This month’s Bay Area Wiki Wednesday was at Citizen Space in San Francisco. Our speaker, Yoz Grahame, gave a talk called “Folk Logic: The Social Life of Code”, easily one of my favorite talks so far for Wiki Wednesday.
I’m twisting Yoz’s arm to give this talk again at BarCampBlock in Palo Alto, which is coming up fast! It’s August 18-19, and if you’d like to come, please sign up on the wiki. We have over 100 people so far. We’ll kick off the event in Socialtext’s offices at 10am on Saturday.
Back to Wiki Wednesday!
Yoz described how people learn to code and how code propagates or is propagated through social interaction. Though he was describing computer programming from BASIC to LambdaMOO to Yahoo Pipes, everything he talked about made sense when applied to wikis, wiki culture, and wiki adoption patterns. With examples from Ning, Second Life, and many references to work by Richard Borovoy et al, Yoz described the joys and dangers of creating systems that allow other people to write code. Social code, or code that works through “folk logic”, allows people to create their own code, to clone and modify others’ code, and to share data.
Kirrily Roberts blogged the talk as it happened.
I was left wondering — mostly — about how to implement Folk Programming in a non-centralised environment. Wouldn’t it be cool if web apps (WordPress for example) had cloneable plugins/widgets that were as easy to add as Facebook applications and as easy to modify and learn from as Yahoo Pipes?
And by the following morning she had pinged me with a cool hack: a FolkLogic demo!
As is fairly usual for our local Wiki Wednesdays, we had a small yet convivial group with intense discussion and connection between participants. Adina, Kragen, Betsy, Kirrily, Ariel, Yoz, and I went off into fun speculations about what we could do with social code, or wikis that allow more programming and cloning. Betsy described some of the projects mentioned at Phoebe Ayers’ recent Wikipedia meetup; one of them was a project to scan the OED; Kragen had already done it, so it was a lucky moment that will save someone a huge amount of effort! We also got deep into another of his old projects, a sort of wiki database bug tracking system, WowBar. Kirrily described a deletion discussion on Wikipedia, and the ways that wiki discussions (rather than automated voting procedures) can be productive; there was an effort to delete an entry on gay cruising grounds in Britain because it was not encyclopediac, and she wrote a history of gay cruising in Britain since the 18th century in response.
At some point during our discussion, Betsy described the possibilities for building on a relationship database structure into Mediawiki, and the complexities of multiple languages and translations.
If you’d like more detail, a partial transcript of the talk and our discussions will be on the event page on the wiki.
Wiki Wednesday talks coming up soon will be on Wiktionary and handling global involvement and multilingual aspects of Wiktionary, and then another month this fall will be on wikis and non profits, with participants from Bay Area public television station KQED.
Thanks very much to our hosts at Citizen Agency, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina, and to all the participants!
I’d like to start videoblogging our Wiki Wednesday talks and demos, so if you’re interested in helping out with that, please contact me at liz@socialtext.com.
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