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

[Sameer Verma]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
> --
>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>

I think Carol's point was one of structure, more so than ownership or
hierarchy. The hierarchy can be incredibly flat, but lend itself to a
good structure. For example, in Drupal, you could use the taxonomy
module to set up a structure so that when content is created, it has a
home to live in and not be a free floating node in the Wiki sea. Even
in the CVS vs Git type argument, there is some structure to the
process.

Sameer
-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/