state of wikiotics

[Jim Garrison]

Hi everyone,

When Laurent and I were chatting a few days ago, we identified a number
of challenges that Wikiotics faces going forward. We planned then to
collaborate on a document outlining these, but as I began drafting I
felt it would be more useful for me to write things as I see them (based
on our conversations), and then Laurent and others can chime in with input.

In short, Wikiotics faces a number of issues. I believe that our plan
to build a "minimum viable product" (MVP) can fix many but not all of
them. Since at the moment it looks like we will not be proceeding with
the MVP immediately, it makes sense to take this as an opportunity to
identify everything on our minds. The remainder of this email serves to
catalogue my thoughts.

In some sense, things look pretty bleak. We registered the domain
wikiotics.org on January 15, 2008 (five years and six months ago). At
this point, it seems that zero people are consistently using
wikiotics.org to learn a language. We are heavy on infrastructure but
short on users. It's not clear that the current site at wikiotics.org
would be useful to many people without both work on the content and the
web application itself.

Laurent and I decided against moving forward with the MVP for a few
reasons. First, the browser support for recording audio (e.g. through
WebRTC) is simply lacking so much that we would not be able to build an
MVP in the two remaining weeks that Laurent will be available and on the
grid. The lack of browser audio recording support has long plagued the
Wikiotics project, causing us to eventually use Flash, but it apparently
would be difficult to translate the existing Flash recording code to the
MVP in a reasonable amount of time.

Another issue is that it's not just that we need to build an MVP. We
need to grow and nurture it too. And at the moment, even if we had been
able to build the MVP in the next month, it's not clear who would have
done that.

The next few quotes are taken from Paul Graham's recent article at
http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

> Patrick Collison wrote "At some point, there was a very noticeable
> change in how Stripe felt. It tipped from being this boulder we had
> to push to being a train car that in fact had its own momentum."

Even once we have a great MVP, we will need to put quite a bit of effort
into promoting it and nurturing it so that people will want to use it.
The "build it and they will come" attitude has not worked for us, and we
know this.

> It would be a little frightening to be solving users' problems in a
> way that wasn't yet automatic, but less frightening than the far
> more common case of having something automatic that doesn't yet
> solve anyone's problems.

Graham is talking here about not automating things early on if they can
be done manually. In some sense, this is a disadvantage we face
compared with people working on a project full time. In my case
especially, it is impossible for me to know whether I will have any time
at all to work on Wikiotics in a given week. So instead of resorting to
doing some things manually, we've had to automate them simply because
it's not clear when anybody would get around to doing them otherwise.

> The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so
> nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of
> startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as
> pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s)
> you're going to do initially to get the company going.

This is a really good point -- before building anything else, we should
come up with a full plan for how we plan to get it off the ground, too.

I've been thinking lately about ways in which our plan of building a
sustainable nonprofit built on free software faces initial tactical
disadvantages compared to startups. We should pinpoint and brainstorm
solutions to these problems.

* For us, personally, success means only more liability at first. More
users means we will need to spend time working on things and fixing
things, whether there is funding for it or not, and also whether each of
us personally has time available then or not. I know that this has
caused a fair amount of cognitive dissonance on my part, for sure.
Knowing this has also led me to put in effort "now" instead of "later"
when deciding whether to build something that scales well, even if it
means development goes more slowly. This conflicts with Paul Graham's
advice (mentioned above) to punt on things that require effort to make
scale.

* We rarely are able to all get together and work at once. There is
something to be said for the social feedback of being together and
working on a problem in a room. Short of in-person communication, it is
also nice to at least be working on the project at the same time as
others. Unfortunately, for much of the time people have been working on
Wikiotics, one person would have a lot of free time to devote to the
project, and the others would be too busy for it to feed back in a
meaningful amount of time. I know that I spent time frustrated in this
sense, and so has Laurent. If we could all just get together for a
summer camp some time, I truly think we could build amazing things.

We've gotten some really great positive feedback at various points of
the project. One experience I remember particularly well was OSCON
2011. When we showed people Wikiotics at our booth, people were
*genuinely excited* about the potential for the project. During my
flight home, the person in the seat next to me asked me if I had
attended OSCON. When I said yes, he asked what project I was with, and
when I said Wikiotics he was incredibly excited, saying it was his
favorite project he discovered while at OSCON.

Another piece of positive feedback came recently from our contact at
Gandi, who said

> Sounds like you guys are making progress. It's a huge project, and I
> can see that it will take some dedication to maintain and build
> momentum.

Even if few people are using the site, we have built a (small) community
of people very interested in seeing Wikiotics succeed.

But I think I speak for both Laurent and myself when I say that we are
both exhausted from developing, and we now have other things going on in
our lives that mean that giving Wikiotics the focus it really needs has
high opportunity cost for each of us.

Let me first begin by explaining my own goals with regard to the
project. I have always wanted Ductus to be an experiment in radically
innovative wiki design. But maybe that has distracted from our real
goal, which should be to teach people languages.

Personally, for me to justify putting more effort into this project
going forward, we need to be building a wiki that will do things other
than teach languages. In 2008 when we began this project I was looking
for things to do. Since then, I have completed most of a PhD in
physics, and Wikiotics is the odd activity out in my life -- unrelated
to other things I am working on. For me to work on it longer, it really
needs to have an impact in education more generally (including in
science). Building my career is probably going to require over 40 hours
of week of effort; it's difficult to justify continued obligation in a
project that is unrelated to it and an ongoing liability.

As such, perhaps I am not the best person to be leading technical
development any longer going forward?

I am really mostly satisfied with the architecture of Ductus1, but there
are a few things I would change if given the opportunity. I could
detail these in a separate thread. The main reasons for us wanting to
do Ductus2 (the MVP) is to (a) focus on the user above all else from the
very beginning; (b) update the code base to use more modern
Javascript/CSS libraries; and (c) fix the few architectural mistakes we
made with Ductus1.

Let's switch subjects briefly to other things I perceive.

Currently the 25 most recently edits at
http://wikiotics.org/special/recent_changes go all the way back to May.
Among other things, from looking at the recent changes page it is not
at all clear that we are paying two Fellows this summer to build
content. (Are they lacking supervision? Frustrated with the current
site? It is not at all clear to me why there are not more edits, but
there is surely a reason.)

And I think we still send way too many private emails. We have too many
public communication channels, many of which go neglected. We never
fully addressed the points I brought up in my google groups thread
"things look dead" from a few months ago.

At this point, I believe that establishing a nonprofit organization with
501(c)(3) status is the most important thing we have accomplished.
We've also learned much from our work so far (and talking to people),
and I'd love to see this effort go on to being useful.

Thoughts?

- Jim

[Ian Sullivan]

Jim Garrison <garr...@wikiotics.org> writes:

> Hi everyone,
>
> When Laurent and I were chatting a few days ago, we identified a number
> of challenges that Wikiotics faces going forward. We planned then to
> collaborate on a document outlining these, but as I began drafting I
> felt it would be more useful for me to write things as I see them (based
> on our conversations), and then Laurent and others can chime in with input.

Sound good to me. My comments are, mostly, included inline below.

> In short, Wikiotics faces a number of issues. I believe that our plan
> to build a "minimum viable product" (MVP) can fix many but not all of
> them. Since at the moment it looks like we will not be proceeding with
> the MVP immediately, it makes sense to take this as an opportunity to
> identify everything on our minds. The remainder of this email serves to
> catalogue my thoughts.
>
> In some sense, things look pretty bleak. We registered the domain
> wikiotics.org on January 15, 2008 (five years and six months ago). At
> this point, it seems that zero people are consistently using
> wikiotics.org to learn a language. We are heavy on infrastructure but
> short on users. It's not clear that the current site at wikiotics.org
> would be useful to many people without both work on the content and the
> web application itself.

Work on the content is very much needed, which is what our summer
Fellows are working on currently. The state of the site is another
matter. While we are certainly not a one stop shop for the language
community at the moment, we do have a number of tools available for
actually building lessons that are useful as is.

This is the primary disadvantage I see of a non-profit versus a
for-profit organization, especially at our scale. As a for-profit we
would face a much larger pool of potential investment dollars which
would have enabled us to work full time on the project and spend more of
that time together planning and collaborating. The downside of course is
that we would have needed a business model that skips our goal of making
language instruction freely available to everyone.

This is actually a good example of the difference between how we
imagined the site being used and how most people have actually
interacted with it. The workflow our Fellows are using starts in a
shared Google doc for initial drafting, moves from there to the WikiBook
page for some elaboration and a second look, and only after all of that
is the relevant dialogue section moved to Wikiotics and expanded into a
full lesson.

There are some quite sensible reasons for this. The Google document
provides a completely unstructured white board that works well for two
people jotting down notes about what to do in the future and that has
good notification and tracking features so that they can keep aware of
what is going on. The WikiBooks project offers more structure and an
easy way to view all related materials at once so as to keep track of
previous work though the notification tools use Wikipedia accounts that
are newer for them and certainly less used than their primary email
accounts through which Google notifies them of Google doc changes. Our
site has very little in the way of lesson organization and no mechanism
for being notified of changes to a lesson. It is however the only part
of the tool chain that lets them turn notes about lessons into direct
instruction materials that they know everyone in the community will be
able to use.

This is also how I have seen most of the law students at CLS respond to
wikis for the first time. The habit of composing documents in a word
processor is pretty well ingrained in people these days so when they are
first introduced to wikis they start by composing offline and then copy
it online as one big edit.

> And I think we still send way too many private emails. We have too many
> public communication channels, many of which go neglected. We never
> fully addressed the points I brought up in my google groups thread
> "things look dead" from a few months ago.
>
> At this point, I believe that establishing a nonprofit organization with
> 501(c)(3) status is the most important thing we have accomplished.
> We've also learned much from our work so far (and talking to people),
> and I'd love to see this effort go on to being useful.
>
> Thoughts?

We do have too many communication channels and I am primarily
responsible for the lack of updates over them. Some of that will change
in the build up to the September event.

I think that the most important thing we have accomplished is building
the tools currently on the site that are allowing our fellows to build
some real useful language lessons in forms they would not have been able
to build themselves and using multimedia materials they would not have
previously been able to share with the community except in
person. Forming the non-profit is important to me primarily because it
has enabled fund-raising sufficient to support that work.

I think we will have a much better picture of the current state after
September. That will allow us to see how a local community interacts
with a serious collection of lessons built on Wikiotics, how the
platform performs at actually translating and customizing those lessons,
and how other local outreach efforts change when we have an existing
program and body of material to start from rather than a clean slate,
however full of potential.

-Ian