I’ve just started new topic related to specific area of tools that will be useful in reaching our stated goals (enlightenment for all sentient beings - it seems to me that for each area there should be one thread with ideas, links, description of strengths and weaknesses, so that we can choose the best for the job, or decide to create something new.
Threads already present:
Discussions - web-based forums, for persisting long-term conversations,
Chat technologies - for real time ad hoc communication,
Text technologies - documentation, blogs? Publishing?
Threads we may want to consider:
4. Voting software,
5. Project management software,
6. Resources database?
And probably many more. Ideally we would have one system, with heavy security measures and equipped with some AI to help with keep it under control and reducing chaos, but for now… for now we can at least identify what’s out there and if it’s useful for us.
As you said, it would be ideal to have one system which could do everything. Or it would seem ideal. The point is that Google Wave could do about everything mentioned here in some way, but it wasn’t adopted widely, unfortunately. But while it was available, I have used it intensely for a couple of collaborative projects. Some of the Wave technology lives on in Google drive documents and other apps, but it’s not half as fancy and powerful as the full Google Wave environment. Rizzoma is compatible to Google Wave, as it’s based on the same technology.
The problem is that tools that can do almost everything are really complicated to use and may feel overloaded (and may actually become overloaded in the sense of resource usage and thus become slow and unstable – one of the major problems that plagued Google Wave). That’s why is does make sense to use different tools for different purposes.
So, the first step would be to become clear about the actual purposes and requirements. Before we know what we need, we can’t know which tools are best suited for our purposes. And our requirements will vary depending on the projects we are working on. For software projects we would need to use some kind of version control system like Git (popular, complicated) or Fossil (cool, easy). For knowledge management projects, using wikis would be quite ideal. For other projects we might need to use video conference tools with screen sharing abilities (Google Hangouts for example) or something like that.
This means, we would have to make this technology debate dependent on the projects we are working on. But there’s no harm in doing a preliminary technology survey that can be used as basis for project specific discussions.
- it seems to me that for each area there should be one thread with ideas, links, description of strengths and weaknesses, so that we can choose the best for the job, or decide to create something new.