Northern Voice 2007

A project in planning stages.

Why wiki succeeds over more brittle software is that is makes no assumptions about what people will do with it. It is the "simplest thing that could possibly work," and the applications/domains to which it is put are wide open and free ranging. This is also what makes the Internet itself work so well.

But wiki is limited in that architecturally, it is a big bag of pages. If it has a full-text search engine, great, you can find stuff, but other than explicit linking, there isn't much to it. This is an advantage and a disadvantage, obviously. It makes the thing incredibly flexible and easy to maintain, but it perhaps makes it harder to tailor to particular workflows.

So, with this in mind, 2007's project is to create subclassable wiki pages. Perhaps not literally, but at least figuratively. To be a bit more specific: at the user (or at least administrator) level, any page in the wiki ought to be classifyable as one or more (user-)defined types. And then, based on what categorizations you have, you can drive things like automated navigation systems, blog-like interfaces, smart CSS, smarter RSS, etc.

We had a first take at this last year at http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca -- which is all wiki, but in which each page can be categorized to be 'under' a particular topic; topics then can display their child pages in reverse-chronological order, blog style. It works pretty well, look nice, and allows newcomers to get a better sense of what's in there (as opposed to the big-bag-of-pages approach of most wikis).

This year I want to make these page types or classes stronger, though. Consider: pages which are about a particular topic vs. pages which are about a particular user. Pages which are about something "new" or ephemerall vs. pages which are reference material. Pages which are about the wiki itself vs. pages about other things.

Seems to me it's simple enough to accomplish; in fact, you could do it all with nothing more than tags, so long as you're prepared to deal with the potential for misfiling, mistyping, and of course abuse. The big gain, though, is to allow things like navigational palettes and CSS stylesheets to be conditional on which page class it is. Then user pages would look and act different than help pages, which would look different than news pages or reference pages. And so on.

The times below are a loose schedule for the unconference day of Northern Voice. Slots are 45 minutes long -- your talk should be about 30 minutes long, with room for questions and time to move between rooms. If you need more time and there are slots available, book two blocks.

Note: we will place sessions on the actual day of MooseCamp. Be prepared to write your session name down, give a short pitch, and place it on the schedule.

Moosecamp at Northern Voice 2006 was a blast! And up there on my list of favourite moments at Moosecamp was PhotoCamp. Why? Because Kris' awesome "dis-coordination" felt just right to me; it brought out the knowledge from the photographers in the room out into the open into a great dialogue. Which meant that I learned alot (and I was only there for 10 to 20 minutes out of the 1 hour camp).

I am really looking forward to another PhotoCamp at MooseCamp 2007.

Anybody up to "discoordinate" a VideoCamp at Moosecamp 2007? I've been doing a fair amount of videoblogging lately and I am looking to improve it and get some ideas and inspiration. If so let us know and/or leave a comment

MooseCamp 2007, associated with NorthernVoice 2007, takes place on Friday February 23, 2007, at the Forest Sciences Centre, UBC, Vancouver, BC, Canada. The street address is 2424 Main Mall, Vancouver.

Some more details on NorthernVoice 2007:

Dates: February 23rd (MooseCamp) and 24th (conference)

Location: UBC Forestry Sciences Centre (photos from Cyprien)

We're looking into options for lunch and will let you know. There will be space provided again for caregivers to self-organize childcare. Any other questions, comments? Let us know!