Is Wikitecture Possible in Second Life?
Architecture Island, from SL resident Keystone Bouchard’s Flickr stream
Regular readers are aware that I often pine for a 3D wiki for the virtual world of Second Life, something akin to the one Hiro Pendragon made some time ago. I’d love to see an object that many people could modify in some way, which could be rolled back to earlier versions or have individual modifications ratified somehow by the group. Turns out I’m not the only one. I recently noticed an interesting discussion on The ARCH, an excellent blog on virtual architecture, about the possibilities for collaborative design mechanisms in Second Life (complete with transcript). Keystone Bouchard, who runs The ARCH, puts the problem nicely: “Is true Wikitecture and collaborative asynchronous design possible in Second Life? If so, what kinds of tools, scripts and rules might be necessary? Some exciting ideas are already beginning to surface.”
The transcript is a bit too long for me to read all the way through at the moment, but some interesting ideas appear there. A couple of my favorite come from a resident named Theory Shaw:
[19:01] Theory Shaw: - Instead of having one incarnation of a build at any one time and space, provide individual ’shards’ (dimensions in a sense) that allow individuals in the community to collect and modify the objects from the shards of other contributors. These individual shards can in turn be ranked by the Wiki community to determine what general design direction the community as a whole is leaning toward.
[19:18] Theory Shaw: By making the source code (model) for the software (city) available to all, any programmer (designer) can modify it to better suit their needs and redistribute the improved version to others users. By working together, a community of both users (citizens) and developers (designers) can improve the functionality and quality of the software (city). Filtered through the lens of the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ the best ideas will eventually float to the top.
I’d love to extend this discussion via 3pointD. Keystone’s questions are excellent ones:
• Is true Wikitecture and collaborative asynchronous design possible in Second Life?
• If so, what kinds of tools, scripts and rules might be necessary?
Any ideas? Is there anyone out there who’d be interested in attending another 3pointD Think Tank on this subject? My goal would be to get the original participants in the ARCH discussion in touch with some coding geniuses and actually get a project for something like this off the ground. Let me know if you’re interested.
Feeds
A thinktank on this topic could not come at a better time, as I am laying down the ogoglio space hosting platform’s build APIs. If we can come up with a good set of design criteria for a 3D wiki then I can use them to inform that work.
Here is my summary of 3D wiki characteristics mentioned in the wikitecture group chat log:
Versioning
- history
- revert
- offline backups
- ‘hyperooms’?, shards
Sharing
- default open
- vandalism isn’t fatal
- lock when repeatedly vandalized
- 3D warehouse/marketplace
Communicaton
- proposals, vetting
- ref. patch submission to code repo
- talk pages
- feedback: traffic, thumbs up/down, comments (by object, by view)
- leadership: de facto or de jure
What’s missing?
A thinktank would be very timely, and I would love to participate! Obviously the potential of successfully implementing a working methdology around collaborative design and review processes has far reaching potential across many disciplines. It certainly adds a layer of value Second Life as a professional tool that is not yet possible (to this degree) with any other application.
Yes, it is possible.
That is all.
p.s. send money
How much?
I would also be very interested in participating in this
I think this is a typical fallicy of the whole Wikiality. What happens is that instead of any “wisdom of crowds,” a couple strong-minded individuals, or those with the time to wrestle with balky SL and its pesky permissions system, get to dictate taste, yet hide behind the screen of “crowd wisdom”. It would be better if they just exercised editorial control, or asserted individual vision, and were done with it.
There’s a deep fallacy in Wikiality promoters which is that the constant plurality of assertive subjectivities creates a collective objectivity that suits all because they’ve “collaborated” or “participated” or “collected from shards”. But…what if somebody or some group doesn’t like it? Then they’re told to simply break off the the Wikiality and go form a competing Wikiality — it’s always Balkanization. There’s never a real consensus built out of the ability to concede or manage or accommodate consent. There’s always the heavy hand of majoritarian rule.
Perhaps in a small, tightly-knit group of likeminded with the same aesthetic, this might work.
Basically, what’s great about this idea isn’t the wiki or any of the wikinista ideology, but just that Keystone has assembled people interested in architecture on an island to noodle around and talk to each other and share ideas.
Trevor’s flippant tekkie ideology is also troublesome. Vandalism isn’t fatal? Says who? And are we do completely word-salad away the meaning of vandalism? Are we supposed to endless deconstruct in the name of creativity and hide the fact that it’s destructive and not constructive?
I’m also leery mind-maps and conveyor belts set up with toggle swithces that say yes/no, thumbs up/thumbs down as if group cooperation is merely a series of switches — switches that of course the master programmers take great delight in programming.
I also have a basic question for Keystone — when Shaun Altman and others even before him (me) tried to get group building going, it also hung up on the very basic problem of permissions. How have you handled this? Or are you not attempting to make the objects accessible by any/all in the group? How do you police texture perming?
I think I’ll get “flippant tekkie ideology” branded on my butt.
Just keep sending it until we have a 3d wiki.
Maybe a mix of OpenSim sandbox / live sim in sl / a mysql database for revision history and a libsl bot for pushing changes to the live sim.
>I think I’ll get “flippant tekkie ideology” branded on my butt.
Please do, Trevor, and then you, and everyone who looks at your butt, can contemplate what the phrase “vandalism isn’t fatal” means to culture. It will be a public service.
[…] Vervain - Crescendo Design 3pointD and Studio Wikitecture Saturday February 24th 2007, 6:26 am Filed under: wikitecture, studio wikitecture, architecturalresources, virtual architecture, second life, architecture Mark Wallace of 3pointD asks in a recent post: “Is there anyone out there who’d be interested in attending another 3pointD Think Tank on this subject (wikitecture)? My goal would be to get the original participants in the ARCH discussion in touch with some coding geniuses and actually get a project for something like this off the ground. Let me know if you’re interested.” […]
More collaboration efforts in Second Life…
3pointD has an interesting entry regarding an architecture-oriented collaboration with Wiki-style open editing mechanisms. It’s theory at this point, but I think the efforts and goals of this project are not entirely orthogonal to the collaborative en…