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Collaborative Design, The Wiki Approach
To get a sense of how this collaborative design will work,
pick a subject that you know quite a bit about. Look it up in Wikipedia. Hopefully you can find something on which you know a good bit more than Wikipedia currently records. Try to edit the Wikipedia article so that - it is free of your own biases - it presents facts, not your opinions - those facts come from written sources which you cite - it is fun to read and relevant to the subject at hand You will discover that this process is a load of work. While you are doing it, you will note that other people will note that your revisions do not accurately reflect *their* biases and opinion, so they'll insert those, along with unattributed heresay. If you can't discern the difference between opinions and fact, none of this will bother you, but on the other hand, you also won't make much forward progress towards designing anything real and so you are unlikely to affect many other people. There is a big difference between a sum of the world's knowledge and a sum of the world's opinions. Separate note: I know of one team that is using a wiki to store and revision engineering documents for a CPU design. Within a company, where people hacking on the wiki can be held accountable for their contributions, I think a wiki could be a simple and powerful paradigm.... but we don't use it where I work, so I don't really know. |
#4
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#5
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Hop David writes:
wrote: Hi again, I was just browsing through Wikipedia recently -- I'd heard about it, just never bothered to actually check it out before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction I was marvelling at how an encyclopedia can evolve just from random visitors editing it and putting in their own 2 cents of opinion. If I'm not mistaken Linux was built by such a collaborative effort. Yes, but the prove of every line of code in Linux was how it worked. In knowledge or even in building spacecrafts this is not as easy to test. Jochem -- "A designer knows he has arrived at perfection not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery |
#6
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Hop David wrote:
wrote: Hi again, I was just browsing through Wikipedia recently -- I'd heard about it, just never bothered to actually check it out before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction I was marvelling at how an encyclopedia can evolve just from random visitors editing it and putting in their own 2 cents of opinion. If I'm not mistaken Linux was built by such a collaborative effort. But wasn't part of the key with Linux that a) it had a relatively small starting point, and b) that there were a few key personalities that provided shape and guidance? And other collabrative efforts have stalled or worse; or, like GNU, ended up running off in a different direction than the original vision. /dps |
#7
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David If I'm not mistaken Linux was built by such a collaborative
effort. Linux had one guy doing all the integration for a very long time, who had a surplus of good taste in acceptable code, plenty of people checking his work for correct functionality, and public tolerance of a vast number of failures. Integration is, BTW, generally a thankless grinding job that most engineers would flee from in a moment. Linus found it different because he did not have supervisors requiring that certain code go in because some customer obligation was higher priority than Linus' taste in acceptable code -- and yet he still had "customers", quite an amazing situation. Also, a wiki where you need to get a membership has been tried: Nupedia. This was the failed predecessor of Wikipedia. Look it up on Wikipedia, there should be a good article on what went wrong. The world is still feeling out the best ways of utilizing the great surplus of professional talent brought about by widespread higher education and computerization. It appears that the vast majority of people do not understand how hard things get done (small numbers of dedicated people make ludicrous sacrifices to drive things to completion), and assume that somehow lots of people making small contributions can do as much as small numbers giving it their all. Unfortunately, nothing has changed about the mythical man-month. |
#8
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Hop David wrote:
wrote: Hi again, I was just browsing through Wikipedia recently -- I'd heard about it, just never bothered to actually check it out before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction I was marvelling at how an encyclopedia can evolve just from random visitors editing it and putting in their own 2 cents of opinion. If I'm not mistaken Linux was built by such a collaborative effort. I'd have to say that in some ways you are. Linus was a big part of what made Linux happen. In that he pretty much determines what goes in, and what stays out, and who is responsible for which bit. It certainly wouldn't have happened if anyone could add source without regard to an overall plan, or even vision. That way lies madness. |
#9
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the Artemis Society, precursor to the Moon Society, is a wiki org for designing the first civilian flight to the moon. It works, for designing something. It's a beautiful thing to regard when people write a detailed plan together. When it comes to building flight hardware, which requires money and manual labor, wiki may not work too well. One problem, a la Gregory Bennett, is that the wiki organizer acquires a valuable knowledge base which is salable on the open market and he goes to Bigelow Aerospace. :-) Wiki remains a valuable amateur technique and can get communal ideas organized on paper but can it manipulate materials to build real things? |
#10
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Well, while surfing around I came across a free wiki website:
www.pbwiki.com It allows you to sign up for your own wiki, just as easily as you would for a webmail or blog account. Editing privileges are passworded, so that you have to distribute the password to others in order for them to be able to edit it. This can then keep things exclusive enough to stave off the chaos, etc. I guess the key distinctions with a wiki is that it exploits ease of input to encourage the buildup of information from a wider body of people. Unlike a blog, which is a linear/serial record, the wiki gives a topographical presentation of inputted information and is mainly geared to showing you the 'latest and greatest' info, although obviously you can look back at history. I've been reading about SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) lately, since it's about to be released for MS Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, and I think that the advent of this would be critical to the realization of wiki-CAD. Right now, when you login to your webmail/blog/wiki you can merely input and format text through a text editor. But as soon as SVG becomes a standard baseline feature in browsing the internet, then it stands to reason that the various webmail/blog/wiki service providers would improve their editor GUIs to permit graphical editing/input. (Gee, I wonder if Usenet wouldn't similarly adapt to SVG, since it's all encoded in text format anyway. Sci.Space.Tech could one day be bristling with vectorized blueprints and drawings. Obviously, posting image binaries directly in here is considered in appropriate and bandwidth-wasting, but would the more compact vectorized SVG format be considered permissible?) Note that I won't include the existing use of Macromedia Flash or Adobe Illustrator, since these are largely closed formats which limits the way in which graphical editors can be designed to produce them. Once SVG opens up the web to facilitate 2D CAD, then it would stand to reason that 3D CAD will soon follow, since the 3D-manipulation exists inside the editor, and the output will always be a 2D projection in the same old format anyway. So conceivably, we could soon have full-fledged CAD-wikis allowing for mass collaborative design. Gee, and once you have wiki-CAD, perhaps you can incorporate a physics engine into your web-based editor, and then suddenly you could have simulation-wikis. Maybe the wiki approach could then be applied for videogame design purposes, since videogaming is a hyperactive market. Perhaps all of this would greatly streamline and accelerate the rapid-prototyping process for engineering, so that concepts could be ever more rapidly developed and actualized. Disruptive technology? Comments? |
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