x the age of 90% of the people here. I may be 2x the age of ANY of the people here. (Not true, but it seems that way.) Worse, I’m dressed to “go out” to some place nice later, so it’s like I’m in costume.

A sport here: being first finding the too-few power outlets. (That’s the headline reference, btw. Figger it out.)

Neo-Cantabrigian observation: MIT does wi-fi right, while Harvard does power outlets right. At MIT, it’s a snap to get out on the Net through the wi-fi cloud, but there are too few power outlets, and some of them have no power. At Harvard, there are power outlets for everybody in all the classrooms (at least at the Law School, to which most of my experience is so far confined), and getting out on the Net requires a blood sample. From your computer.)

Great question from the floor… “At what time have you been most afraid of what you’ve created?” Answer: “Right now.” At which point Anonymous Thinker — a guy dressed in a suit and a fedora with a black stocking pulled over his head — just made a bunch of noise from the back of the room. Near as I can tell. I’m in the mid-front, and can’t turn my head that far. Still, funny.

Best question on the Question Tool: “SUDO MAKE NEW QUESTION.” Top vote-getter: “What is your zombie defence plan?”

Unrelated but depressing: The lobby for US-style copyrights in Canada has gone into overdrive, recruiting a powerful Member of Parliament and turning public forums on copyright into one-sided love-fests for restrictive copyright regimes that criminalize everyday Canadians.

I don’t have the whole fotoset up yet, but it’ll be here.

Randall just called blogs a “four letter word”. Blogs are very outre here.

Living Lessig

April 4, 2008 in Berkman, Blogroll, Ideas | 15 comments

Listening to, and blogging, Lessig live from the Ames Courtroom here at Harvard, as part of the Berkman@10 celebration. Lessig was here at the founding. Some public notes from his talk…

There are two and a half doctors for every drug representative.

Story: He disqualified himself as a geek by asking a question about law at a geek conference.

Question: Is government just stupid?

The government often gets the easy cases wrong. Such as. There is a consensus among public policy makers that any copyright term change should be prospective only. But governments always extend terms. An easy case the gov gets wrong.

Nutrition… The sugar lobby urged the government to get the Food Nutrition Board to say no more than 25% of your caloric intake from sugar, while the WHO said 10%.

Global warming… There is a consensus that it’s real and we need to work on it. 1000 peer reviewed articles over a period of time. None disagreed. But junk science did, and the government, by doing as little as possible, got it wrong.

This leeds geeks to a position of hopelessness and disengagement. Most think government is a waste of time.

The problem is not stupidity. The system of influence by lobbyists and campaign fundraising that radically effects access, attention and understanding, weakening the government’s ability to get it right.

If money distorts, then pubic financing of elections would stop it. That’s one of Lessig’s theses. He also thinks the right should like public financing because it would result in smaller geovernment. Many on the right were against deregulating cablecos and telcos because deregulating them would remove them as sources of campaign financing.

So. Need a netroots campaign that is not DC centered. That’s why Creative Commons was born.

Change Congress wants a simple way for citizens to signal what they want.

Next is wikified tools for an army of collaborators to suss out who is for reform.

Fund reform after that. Take the problem you’re trying to solve, and make it manageable, digestable and segmentable.

These aren’t new ideas. Just a new opportunity.

Argument: Only if the outside makes a demand will the inside change.

Bribery in congress was not illegal until 1853.

Jefferson expected expected bribery to win.

The top 1% protect themselves from the bottom 99%.

“We do nothing as this happens.” This is exactly what Larry said to the geeks in his first Free Culture speech, by the way.

Criticism: people care more about substance rather than process.

Comparing the current problem to alcoholism. It’s the first problem. We can address no problems sensibly until we face this first problem. Until we change congress.

People tell them they’re happy about this project, but that he will fail.

Yet even certain failure teaches. It’s not excuse not to do something.

We, the most wealthy, secure and articulate people in this polity must be the first to work on this.

These corruptions are promulgated by the most privileged.

Now he’s asking us to “join me here.” The moment is straight out of Billy Graham. We should recall the success of the technique.

Introducing Congressman Jim Cooper of Tennessee…

  “You have witnessed an important moment in American History.”
  He was once the youngest congressman in America. “Sadly this is no longer true.”
  “We’ve got to change Congress.” Impressed that a man like Lessig would “risk his career and reputation to do the right thing.”
  Rep. Graham is for Senator Obama, by the way. No surprise there. A main point of Lessig’s is that Change is more than a slogan. It’s not an empty phrase or a campaign slogan.

Lessig again: Congresspeople spend hours a day telemarketing. Looking for money.

“Congresspeople have an extraordinary job… they get to do the right thing.” Geeks need to push them to do this.

“If it’s my movement it fails.”

It’s still early. No board. No structure yet.

Note to selves: a lot of what Larry wants here is what Britt Blaser and friends are working on.

By the way, Larry will be speaking a week from today, at noon, at UCSB’s Multicultural Center Theater, courtesy of the Center for Information Technology and Society (with which I am also affiliated) there. I can’t recommend it too highly. Larry’s talks are a great show, as well as a call to commitment that’s likely to be as strong and appealing as any you’ll experience in your life.

[Later…] Here’s a picture gallery from the talk.

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