StephenGilbert

I want to learn about and explore online community and culture with a group of unusual and insightful people. In doing so, I intend to help create a new kind of Internet culture based on trust, intelligence and good faith. Finally, I like this place, and I want to cultivate what we have here.

All of my contributions to MeatballWiki are still PublicDomain. See PrimarilyPublicDomain for more info on what this means in the context of this wiki.

As of early 2011, here's what I've been up to:

• At the end of February 2011 I quit my day job as a customs broker and started a computer repair and IT consulting business called [Code Green Technology]. This is likely only of interest to the vast number of Meatball contributors in the Greater Fredericton area. :)
• I doubled the number of small people in my household. Current child count is four: three boys, one girl. Future head counts should return the same number. Oh, and also a new cat, which I grudgingly like, despite her habit of chewing computer cables.
• I've been doing community development consulting for a local start-up cooperative called KnowledgeAtlas? (http://knowledgeatlas.coop). I intend to fold any of my work that is of general interest into MeatballWiki.

My To Do List

• PhlogisticiansCorner??: an early web forum. The thread view, with only the next level visible, seemed to encourage long posts and well-thought-out threads. Why?
• CooperativeEnterprise?: community-controlled business. Instead of maximizing profit, the focus is on meeting the needs of the community.
• Refactor WikiPedia and associated pages. Even after all this Internet time, people still are missing the mark. It think Meatball is the place to get Wikipedia commentary right.
  • WikiPediaIsNotTypical
  • MetaWikiPedia - horribly outdated
  • WikipediaFork
  • MediaWiki - outdated, but interesting history
  • MeatballForWikipedians - old guide mostly by me. Review for possible updating.
  • DisinfoPedia - renamed SourceWatch? ages ago. An early example of a successful wiki project inspired by Wikipedia
  • TheSeptemberThatNeverEnded - doesn't need updating and not really a Wikipedia page, but does contain a long-ish discussion about Wikipedia's effect on the previous wiki culture
• HelpingLusers: a long-standing Meatball pet peeve of mine. The time has come to reform this delinquent of a page. :)
• Our WikiNode needs some reworking.

Things I'm Looking For

• KnowledgeAtlas? is a formal cooperative that is based entirely online. To the best of my knowledge, they are the first to do this. Most cooperatives today have an online presence of some kind, but they are still based in MeatSpace. Does anyone have any contrary examples?
• An easy way to produce multiple documents from the same source, with different sections flagged for different versions of the document. For example, say I had some cross-platform software. I would like to compose a singe source document with instructions specific to each platform. I would then publish a manual specifically for Windows, Linux, Mac, etc, and each manual would only contain the sections that pertained to the given platform. Wiki-style collaboration would be a major bonus.