Citizendium Blog

I’ve just posted a major new announcement on the Citizendium-L mailing list. It’s just plans, and we won’t do press releases about plans.

Here are the highlights, divided into governance and content changes.

Governance changes: we’re going to start enforcing the separation of powers (e.g., constables cannot be on the Editorial Council); I’m going to spend less time on day-to-day controversies; I will have a “veto power” over Editorial Council and Constabulary decisions; the role of the Editor-in-Chief is otherwise clarified; the Executive Committee will be starting up a new regular voice meeting; if the Editorial Council agrees, we will allow all members to exercise nearly the same authority the Chair has; authors will join the Council; we’re going to pursue a cool new initiative called the Big Invite; we are going to establish a Judicial Board independent of the Constabulary; the Constabulary will regularize its rule-making process; I’m going to start recruiting, outside the CZ fold, for the CZ Advisory Board, which will approve the Citizendium Charter and select the Board of Directors of the Citizendium Foundation; we’re going to get a Personnel Manager on board (if possible); and we’re going to actually have a “job listings” board for volunteer positions.

Content changes. We’re going to start a whole passel of new subprojects, devoted to: annotated Web links; annotated (non-Web) bibliographies; categories (subtopics, supertopics, related topics); catalogs (almanac-type information in tabular form; see e.g. [[catalog of religions]]); galleries; expert (curated) articles with bylines; debate guides; and news guides. These are going to live on subpages of main namespace articles, with links to each of the subproject pages at the top right of all CZ articles. In time, the software is going to have to be changed, and the subproject pages will be linked from a third column. For these subprojects, we’re going to look for project coordinators. In addition, we’re going to be doing some more “Big” initiatives. We’re going to start asking editors to rate articles on various measures, using an expanded Article Checklist, and we’re also going to delete all (or most) “External Articles.”

All this is going to take a lot of work, but I’m putting my gloves on and getting to work.

Here’s the introductory section.

Dear everyone,

I’m writing to announce a set of major new initiatives and changes to the project. Call it Citizendium 2.0. In the coming months, I wish to radically expand the scope of CZ and, at the same time, change the way that the project is managed — and the way I personally work on the Citizendium.

For this, I am going to need your help this summer. I’m going to need a lot of help. If you pitch in, though, I can guarantee that we are going to accomplish a lot of very exciting things. I am constantly in awe of what self-starting volunteers can accomplish. But I am also aware that I’ve got to take the lead on a lot of things, or it just won’t get done. So I’m committing myself to you, here and now, to work very hard on making these things happen.

This mail is very long, but for anyone who cares about the project, very important to read. You could think of it more as a project planning document than a letter, but I’m presenting it in the form of a letter because I want to make it very clear that this is my own view, and that I encourage dialogue about what I have to say.

I have interspersed links to Forum pages where we can discuss the various plans and proposals. As we approach implementation (in the various ways in which implementation can be achieved), I will be reminding you of the issues so that we can have plenty of feedback.

We have grown considerably from the first few months, and I believe we have reached a level of membership and activity that makes many new things possible. Moreover, as I’ll explain, everyday responsibilities that I have been trying to manage personally must be handed off to trusted and qualified individuals. Also, I pledged last September that in six to twelve months, a Board of Advisers would be adopting a Citizendium Charter that would formalize the governance of the project. So we are running up against my promise’s deadline.

What brought all this on? Mainly, time away from the project in San Francisco — that’s where I started writing this, so it’s been a few weeks in preparation! Simply time and distance, which has given me perspective, as well as (oddly enough) my re-reading of the time-management book Getting Things Done as well as a tiny piece of advice from my colleague Peter Magnusson. Peter said, basically, “Larry, you’re the boss now — do what you think needs to be done while you can.” That struck me as right; there’s just a lot of stuff that ain’t going to happen if I don’t get behind it, and it might only get harder even for me to do in the future. I’ve also come to the view that we have learned a great deal about how CZ works. It is now time to use what we’ve learned, and boldly make some changes and additions that will make the project better. But mostly, as you’ll see, I’m just following through on vague hints and promises already made.

Friends might caution me against trying to do too much all at once, but I think that bold and sweeping new initiatives are sometimes the only way to get certain things done and to generate the excitement and shared understanding that a truly significant change is indeed underway. And I think I have not, in the last few months, always provided the sort of proactive leadership that the project needs if it is to fulfill its maximum potential.

In coming weeks, to help make these plans a reality, I will also be working a great deal on policy matters with the Executive Committee, the Editorial Council, the Constabulary, many different individuals, and of course the community as a whole. I will be adding much material to, and asking for community feedback on, the Policy Outline. It will be not so much changed as expanded and clarified.

Therefore, here is a broad plan for the initiatives that I intend to spearhead, starting immediately. Don’t be surprised if, in July and August, these changes start coming one after another; that’s my hope, anyway. I intend to pursue these goals with gusto.

More

UPDATE: Ireland in 27 hours. 

Now for a little something off-topic.

Let’s face it, if you’re a map lover like me, Google Maps is just friggin’ cool.  Here’s the route from NYC to SF.  But now, let’s suppose you want to stay off highways.  They now let you check an “Avoid highways” box, and then you get this route.  How long would it have taken you to plot that out?  Not only is it instantly plotted, you can now instantly learn that the highway-free route is 25 hours longer?  I used to meticulously calculate that sort of thing by hand.

(Also, that’s 25 hours saved thanks to our glorious Interstate Highway system, an even greater invention than Google Maps.)

What is even cooler is the fact that you can how drag and drop routes.  Given points A and C, you can select any point B and construct the fastest route ABC.  You can add as many intermediate points as you like, too.  Maybe you’d like to try the southern route from NYC to SF?  And you can drag and drop all points as much as you like — and as you do so, it instantly remaps the route, giving you the mileage and timing in a little pop-up.

I’ve been checking that my usual routes to my usual destinations are the fastest.  They are. 

What I predict next: the fastest route (through town) given current traffic conditions.  They’re already tracking traffic, so it’s only a matter of a crunching a few databases.

It came out in print a few months ago, but I just noticed that The Focus has just posted my essay “Education 2.0″ online.

Here’s the whole thing.

IN THE LAST TEN YEARS OR SO, the Internet has deeply disrupted many industries. Music downloading sites have revolutionized the music industry and shuttered many physical stores. eBay and Amazon.com and other online retailers have changed the way we shop, especially for harder-to-find items. Free news content online, and aggregators such as Google News, have threatened the profitability of traditional news media. Wikipedia and the new Citizendium have the full attention of reference publishers. The financial industry has been overrun by do-it-yourselfism. The real estate industry is wondering how to respond to the levelling influence of cheap online housing listings, such as Craigslist. And these are only a few examples; virtually no industry has been left untouched by this Internet revolution.

Why has the Internet been so broadly disruptive? Consider what the Internet is: a giant digital network. Much information that was previously available only in a “hard copy” is now instantly available over this nearly universal network. That fact alone is enough to explain why free news content online has threatened the profits of the news industry.

Organizing education online

This giant network makes information dissemination not only easier, but also decentralized. Moreover, it has fostered a new kind of social organization, namely, social interaction that is asynchronous, at-a-distance, and dependent upon decisions made by sovereign individuals rather than a top-down hierarchy. This new kind of social organization describes such startling new developments as Wikipedia and Craigslist, and “Web 2.0” social networks generally.

I want to consider the impact the Internet might be expected to have on the future of one industry in particular: education. The Internet has the potential to bring changes to education on the same scale as the changes to other industries; but most students are still attending brick-and-mortar schools as they did one hundred years ago. This is unlikely to change. I believe an Internet revolution in education would not take the form of enhanced distance education; but while education may not be delivered online for many more students, it can be organized online. And as I want to argue, that is where the really exciting possibilities lie.

Imagine that education were not delivered but organized and managed in a way that were fully digitized, decentralized, self-directed, asynchronous, and at-a-distance. It is not hard to imagine a digital, decentralized degree-granting institution that “lives” primarily on the Internet, and organizes teachers and students to meet face-to-face. Such an institution need not offer courses, pay teachers, or collect tuition from students at all, but could act merely as a middleman and record transactions.

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