[OWW-SC] Private wikis?

[Maureen Hoatlin]

Hi All,

My lab has a private wiki and we are also active users of the public wiki.
A little history might be helpful...
When I started on OWW I mainly wanted a private wiki but because that option
wasn¹t around at the time, I started using the public wiki first. I¹m glad
it happened that way because If I¹d had immediate access to the private wiki
I might have just kept to myself and lurked around in my little Oregon
world.  Now I understand more about what OWW is about and I¹ve become a
believer.  I find that I want to have as much as possible to the public
wiki. For some new lab projects we are just posting everything in the open.
For example, we are working on modeling a protein and my summer student
posted his methods ( http://openwetware.org/wiki/Victor_Wong). My hope is
that a colleague will get interested in the project and we will work
together entirely in the open (so far, no luck on that but one can always
hope....).

Right now I¹m hosting a class (using Reshma¹s lovely template) and some of
the other faculty here have expressed discomfort about posting, lectures,
slides, schedules and so on. This is just what people are used to--
protecting and hiding everything.  I explain how much I¹ve learned from
reading the other wikis and how great it is to contribute, not just
unilaterally consume. Based on my experience, I think the more people use
the public site the more comfortable they will be with the OWW mission of
open sharing. So if OWW offers private wikis, then the labs ideally should
also be active on the public side. I don¹t know how you would enforce this
though.

I¹m absolutely thrilled to be one of the test cases for the private wiki on
OWW.  We¹ve decided to use the private wiki only for developing preliminary
data in a format for publication. We are essentially working on drafts of
papers with the intent that once the paper is published we will move that
whole section onto the public side.  The private wiki has transformed the
way we communicate preliminary results in my lab. I can¹t imagine doing work
without it now. It would be a huge handicap. We were actively looking at a
wikifarm (Sourceground) to host our private lab wiki when the private option
became possible on OWW.

In my opinion, having the private wiki option on OWW could ultimately
advance the mission of sharing because otherwise some people might just go
to wikifarms or use new operating systems with integrated wikis and drift
away from OWW.

-Maureen


On 4/12/07 6:27 AM, "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
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List
> sc at openwetware.org
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070413/f3ed41c5/attachment.htm