DEPRECATED - use google docs

# 2024-04-05

Present: Simon, Rufus

- Discussion re wiki
- Confirmed Senior Research Associate
- Put on the website

Context

- Simon's interest in contributing (now has space)
- Para-academic context of Life Itself research collective
- I hadn't come across [The Para-Academic Handbook](https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/42468/1/PHA_Final.pdf) from 2014 but it looks very aligned

## Where I feel myself slotting in ...

- Reviewing written work
- e.g. “This is great, and could be improved like …”
- Governing/editing a knowledge commons (and an ontological commons)

## Wiki idea

Thanks @Catherine Tran ! On the matter of the academic/intellectual knowledge commons relevant to 2R & DDS, I would be delighted to know of who is up for

1. co-creation: would involve consulting around and agreeing on the technology, and setting up the technology, processes and practices;
2. active contribution: would involve entering your favourite resources, and commenting on those and others, and cross-linking as appropriate;
3. encouragement and moral support: using the resource and occasionally adding commentary;
4. networking with other research groups in related areas, and negotiating with them around any possible collaboration.

The whole idea springs out of how I have imagined the [P2P Foundation wiki](https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net) working better.

### Specific idea: commentary of papers/articles/podcasts

Good starting point ...

- Article title
- Link to original (and any copies)
- Excerpts (including abstract if any)
- Links to other articles
- Commentary
- this would be by members of the LI research community
- named comments only
- the key sections commented on are places in the Excerpts
- commentators link to other places / sources

Naturally leads in to a fuller knowledge commons e.g.

- Start adding tags/themes to articles
- These tags become pages with some definitions etc
- These are networked together

It would thus grow from being a literature commons to an ontological commons (a linguistic domain) in the sense of defining an area of discourse.

## What tech to use (⚠️ rabbit hole!)

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/oe7xpp/markdown_based_wiki_i_can_git_push_to/

- Indexing and finding things

## Requirements for an effective toolset

The point here is that the most reliable way to agree a technical solution is first to agree the criteria of choice, then evaluate against them. Additions and comments are therefore strongly encouraged.

### As envisaged by Simon

- Quick, easy, simple editing — which is the absolute basis of the whole wiki concept
- clickable link to edit, visible when logged in
- edit the content (e.g. markdown) directly
- button/link to "finish editing" or "save" or "return"
- button/link to cancel edit
- Synchronous editing is really only needed for note-taking in meetings, and HackMD works fine for that
- Attributable edits (HackMD as here is a good example)
- reverting function not really needed for this level
- saving/comparing previous versions useful but not essential
- Very simple linking to other pages
- similar in function to the \[\[page name\]\] convention in mediawiki and other systems
- easy viewing of backlinks (as mediawiki etc.)
- this is not yet a feature of Markdown, and therefore one of the major obstacles to implementation
- Flowershow allows it, but you need to go to the end result to test
- Integration with the rest of LI architecture
- this is the really tricky one, because there don't seem to be any solutions that actually solve this
- @rufuspollock to elaborate here, my guess follows, based on what I've picked up from Rufus
- Markdown should enable
- saving locally on individual's device
- saving on some Git repo
- copy–pasting between different tools
- Learnability
- the tech must be accessible to and usable by **everyone** in the LI research community
- must be easy to learn
- ideally, sharing conventions with systems that are already familiar (this is perhaps the central difficult challenge)
- strong, explicit personal support where needed, in case the tech is not intuitively obvious