Internet think tank(s)

Pages/links

Pages 'owned' by people or groups, not just informally and de facto as now, but supported in software? Perhaps joining such an edit clique implies that you can't attribute anything to yourself, but only to "a member of the group", or maybe that only members can see who wrote what, but can't talk about that to outsiders

Ownership permissions could be much like unix file system. (An example of such a system is coWiki. Maybe we could make them very much so, such that the creator can alter the permissions of his page, transfer ownership, etc, and (as in ls) only group rights or authorship is visible in the directory. See [Protected_pages_considered_harmful Protected pages considered harmful] - focus on "who can edit" and "what can we or should we know about who edits" not on "who owns" or "who is blamed f what is here"

Try to ensure the think tank doesn't became just a bunch of short and incoherent blurbs, but rather each argument is made thoroughly along with all it's evidence and substantiation.

-pages are dynamically scored according to visits and references, using probability theory. (emergence of Markov Chains, find where people go next, and where they come from, e.g. what searches, in-links, etc). Number of those who have read is identified

-dynamic("emergent") links are self-organized by way of inducing pathways from the users' movements. These could be put, for instance, at the top of each page as "most common routes here"

So I spent today attacking this problem. I'm sure there are other ways to do this than I came up with, and let's discuss them under the title "emergent optimization" (i think it's more appropriate than 'self-organization', which refers more to Per Bak's self-organized criticality, which is a natural process as opposed to an artificial process). i'll be posting my algorithm there, but first i'll give other people time to post the current methods if there are any, and their ideas. Mine might not be the most practical or appropriate. (thou i think it's pretty interesting).

-New pages are somehow specially identified, and readership per unit of age is defined.

-ability to link directly to other wikis, such as wikipedia, wikimedia, Disinfopedia (seeing propaganda), Consumerium (moral purchasing), CivicActions (electoral reform and electronic democracy), and others with some unique focus group or mission, which are already acting as think tank type resources, which are open to public anonymous input, and which would benefit from more attention from other wiki users.

Interface

Start from a simple ideology of Wikitax and then work forward to

-forums integrated into it, and perhaps live chat, and, of course, email.

-polling; voting mechanism that can be easily deployed in-context.

-in-person/"normal" think-tank sessions, recorded, typed, and integrated into the online think tank(s). and in the longer term, increasingly direct cooperation.

-resource/research portals for debates

-newsgroups? (internal, e.g. Wikipedia mailing list archives, or external?)

Graphic Interface

Something "synaptic" using Macromedia Flash? Two or more screens? High resolution audio? VR goggles? Pressure-sensitive drawing tablets? Most importantly, game devices like joysticks, steering wheels, game controllers? Why should trackball/mouse and keyboard be the way we interact with complex stuff like Wikipedia? Can we work on this as part of Wikipedia4? How can it help address ongoing conceptual concerns li those in the board manual? Help recruit the ideal Wikipedia board? How can it help us look not only at narrow concerns but the evolution of the work of Wikimedia as a whole? Can we expand the overall appeal of the Wikis by user interface design alone?

I developed this concept a bit at WholeEarthWiki. ~~_\Bird/~~

Intent

None, seemingly. More technology in search of an application? Any ideas?

Wo ho ho... The big D-word: en:decentralization. Towards a more responsive global power structure through information emergence via modern media technologies.

English, please? For example, and this is the supreme example: government. I imagine that there will be a large amount of activity in the political areas. The government has think tanks that they use quite often, but those think thanks are directed by the agenda of the administration, and are essentially private think tanks. That kind of information isolation can not be healthy. Wouldn't it make more sense to have a public think tank, where academians and the like, from all over the world, can contribute and debate? From this, the public can become more politically sophisticated and the government would have to be more responsive to this now organized(self-organized) discussion - and perhaps -- and this is the kicker -- some politicians might refer to it directly. Ofcourse, all this assumes that the word gets out; that the think tanks are well-advertised and become competitive with the contemporary institutions.

But in any case, as the French have said, l'art pour l'art; art for art's sake. Discussion for the sake of discussion; philosophy for the sake of love. What is the utility of thinking? What a grand question, let me think about that...

The intent, ofcourse, is multi-faceted, but in general it's of a cybernetic nature. That is, in general it enables the most fundamental resource known to man: the human mind. The value of this is that we don't know what it will create, we could never guess what it will create. But we know one thing: that it will create: In the fields of whatever is discussed, through the free exchange of information, it will enable technological, sociological, and scientific progress. The intent is to enable communities of dreamers, thinkers, scholars, philosophers, normal people, and help them help each-other figure out how to put their hands in their heads.

Ok, its true anarchy. We all write the story here.