[LogiLogi-list] various thoughts

Hi all,

In this mail I resume latest thoughts, most of them triggered after my
talk at Montevideo, which was a great experience. So here is a variaty
of ideas/thoughts:

= Stallman
It's great you got to talk to Stallman, although it was to know he has
different view. Does he thinks LL's view and activism not good?

I also would like to know what he said about LL itself, as a project,
did he liked it?

= Roadmap
I believe we should all together trace the next-steps and road map in
detail. For example, I strongly believe we have to make a stop, and
rethink some aspects of LL and work over them before continuing to
further development of the API, which would be the greatest expansion.

= Democratization of development
One of the future plans traced by Wybo was to include some democratic
process in the development, which I think is great, and this also
triggers lot's of other stuff that I've been thinking off for some
time. Also this remembers me of leparlement, which is a fast way of
searching democratic consensus :)

== Developing over LL.org
I've proposed this before, and some people had suggested the same
thing after my talk, and I think now we are ready to start walking
this way. We should get LL development to logilogi.org, and start
using our own tool for LL's own development, in the end, we are always
debating/exchanging ideas over the list/irc.

= Tags
This is a returning topic. We currently have two big issues with tags:

== Query Vs. Dir structure
This was brought back in my last large-mail about the new UI proposal
[0] in the section "Navigation bar - too many tags". Basically, I
tihnk we should opt for one way or the other but both the same, in the
url and search bar and I believe the Query to be the most intuitive
one.

== Logi-lists
I introduce this idea first in order to use for my next proposal for
internationalization.

Logi lists are just what we have right now at the laguage settings
plus going further and mixing lists across users/peergroups. This way,
the order would be a rating and thus we could apply an algorithm like
the logis ranking does. This would be just one of the many ways there
is for voting/ranking lists.

== Internationalization of tags
We should pay attention to this. Right now it is a bit confusing since
tags have no language. We talk about this before. There is no easy
solution and we should discuss how to solve this. I would guess Wybo
already has this in mind, what is your view on this?

Here are my thoughts:

LL tags should be sorted and filtered, and should have some properties
like language. I think for this we should apply some concepts we
already use for logis mixed with list sorting as a way of voting. This
would be:

 * I can rearrange the tags by dragging them which is a vote (a set of tags)
 * the peergroups and power/weight applies for the rankings
 * tags are displayed in many languages at the same time, as far as
they are in my lang list at settings. (language list should show the
option to chose which langs and not only sorting)
 * how many tags are displayed can be determined (initially by
default) to some amount of power at least

the functions should be thought still, but I want to show the idea.

This could be an example:

Content: Free, Libre, Livre ... (more tags)
Context: Software, Codigo, Open Source, Linux

This way we are freeing up tags and still have them under control.
Right now tags are freely editable at LL, but somehow not handy and
adding, sorting and filtering (by language and amount) empowers them.
Also about languages, for me is the same to have a tag in english or
spanish, so I want to have both displayed. For the logi is different
right now as we can not show more than one logi (for each spoken
language), so we have to chose which to show. We could apply this to
the tags too, by only showing tags for current language (of the logi)
and also tags with no language and additional to this there could be a
global language option to show a mixed of all understand languages by
the user...

Other interesting part of this, is that I come to realize that we
should make the action of tagging much more easy, and we should incite
community tagging. Furthermore, the tags we assign should be shown
always to us.

I've actually be thinking how to solve this for the last days, but
obviously with the ideas we've all talk about in the past :) Urgyen
chat yesterday was also interesting, and I haven't yet studied some
links he post to the irc, yet. This is a clear topic we could talk
about at logilogi, mostly for future reference.

In resume, what I see is that we should get consensus in what tags to
show by an algorithm as we do with logis. This could also be
implemented through our current structure of Default, Extra-context
and Extra-content tags, and defining by ranking which ones to show in
each sub-group. Please Wybo, shade light on this :)

= Ratings in other peer-groups
Show other peergroups that rate this logi, ordered by ranking. For
example, "Also rated by: Biologers 3.4, Politicians 2.5", to give
another dimension of relations.

= What is logilogi for?
We should write a logi about this, I might do it after discussing it
over the list. Logilogi is a platform for rational debate of ideas and
concepts. Now, this is more of a objective than a description of what
it is for. First, we should differentiate between; what could LogiLogi
be used for, and, what's the objective of logilogi.org, which are very
different things. We know logilogi could be used for managing
information for different purposes and that it's unique in it's
features. On the other hand, logilogi.org aims to be an application of
LogiLogi  for the rational debate of ideas and concepts as said
before. This differentiation was critical when I intended to explain
LogiLogi to non technical people.

= Bulk logis
This is a strong term to use, but helps to explain. This does include
the spam, but not only. For example, logis containing "asdfasdf",
logis with wrong tags (on purpose), etc. This is related to the
deletion of logis, and this problem is solved when other content is
created and rated, but mean while this bulk logis are still there.

Also, there are other logis that are not bulk, but neither philosophy.
For example, if somebody writes a poem, or a logi describing himself,
or other cases. I would like to know what's your view about this.

What will we do about this at logilogi.org? we should remain unbiased
and allow any type of contents (while not automatic or clear cases of
spam?), but we could end up with lot's of bulk data, tags, peergroups,
etc... Also we should take in count external linking for
self-promotion (another of WP problems)...

= Deleting logis
Since the contents of LL are under a free license, instead of the
"delete" action we could "detach" it from the author and keep the
contents. This is important in many aspects. A logi could mean work by
many people (linking, questions, derived work, remarks, etc), so I
think this is important as a warranty for contributions over a logi.

On the other hand, there could be some system to auto-delete logis,
maybe a logi marked for deletion (or voted -2) with no votes for X
amount of time could be auto-deleted.

= Logilogi adoption
After my talk, Rodolfo Pilas, a pioneer of free software in Uruguay
talked to me and made some comments and great constructive suggestions
about my presentation, which I greatly appreciate. He thought LL is
great and he said "now it would be great if business adopt logilogi,
they could submit bugs and contribute back code", and that was
something I haven't thought much about still, although is the classic
model of free software, but I haven't thought about LL applied to
business so this is something we could also promote and maybe us start
doing business or installing LL as a solution for business. This would
obviously be a modified version of LL, but there is certainly a great
potential. This is related to the next point, could LL replace forums?

= Replacing forums
Right after my talk, the guy in charge of the computer room at the
university told me he would be interested to install LL over there, as
they where thinking of installing a forum, and now he thought LL was
much powerful, and I think this is very interesting. I would like to
help them on this, but I'm not sure that LL will fill the need of a
forum, so we first have to look at the needs.

= Logilogi like a blog?
Many people compared logilogi to a blog, and although we know the huge
difference, it actually has some similarity, since a logi could be a
post, and the comments show under it like comments on a blog. This
would be only in the structure, but also in the way that the
authorship is preserved, like blogs, different from wikis, so maybe
it's not a so bad association. Maybe we could make the logi-blog? a
super powerful, super easy blogging system for rails? then linked with
the ogog api? wa! :)

= API
This three letters are probably going to be mentioned very often in
the upcoming months and it will be a detonator for LL adoption. Wybo,
shall you start tracing your ideas about this? will there be
peergroup, rating, reference (like inter-wiki links), and content
interrelations?

= Search engines optimization campaign
I think it's time to get exposure, and this is our medium and we
should use it at it's maximum potential. We should start SEO campaigns
to attract attention, define keywords we want to apeart and promote
them. We have lot's of mediums for this with no expenses, and this
works takes some time so we could start it right now while we also get
contents. Contents are also the base for SEO, and logilogi is by
nature a winner on this by it's nature, so we should take advantage on
this, right away.

= Announcements list
When people shows interest in logilogi I/we always invite to
participate at the list, but the general list is sometimes a bit
technical, or maybe talk about things that don't matter to everybody
and could be extense like this email :) We need a moderated list to
invite general public to use, maybe this is the announcements list,
and start reporting on new choices we've taken, functionalities (ej:
we have a new front page!) etc. Maybe we could start selecting news
for a weekly/monthly diggest.

= Donations
Let's add a paypal account, Wybo? we could also open a campaign at
pledgie.com, where we specify what will be the founding spent at.

= UI
We haven't got the time to talk much about the UI modifications I
proposed (now Wybo told me he will answer early mails later), and I
already have new ones to add, and I think we should keep evolving on
this as it's one of our weakness.

= Crossbrowsing
We've done a lot of work, spent lot's of time working for LL to be
compatible with IE. Miguel just told me he gave up after working 2
days to make something work in IE, and this is a no end known problem.
I think (and Miguel too) that we should focus on FF, and then, after
releasing a stable new version, we could think of compatibilitiy with
other browsers. How many people use LL with IE so far? is it worth?
many people also has FF but use IE, so if there is a big alert they
could switch browsers or just download FF, which will also promote
it's use. We think this would unleash the front-end development
dramatically.

added note: just now I came across this:
http://www.me.com/unsupported_browser/en/ (I can't enter the site as
it doesn't recognize iceweasel as a firefox-like browser, and it would
not work with IE either)

= Learning Rails :)
I'm back to learning rails, knowing a bit more now so starting not
from scratch, and spending some of my time to learn so I can
contribute to the LL code... Hope to be active on this soon, fixing
bugs, getting tasks done, but without leaving the UI design :)

----

Next, I'll write a draft of the presentation at Montevideo now at the
LL foundation.

I'll end the mail for now, and I think it would have been nice if all
this mail had been written through logis :)

Greetings all!

[0] http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=a1be8f60807080230u288eb1ffr73fe553732aa35a3%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=logilogi-list
-- 
Bruno