<div dir="ltr">Martin, we have keepers of the wiki.  Most successful social software aroung -- facebook.  Arguably a CMS.  But as to the wiki, I say ... delicious. :-) <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 5:41 PM, Martin Langhoff <<a href="mailto:martin.langhoff@gmail.com">martin.langhoff@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="Ih2E3d">On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Carol Lerche <<a href="mailto:cafl@msbit.com">cafl@msbit.com</a>> wrote: > The reactions to my post remind me of the story of the lumberjacks </div>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 --  <a href="mailto:martin.langhoff@gmail.com">martin.langhoff@gmail.com</a>  <a href="mailto:martin@laptop.org">martin@laptop.org</a> -- School Server Architect  - ask interesting questions  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first  - <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff</a> </blockquote></div> -- "The water won't clear up 'til we get the hogs out of the creek." -- Jim Hightower </div>