[IAEP] Teacher in Uruguay enchanted to see his ideas integrated into global Sugar update [pr mockup]

[Martin Langhoff]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Carol Lerche <cafl at msbit.com> wrote:
> The reactions to my post remind me of the story of the lumberjacks

Fantastic story. However, in practice a CMS is often inferior to a
wiki in that it appoints "keepers". The cook amongst the lumberjacks
has to cook daily and cannot decide not to feed a particular
lumberjack. The keepers of the CMS can get antagonistic, or just
ignore their duties, and that just kills community collaboration.

Same with CVS and SVN - the centralisation spawns politics.
Distributed control is the right thing -- for all its flaws, the wiki
*social dynamic* rules -- you get lots of contnet, perhaps a bit
disorganised, and a thriving community around it. CMSs are
hierarchical and mere observation shows what they do to community.

All the observations that Linus Torvalds (in various flamerwars :-) )
has made on the social and political flaws of CVS and SVN apply
squarely to classic CMSs. Clay Shirky's "Designing social software"
essay is also relevant here.

cheers,


m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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