Mediawiki-based social networking app for collaboration
tav
I spent the last few evenings hacking together a collaboration app on
top of MediaWiki:
* http://socialstartuplabs.com/wiki/User:Tav
* http://socialstartuplabs.com/wiki/User:Tav?listing=tribe
And, surprisingly, I'm quite pleased with it. It allows you to:
* create a profile quite easily.
* create new projections or join the teams for existing ones, e.g. SolarRoof.
* define individual definitions (interpretations), intentions and
needs relating to a projection.
* follow others by adding them to your "tribe".
* see the overlapping intentions of those you're following and the
projections you're part of.
Now, I'm obviously biased, but I already find it a lot better for
actual collaboration than pretty much every other web app that I've
ever used. It takes a few minutes to get used to — but as long as one
is familiar with MediaWiki, it seems easy enough to use. Pretty much
all of the "underlying plumbing" is hidden away.
The app is a partial implementation of the Confluence model that came
out of 24weeks in 2007. It's also a rework of the same MediaWiki hack
we did back then. It makes heavy use of MediaWiki's transclusions
support (thanks Erik!) and, this time round, I sullied myself by
writing my first ever lines of PHP to create an extension that
improves the usability substantially.
Anyways, I'd love to know what everyone else makes of it. Signing up
is very easy:
* http://socialstartuplabs.com/wiki/Special:UserLogin?type=signup
It'll automatically create a profile page for you and on the right
hand side, you'll find links which will help you fill in some details
— name, info, contact details and profile picture. After that, just
find/create projections and join them — and find people and add them
to your tribe.
Then just keep your intentions/needs updated on your profile — use the
wiki for adding relevant content — and use the tribe view to keep
track of what those you're interested in are up to.
Let me know how it goes. Thanks!
--
love, tav
plex:espians/tav | t...@espians.com | +44 (0) 7809 569 369
http://tav.espians.com | http://twitter.com/tav | skype:tavespian
tav
> Glad to see the confluence concepts in play in an app. I've stuck myself in
> there.
Cool!
> Would be fun to maybe get into a chat to talk through how it could be used.
Good idea! I'll be on IRC for all of today if you (or anyone else)
fancies such a chat today. It's the usual place, #esp on
irc.freenode.net
* http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=esp
Otherwise, perhaps we can arrange for some other time?
tav
Thanks for all the fantastic feedback. I've made some minor changes:
* "Projections" are now "Objectives" (thanks to Randy Fisher).
* "Tribe" is now "Stream".
* Discussion pages are now enabled for objectives (thanks to Alex Rollin).
Hope that makes the system easier to use.
Alex:
* I haven't yet packaged this up to be deployable on other MediaWiki
instances, but would very much like to. At the moment, I've patched
MediaWiki in a bunch of places and it's a bit messy. Would be very
cool to clean it up and make a completely self-contained open source
Confluence extension.
Wayne:
* One can create a new page and link to it from both an intention and
a need... and thus connect them up. Not sure if that's what you were
asking about though...
* I can totally understand that MediaWiki isn't perfect for many
things — and thus my work on Ampify. But I was trying to achieve a
very quick result with this MediaWiki hack.
* Nice idea about checking off needs/intentions. That would be very
cool! Unfortunately MediaWiki doesn't support this natively — however,
it would be possible to add such functionality by creating an
Extension though...
Chris:
* Thank you for the idea to extend the profile info wizard!! It now
prompts you to create/join an objective and to add people to your
stream.
* I'm hoping that the name change from Projection to Objective makes
it clearer. But some documentation would be really nice. David
(Happyseaurchin) has started creating a short video which I hope will
serve this purpose.
Matt:
* Definitely agreed that it needs a user guide — and an event or
something to help bring out it's potential.
* Perhaps we could have a collective skype/irc chat session sometime next week?
Charley:
* Totally agreed that we don't need to duplicate the existing
MediaWiki documentation. Thanks for all the help you've been providing
around the space.
Wael:
* Nice idea about bringing in the geo-location aspect. I hadn't
considered that for MediaWiki at all! How do you see it working in
this context?
Thanks everyone for the great engagement.