Slide 1
Platonic Wikis and
Subversive Social Interfaces
 Jonah Bossewitch
Plone Conference
Vienna, Austria: September 20, 2005
 This talk will consider Plone as a preeminent platform for deploying Social Software in a variety of configurations. We will also explore the affordances that a Plone environment fosters, and the expanding role of Software Architecture as a leading art. Finally, we will examine the ecology of the Plone project itself in light of this analysis.

Innocent Questions
Explain the differences between a blog, a wiki, and a forum?
When should a community use which and why?
Is plone a wiki?
Is a wiki a CMS?
WWJD?

Modalities of Social Software
wikis and blogs and forums and tagging (distributed classification)
proliferation and diffuse nature of these concepts

The Platonic Forms
wiki's workflow, blog's workflow, etc
It is all just rules and policy applied to content
What's interesting are the variations and riffs around these familiar forms

Tagging and Folksonomies
Tagging as a social activity
source: http://dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html

The Perfect CMS
The workflow is arbitrarily configurable
If it is truly arbitrary, might as well make it deliberate
Impact Space:

Situated Within This Space
Environments which foster one end or another
One blog per person vs. shared blogging
A Plone w/ open workflow as a wiki,  Plone's news, etc

Environmental Affordances

Perceived Plone Landscape

Actual Landscape

Plone Process

Plone Community

Plone Ecology

Sustainable Plone Evolution

Case Studies
Educational Multimedia Case Constructor (http://emcc.ccnmtl.columbia.edu)
Post-Graduate Life-Long-Learning Plan (http://pgd.ccnmtl.columbia.edu)
PloneStickies (http://plone.org/products/stickies)

Appendix

Social Software
 "A new generation of socio-technical systems that facilitate human expression, communication, and collaboration.Ò (Ulises Ali Mejias)
social interfaces - mediating human-human interaction (Joel Spolsky)
ergonomics:ui::ui:social interfaces
Examples

Software ÒArchitectureÓ
affordances
leading art
behavior/worldview

Completing the Circle
f/oss as inflection point
values of developers embodied in features of system
e.g. cc licenses

Wiki Prayer
ÒPlease, Grant me the serenity to accept the pages I cannot edit,
The courage to edit the pages I can,
And the wisdom to know the differenceÓ