Think about direction

"Wonder why you haven't before"

Okay, so to continue with the REM lyrics, tonight was setup and direction night.  Things are still a little broken - there's a reason the current version is unstable, and there is no stable  - but I set up clickwiki.org with the bleeding edge version.  The decomposer is an unholy Frankenstein of DOM and parse, the composer is parse (they will eventually both be DOM), but that's just half the fun.

Pardon me as I dump the state of my brain: it is nearly 2:00am my time, so I'm a bit fried.

As I said in my last post, at least one person whom I was careful to keep up to date was blindsided, which sucks.  So now I'm sending emails to a nearly empty list, blogging here to nobody in particular and setting up a wiki documenting... okay, I do actually have a few people using Click for some small communities.  And perhaps the documentation will eventually be good enough to point commercial clients at (although, as I've said before, most aren't using any of the features that wikis would be).

Why am I speaking into the void?  I will explain to you, my non-existent reader, as the answer is three-fold:




First, it's setting up a habit of public communication.  If a community does develop around this little project, I will be used to public rumination and proclamation so that I am never in a situation where I surprise anybody.  Second, somebody tripping across this project now has a bit of background to where it came from and a feel for the overall momentum.  And finally, third: I write to form my own philosophy about what this project is.

Back in 1994 or so, I started writing interactive websites.  In 1997, I had a nice one that caught the eye of a fellow who became my business partner.  We started helping newspapers in small towns.  Today we're basically doing the same thing, only instead of print with the added bonus of on-line, we're offering primarily on-line services with the bonus of print.  Seven years later, I got involved in Davis Wiki, and then Wiki Spot, which has a similar focus.  The Local Wiki project aims for that space (and it's a great project I support), so what does Click aim for?

I'm not sure.  It's a cool platform, even stripped of the commercial filters I've written for it. I think it is a good fit for very specialized communities who have unique needs.  If a wiki is a chisel... a single, simple tool... then Click is a Dremel.  It's a little more complicated, but not so much that you need a manual (hopefully!), and ideally it'll come with a full set of specialized tools to fit your specific need.  The hurdle will be making that easy for people to comprehend and also to share custom tools.  Kilt patterns, RPG character sheets, heraldry... there are a slew of specialized needs out there for small groups.  And hundreds of each of those specific types of those small groups over the world.

I think that's a different enough goal (or at least my approach is different from the other wiki-model solutions out there) that it's worth pursuing.

To add to that, I'm going to try to get somewhat idealistic about the decentralized model.  Not because it's important that I do it with Click, but just the conviction that somebody should be working on that.  If we're serious about localizing the information on the web and empowering local groups of people, what good it is if a Facebook or Google login is required for full access to our knitting or kilt group's information?  And why can't local communities form networks a la the big players?  We are as technically savvy.  And, like the hats on Doctor Who... we're cool.