[OWW-SC] Private wikis?

[Reshma Shetty]

OpenWetWare's mission is to promoter the *open* sharing of information in
biological science and engineering.  So the only way to justify expending
any resources on private wiki's is if it encourages folks to digitize
information as they go and this information gets eventually made public.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the private wiki test

1) we won't know if people will actually make pages public after some time
for easily 1-3 years.   (The timescale for people to do experiments and
eventually publish them.)
2) we haven't made it trivial for people to "publish" a page to OpenWetWare
from a private wiki.  Perhaps this could be addressed by the technology
developer that we are trying to hire.
3) the experiment is uncontrolled.  Potentially digitizing information early
on privately doesn't make the information any more likely to go public
later.  But how do we know?
4) Making private wiki's available could in fact make things worse because
given the option of making things private or public, folks might be more
likely to make things private given an easy way of doing so.  Again, there
is no way to "control" for this.

I'd actually rather not have a general policy for giving out private wiki's
because

1) we shouldn't make any guarantees about the private wiki's.  It is a trial
right now which means it could go away at some point.
2) we don't want private wiki's to take off.  Shouldn't we keep the number
of private wiki's as low as possible?

Of course, the caveats to the above are that it may be strategically useful
to have more people become "dependent" on OpenWetWare (in terms of getting
support in the future) and that we could explore charging for private wiki's
to fund the public site.

Just some thoughts ... I'm open to discussion.

-Reshma

On 4/12/07, Barry Canton <bcanton at mit.edu > wrote:
>
> How do we think the private wiki test is going?  I'd be especially
> interested to hear from those with private wikis.
>
> I got a request on behalf of some MIT faculty behind the SMART program
> (Singapore-MIT alliance) who want to build their website on OWW.  As
> expected they are put off by the lack of access control and are now
> wondering if it's possible to keep their entire site private.
>
> My feeling is that we shouldn't give out private wikis unless we think
> people are likely to use the public site significantly too.
>
> What do others think?  Do we have enough info. to decide a general policy
> for granting private wikis?
>
> Barry
>
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