[Search-l] twin principles, or what brings us together?

[Nathan Braun]

For the record, I also totally agree with Fred: this is also one of the
reasons I'm working on Litepost:

* Why trust a Search company with your email??

It all boils down to trust.  This is where transparency and collaboration
help, but privacy is a key factor as well:
- Privacy is Google's greatest stumbling block.
- Therefore, it may also represent Wikia's #1 opportunity.

Is this coalescing/evolving into some (semi-)formal set of Wikia
principles??  (we might as well do this sooner than later)

WIKIA SEARCH-- FOUR ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES
1.        Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate,
both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
2.       Collaboration - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as
individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
3.       Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of
search
results and the searching experience.
4.       Privacy - "Pursuing the Holy Grail of Privacy Protection"  A
threefold process?:
        a) decentralizing storage;
        b) maintaining enough data to keep the project competitive and
functional; but
        c) never too much in one place to facilitate privacy breeches.

I would personally add Personalization or even Hypercustomization to this
list, but that could be a subpoint of "quality" depending on how one looks
at it.

NB

On 5/7/07, Fred Benenson <fcb at fredbenenson.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>    First let me introduce myself -- my name's Fred. I'm a free culture
> activist, and student at ITP @ NYU. I brought Jimmy to announce this project
> at NYU (he claimed it was the first public announcement, but I had heard
> rumblings before.) as part of a free culture lecture series I was
> organizing. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how this progresses.
>
> Second, and my real reason for the reply is add/comment on Jer's
> principles:
>
> What about privacy? If this project wants to compete with big G then we're
> going to have think hard about a good data retention policy. That is, we'll
> want to collect enough of the same data (common search terms, errors,
> effective results, etc.) that Google does, store it somewhere, analyze it,
> so we can offer competitive services and features, but not compromise
> anyone's privacy.
>
> Perhaps this is too soon to start worrying, but I fear that Google +
> others will have a huge advantage over us if we choose not to collect any
> data as they always have access to their data set, and are always able to
> run their algorithms and analyses.
>
>  I think we'll probably be able to find some kind of compromise -- enough
> data to keep the project competitive and functional, but not enough to
> facilitate privacy breeches, but it's still something we have to think hard
> about, from the beginning, because, ostensibly, the log files will be
> available for anyone to peruse.
>
>
>
> F
>
> On 5/7/07, jer <jeremie at jabber.org> wrote:
> >
> > Nobody yet pointed out a completely glaring omission, the obvious
> > one, and perhaps the most important unifying principle of the three now:
> >
> >         Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of
> > search
> > results and the searching experience.
> >
> > Jer
> >
> > On May 7, 2007, at 1:59 AM, jer wrote:
> >
> > > One thing I've spent a lot of time trying to summarize is what is it
> > > that really brought us together, what defines this effort in the
> > > simplest way?
> > >
> > > Here's what I've come up with so far as my twin principles:
> > >
> > >       Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms
> > operate,
> > > both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
> > >       Collaboration - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as
> > > individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community
> > > focus.
> > >
> > > We are a search community built on a shared belief in Transparency
> > > and Collaboration... I hope that rings true for everyone else here,
> > > it's what I personally believe in as the foundation for a better
> > > search.
> > >
> > > Jer
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