Should social.coop eventually have a wiki?

Agree, we need a wiki!

For reference, convo on this is happening on https://social.coop/@lehighcommunalist/99053819371927828

Update from the other thread:

I set up mediawiki instance on a server just this week (with multi-container docker) for a project @Gin and I are working on, and I can easily set it up to serve 2 wikis (with separate databases) from the same infrastructure: https://booleandreams.wordpress.com/2007/06/12/running-multiple-instance-of-mediawiki-on-the-same-server-using-the-same-source-code/

So unless anyone objects, I'll do that so we can very quickly have a wiki! If we then confirm our use of mediawiki we can migrate it to the social.coop servers later (or otherwise export the data into another system)

I think your proposal, Mayel, is good enough to bring to the community for a vote.

Hello,Just read the notes from last night's call. Sorry for not joining- I was planning to be there but I was caught up with work.

I'll do my best to join next time. I think I can help with a Wordpress blog and documenting stuff. I'm good with wikis as well.
I used to be a techie, but I became interested in Human Computer Interaction a good while ago and crossed the road joining academia.

I have the advantage that I understand what you are talking about, but must of the stuff you are doing would take me a long time to figure out how to do.
Travelling for work from now until the end of next week (reading this on a bus to the airport), but will try to follow the conversation.

Best,
Gabriela

Dr.Gabriela Avram
Lecturer
Interaction Design Centre, CS2031
University of Limerick
Ireland

http://coniecto.org
tel: +353 (0)61 202782
mobile:+353860242478

Chair of the CA16121 ( http://www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/ca/CA16121 ) COST Action 'SharingAndCaring' ( http://sharingandcaring.eu/ )

Regarding Wikis:

1. Knowledge needs to be captured for any community or working group to develop itself and grow. Conversations and debate are useful to generate and evolve ideas, but software tools focused on discussion and decision-making don't capture knowledge very well.

2. At the present time we don't have a way to capture knowledge in an organised manner on social.coop.

3. Wikis are possibly the easiest way to collaboratively capture knowledge online in hypertext form.

4. Wiki tools aren't resource consuming and can be easy to set up.

5. Wikis that store wiki pages as files in well known formats (such as markdown) exist, and can be used to generate outward-facing websites, documentation as PDF, or being integrated with other tools.

6. Given all of the above, there's no good reason to let knowledge keep being uncaptured. Generating knowledge and letting it go uncaptured and unused is something incredibly wasteful to do. It's anti-beneficial.

On tooling, integrated vision, and costs:

Regarding the discussion that @lehighcommunalist and @iona1 brought up on Mastodon (I assume @iona1 is the same person as @iona@social.coop)
https://tinyurl.com/yag7wyen
I think it's an important discussion that shouldn't be left unaddressed here.

About a month ago @mayel brought up this topic around the idea of offering a set of new services under the umbrella of social.coop
https://www.loomio.org/d/5yW7iCsJ/comment/1493857

The problem of using separate tools with different user interfaces, and setting up different accounts for each has been evident to many of us, and we have been exploring ways to integrate all these tools in a consistent manner.
That's costly to get done, however, and it's necessarily going to be an incremental process.

A few weeks ago I had proposed a vision of integrating a few tools, among them a Wiki, and we began the discussion of what Wiki tools were the most amenable to integration on social.coop. Unfortunately that was an initiative that was met with resistance, but I'm glad that more people are starting to see the need to discuss these matters. These were my thoughts at the time:
https://tinyurl.com/yaourho3

See attached below mockup designs of one possible vision integrating social.coop tools for collaborative work online. This is just one possible vision, but it's important to note that the decisions about file formats and tooling we choose today have an impact on our ability to integrate these applications in the future, and an impact on the cost of making these things possible.

The tools are important and they need to be put to practice to get things done today, but it's also important to try to arrive to a coherent vision of what integration level do we want and at which costs.

Both ends of the question need to be addressed, the tooling for today and the ideal we would like to arrive to one day.

I don't know if this is the right place to start a more technical discussion about designing this system so that it can be evolved towards an integrated vision, or what an integrated vision means, but it's definitely a good thing that more people are beginning to bring forward their thoughts and possible solutions to some of our needs.

(PS: Loomio URL highlighting doesn't work, I suggest we use URL shorteners always. s.coop wasn't working today it's having a Cloudflare nightmare, so I just used tinyurl instead. )

I wonder if we might consider self-hosting GitBook for this. I've found its use for public-facing handbooks to be super clear, perhaps more so than MediaWiki's sometimes-unintuitive interface. See, for instance, the Loomio handbook in GitBook.

@ntnsndr We've been doing that already, and @loppear already experimented with Gitbook for that (a discussion that took place on the social.coop Matrix room a couple of weeks ago)
See:
https://loppear.gitlab.io/social-coop-policies/Bylaws.html.

Wait... social.coop ( http://social.coop ) has a self-hosted instance of Gitbook? Where can I try it out?

Looks like they're using the Gitlab/Gitbook integration, not a self-hosted instance at social.coop.

Yes, that was just a test because somebody interjected that some sort of bureaucratic process had to be spawned before it could be tested at social.coop. In the meantime, we keep leaking knowledge.

One of the problems with any community project is cohesion. In my experience, I'd suggest having a canonical URL for all projects (not in Loomio!)

Perhaps social.coop/projects?

In the light of what we said in the thread mentioned earlier by @mayel I absolutely agree we:
1. Need a wiki
2. Need to make the number of different tool we are currently using more manageable for users who can't or don't want to waste a ton of time on the (admittedly steep) learning curve.

So as I proposed the other day, I've now set up a wiki at https://wiki.social.coop (using the same software as wikipedia, I understand people have various ideas about what tools would be appropriate, or how we should start by analysing user needs, I just thought at least this can be a place where we can gather info in the meantime, we can always import all the data from the wiki into something else later...)

You'll notice the oauth2 login link, which attempts to authenticate you on the wiki using you mastodon account. Unfortunately it's not quite working, and I think it'd be better to use our bespoke members app as the oauth server anyway (that is to say, as the canonical identity). Same with any apps/services we add in the future.

Should we just make accounts if we want to use it?

Yes. I guess this is my question, too. The wiki is great, but I was hesitating to login until 0auth was configured. I guess it would be wise to just get on and start.

It may be obvious to the more technical members, and I've said this in another thread, but given the nature of Loomio threads it bears repeating here:

• You may start creating and migrating content now on the wiki at https://wiki.social.coop
• Given that OAuth still doesn't work properly, you will need to create a new account exclusively for the wiki.
• It's advisable that you use the same email and user name across different social.coop services (including the wiki) whenever possible. That will make things easier and more precise when we work on an account migration/unification process later.

+1 to wiki under the social.coop domain, for informal knowledge capture and organization by anyone. +2 to @mayel suggestion that this and other "official" services use oauth to the masto/members accounts.

I can go either way (-0) on gitbook - it's nice for a more formal set of documentation, and if you otherwise need the advantages of git (development/release of docs to correspond with some other versioned/release, or the distributed aspect - I put up the bylaws/CoC gitbook on gitlabs in part because I knew it would be easy to migrate to a self-hosted social.coop official location if the community felt it was a good direction.) But organizing the same content in a wiki is about as easy and can be done by any volunteer more easily than getting the gitbook stack going.