2009-03-04 Wiki Strategy Meeting Notes

Owned by David Walker (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Mar 09, 2009Version comment
2 min read

From:     David Walker <DHWalker@ucdavis.edu>
To:     Kirk Alexander <kdalex@ucdavis.edu>, Curtis Bray <clbray@ucdavis.edu>, Hampton Sublett <hbsublett@ucdavis.edu>, Brian Donnelly <bdonnelly@ucdavis.edu>, Charles Turner <cjturner@ucdavis.edu>
Cc:     Kathleen M Beyer <kmbeyer@ucdavis.edu>, David H Walker <dhwalker@ucdavis.edu>
Subject:     Quick notes from our wiki strategy meeting on Wednesday
Date:     Fri, 6 Mar 2009 17:10:02 -0800

Everyone,

Here are some quick (and largely random) notes from our meeting on Wednesday.  Please correct my mistakes.

General Issues

  • It appears that there's a little JSR 170 activity related to Confluence (a plugin), but nothing major.
  • Wikis are only one form of collaboration tool.  There are also blogs and content management systems.  What do we really want?  The primary interest in the community seems to be with collaborative content creation (wiki) and web site creation (content management).  Since there is already a content management project on campus, we'll focus on a wiki strategy.
  • Currently, SmartSite is entirely Sakai-based.  There is interest in the Sakai community to create better collaboration tools, but there is not a good Sakai-based wiki now, and one doesn't seem to be on the horizon for the next couple of years, at least.  (It appears to be waiting for JSR 170 repository adoption to occur first, since JSR 170 handles a number of wiki repository issues.)

Issues related to adding a better wiki to SmartSite

  • If we want a better wiki for SmartSite, we'll need a strategy for SmartSite tools that are not Sakai-based.  Integration of user and group management is probably the primary area that would need to be addressed.
  • It's our SmartSite policy to allow any user to create a site, but it's our Confluence policy is that new spaces (roughly equivalent to SmartSite's sites) need to be requested.  We would need to resolve that difference in policy, if we were going to integrate the two.
  • It's not clear that Confluence is our best choice for a wiki.  We'd want to do a little looking around at MediaWiki and others.
  • I said I would write a vision for how this might all fit together.  I'll try to do that next week.

I've cc'd Kathy to find an hour for us to meet in a couple of weeks to continue the discussion.

David