[Search-l] Defining this community (was Re: IRC Meetup for Technical Discussions)

[Pushparajan V]

On 5/17/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Grahame Gould [mailto:ic at thelastfrontier.com.au]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 05:50 PM
> To: search-l at wikia.com
> Subject: Re: [Search-l] Defining this community (was Re:
> IRC    Meetup  for     Technical Discussions)
>
> >
> >> "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy." - Field
> >> Marshall
> >> Helmut Carl Bernard von Moltke
> >
> >Who's the enemy?
> >
> >Jer
>
>
> >I think this might be rephrased thusly:
>
> >No scheme for user participation survives contact with users.
>
> >Fred
>
> So wiki can't work? Or are you overstating the case? Surely Wiki projects
> are all about contact with users, and Wikipedia has survived and is even
> going strong. (Although Sheldon(.com) disagrees)
>
> Perhaps what you mean is that unregulated contact with users is deadly for
> any plan (unless you intend to have anarchy).
>
> Grahame Gould
> Information Coordinator
> Shire of Wyndham East Kimberley
> Kununurra, WA, Australia
> (08) 9168 4100 Phone
> (08) 9168 1798 Fax
> www.thelastfrontier.com.au
>
> Response:
>
> As I rephrased this aphorism, "No scheme for user participation survives
> participation by users."
>
> That does not mean, nor did von Moltke mean, that the battle was lost,
> just that detailed advanced planning has to be modified as contingencies
> arise. One of the greatest unknowns here is how users will react, how
> enthusiastically they will participate, and what their input into policy
> will be and how it will be expressed.
>
> Wikipedia has worked that way, broad outlines from on-high, some of which
> originated from Larry Sanger, some from Jimbo and others. Then there is both
> the practice and the policy input from users, some more influential than
> others. To a great extent decisions are reached by consensus of users, both
> in their practice and deliberations. Occasionally a deus ex machina
> mechanism operates when there is a systemic crisis.
>
> Perhaps the saying should be: "No detailed scheme for user participation
> survives participation by users."
>
> Now, it turns out that Larry Sanger is dissatisfied with the outcome and
> is now generalling a new assault on compiling knowledge which applies
> stricter control over input by users. So there is an experiment in progress.
>
>
> Here's a question? What are the founding principles that are not open to
> modification by user practice and policy input? The parts of the scheme that
> must survive?


Yeah.. exactly.. Users accepted wikipedia because it is open widely for
local updation and it allows any type of knowledge the user knows to be
documented. Search, doesn't add more usefulness to him rather than getting
the info he wants. He would just use it rather than contributing to it. So
to bring in more effectiveness in search, more customization & collaboration
is necessary.. User should be able to get what he want exactly and also
contribute back what he got from it.

  A distributed artificial intelligence system :), looks more techy isn't
it.. But thats what is wanted.. Some computing people can contribute to
running the algorithm on the system.. and some users can give heuristic
datas like search keywords, etc.. To make it more interesting for a normal
user, the best and more popular idea is social networking site..

Yeah.. Social networking site.. its the fashion in web 2.0 and many pulled
into it easily.. or atleast we can make other social networking site to
connect to the search engine we design.. But there are no social networking
site so open.. :(

Normal user can go with social networking site to express their interests in
the web, search for people, search for documents, the most important point
here is they can also share information..

Techie users can contribute to the algorithm underneath, the backend. They
can increase the efficiency of the search day-by-day using the heuristic
data they get.. They can create some projects and use the data from the
Normal user to design complex filters (like, Yahoo pipes obviously) as they
have good knowledge about all these. I recently say a mail from RSS/Atom
expert in this mailing list.. we are already having more experts on each
field.

Other supporters can contribute their machines. As i said about the
Wikia at Home project.. A simple screen saver to use the bandwidth and compute
speed.

When it goes to a social search, go for every thing open.. It all depends on
how people start supporting us.. The percentage we are open, the percentage
the people start supporting us..


I am not the right person to decide about project plans.. :)

So i just advice to go more open to get more supporters.. But we should have
good project plans, which is some what advanced than the current SEs.. There
should be encouragement to involve some research enthusiasts/students in
projects that come up in search-I.

Getting up users in a social network is not at all the problem.. The biggest
problem is making them to be there.. Its visible that MySpace/Orkut becoming
popular like anything.. They have profiles of most of the people on the
internet.. So, the future looks more on collaboration rather than a single
man army.

And more than that, whatever we do, we should make it damp simpler to use
and completely open.

Thanks,
Pushparajan V


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-- 
Pushparajan V
http://www.vprajan.org
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