Wiki and Chat

Wiki and Chat
Lets back up and review a bit about where wiki and chat fit into the Holy Trinity of Distributed Communication (network of social software) How_To_Build_an_Online_Development_Community_Presentation.

What is a Wiki?

 * space for a Collective Memory
 * A wiki (IPA: [ˈwiː.kiː]  or [ˈwɪ.kiː] [1]) is a type of website that allows anyone visiting the site to add, to remove, or otherwise to edit all content, very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing. The term wiki is a shortened form of wiki wiki which is from the native language of Hawaii (Hawaiian), where it is commonly used as an adjective to denote something "quick" or "fast"
 * a wiki is a simplification of the process of creating HTML pages combined with a system that records each individual change that occurs over time, so that at any time, a page can be reverted to any of its previous states

Pro

 * anyone can edit
 * highly configurable
 * provides RSS feeds of changes and elsewhere
 * allows for user communication
 * various levels of privileges for users
 * pretty simple installation (on mediawiki)
 * can rollback pages in history
 * can compare changes to content
 * allows for versioning of pages

Con

 * not as stylable as straight html
 * spammers!
 * have to keep up on software updates
 * need to monitor changes
 * nonstandard wiki syntax (which is becoming less of an issue)
 * installation process

Examples

 * THIS SITE!
 * http://www.wikipedia.org/
 * http://wikitravel.org/
 * http://www.openclipart.org/wiki
 * http://www.inkscape.org/wiki

Software

 * http://www.mediawiki.org/
 * http://twiki.org/

Physical/Offline Equals

 * Books
 * records
 * group writings
 * group documents

What is Chat?

 * Chat/Instant messaging is the act of instantly communicating between two or more people over a network such as the Internet.
 * Allows for major productivity boosts in particular when working in multi-user chats/groupchats.
 * still no major standard, but the major players are all lining up behind the SIP standard
 * IRC is best for group chat
 * Need to think about security (need encryption end to end for secure communication)

Person to Person

 * excellent for meetings and copy/pasting
 * if too many open, can get annoying and destroy productivity

Groupchat

 * not all services support
 * great for meetings
 * great to stay idle in to have virtual workspace

Pro

 * Easy to use
 * everywhere
 * instant access
 * detect presence of users
 * can record (log) conversations for storage (useful!)
 * prevalent all over the desktop on all systems
 * everyone uses (usually all the major protocols)
 * works well in modern copy-paste heavy environments

Con

 * many different standards
 * must agree upon client
 * maintain multiple friend lists
 * a small/limited amount of text can be sent

Examples

 * AIM
 * MSN Messenger
 * Yahoo Messenger
 * IRC (most used in open source)
 * Jabber (Google Talk)

Physical/Offline Equals

 * conversation
 * meetings
 * presentations
 * conference calls

Overall
Physical/Offline Social protocol still governs these communication systems. How do you want you project to be viewed?