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.
<br><br>Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the private wiki test <br><br>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.)
<br>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.<br>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?
<br>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.
<br><br>I'd actually rather not have a general policy for giving out private wiki's because <br><br>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.
<br>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?<br><br>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.
<br><br>Just some thoughts ... I'm open to discussion.<br><br>-Reshma<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 4/12/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Barry Canton</b> <<a href="mailto:bcanton@mit.edu" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
bcanton@mit.edu
</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
How do we think the private wiki test is going? I'd be especially interested to hear from those with private wikis.<br><br>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.
<br><br>My feeling is that we shouldn't give out private wikis unless
we think people are likely to use the public site significantly too.<br><br>What do others think? Do we have enough info. to decide a general policy for granting private wikis?
<br><span><br>Barry<br>
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