WikiScience

Comment by Jack Park on August 23, 2009 at 6:46

Just visited the WikiScience site again. Got this message:
The WikiScience project has been closed due to lack of participation and site vandalism.
Documents resulting from the WikiScience project will be made available from this site early in 2009.
There is nothing else at the site.

Comment by Aleksandar Malecic on September 28, 2010 at 17:16

Well, if you follow that link to Twine, you'll see that something similar has happened there (you will be redirected to www.evri.com). This is a paradox - a lot of authors and literature support this kind of online collaboration (trying to together create something new and unexpected - it differs from Wikipedia), but we have problems with our lack of psychic abilities, so no one really knows where something like this could happen.

I bet on renewable energy technologies. The are an "archetype", something that resonates with our "collective unconscious" (to intentionally misuse Jung's terminology).

Comment by Jack Park on September 28, 2010 at 17:27

Aleksandar,
Is it really the case that Twine died for lack of interest? Really?

What, in fact, does "lack of interest" mean? I wonder if that term really entails other pathologies about which we don't speak deeply or frequently enough during deliberations about online collaboration and sensemaking.

Comment by Aleksandar Malecic on September 29, 2010 at 9:17

I am not willing to use the word "pathology", especially while talking about Twine. I left it when I was not able to correct automatically generated tags added to links added by me (more precisely, I wasn't able to delete "Palestinian authorities" attached to a text about PNA (peptide nucleic acid)).

Speaking about pathology, I may also have traumas from the past, good or bad interactions with other people or events that have eventually brought me here. Important and successful people would hesitate to participate in online collaboration because they are, well, important and successful, not willing to publicly re-evaluate their importance and success. Also, it can be quite painful to start from the bottom, with many degrees of freedom, to question everything from the beginning. Sustainability is a good example. Everyone wants to be sustainable, but don't touch his/her salary, lifestyle, and habits.

Also, while dealing with complicated issues instead of having fun, it's uncertain whether your online social network will achieve something relevant or not. It requires a lot of time, thoughts, and emotions to build it.

Functionality and design can be important. I am active here http://2020.global.gaiaspace.org, but I have some complaints about it. For example, their search engine should be better. Any website/portal that even remotely looks like a social network has a better search engine. It works nice for me.

How can a social network like this one succeed and grow and develop? It needs DOCUMENTED success stories from its members, from zero (the beginning, documented) to here (the outcomes, also more or less documented).

We can't know in advance which social network will succeed to do something interesting and radically different. By the way, megalomania also has something to do with pathology, right?

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