Out of the void
A month ago, Citizendium was just an idea. Now it’s a pilot and soon it will be big enough to leave the nest: to stretch its wings and battle with the wild currents of public opinion and criticism. Soon after Larry began sharing and developing his ideas for Citizendium on the mailing lists, it became clear that some ideas needed a proof of concept so that we might all better understand what was going on and where that may lead us, intellectually and technically. Hence the pilot was conceived.
As the dim lightbulb came on in my head, I began to contribute to the discussions. I’ve been keen to see the project succeed at applying the positive aspects of collaborative knowledge development while avoiding some of the problems seen at Wikipedia. Then, given my own technical background, I’ve tried to convey a sense of the technical as both the servant and a lever available to such an enterprise. And so in my weakness, I find myself as a member ot the Citizendium Technical Focus Group.
The Technical Focus Group comprises Jason Potkanski, Greg Sabino Mullane and me Peter Hitchmough. Our first real challenge has been to apply the electrodes to the dead body of a server and build an Internet-ready pilot environment. Our second challenge is in keeping it running. We have a private development site built on GForge where we store source code, build the site and track bugs. As you can imagine we are kept busy.
Our hot issues are: managing the data imported from Wikipedia, keeping good performance, looking at immediate expansion plans and handling user queries. If you are a Citizendium user we look forward to serving you. If not, why not consider signing up? See the Call For Applications.