After many travails and gnashing of keyboards, The Flu Wiki Forum has a gorgeous new look. We have migrated from PMWiki to SoapBlox and in the process acquired some wonderful new capabilities, among them the option of having nested or threaded comments (you can keep the old forum comment organization if you want to, however) and full-fledged Diaries. First, let us say that the editorial "we" includes The Reveres in spirit but all the heavy lifting -- and we mean just about all of it -- was done by my wiki partners Dem, Melanie, pogge and SusanC (aka anon_22). It's a terrific job and everyone is grateful, The Reveres at the top of the list.
We are thrilled almost beyond words (obviously we're using words here so we can't in all honesty say beyond words) at the evolution of The Flu Wiki, which was only a vague idea a year ago May and blossomed forth in June 2005.
Our original notion for The Flu Wiki was that it would be a depository for the cointually evolving collective wisdom of the amazing amount of raw brain power accessible via the web. That brain power needed a mechanism to harvest it. The Flu Wiki was our mechanism. Here's a snapshot of the last 500 visitors from around the world:
The Reveres wrote the original Science pieces and a discussion forum was added almost as an after thought. Now The Flu Wiki really has two parts, the contents, links, original pieces and resources collected at the Wiki proper, and The Forum, an incredible bubbling vat of ideas, discussion, speculation and dialog. Dem, Melanie, SusanC moderate it and keep it on track while many, many others have become the driving forces. The Reveres never imagined The Forum and we can take no credit for its success. But we couldn't be more pleased.
If you always wanted to write blog posts about flu but don't want to start a blog, The Flu Wiki Forum is the place to be. You can write up your essays in the form of Diaries and the moderators and your fellow Flu Wikians will promote some to the Front Page and keep a list of still more that are recommended. You can comment on the diaries of others. There are all sorts of nice tools that can help you track your comments, the replies to them by others, your diaries and much more. It is quite elegant. If you are familiar with DailyKos, you will find it a familiar format.
This all sounds daunting, but like the original Forum and the Flu Wiki proper, you'll get used to it quickly. But you can't get used to it if you don't try it out and practice with the new form. Do it.
See you at The new Flu Wiki Forum.
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Ahem. At some point along the pathway, we found out there was a "structured information space" (the wiki proper, as Dem called it), and a "conversation space" (the forum).
It emerged, and we gave it names and thought about it. The wiki would be the blackboard where we were cooperatively creating timeless pages, for others to come and navigate. The forum would be the conversations around the blackboard.
In fact, the conversations found their way to the blackboard (here), and the creation of wikipages begged for some conversation so that cooks could discuss each ingredient and the whole structure of the dish (our first visible success was Water Supply, which started as a cooperative thinking exercise).
Now there are many initiatives with News ("internet surveillance", if we can name yet another emergent fact), video collection (the "sneeze" one may signal the turning of top-down "health education" on its head) ... too many to mention.
Ok, I'll mention one I'm interested in: translating Dr Woodson's Good Home Treatment (of pandemic influenza) into many languages. There are many ways to help. It's just 17 pages of simple (wisely simplified) text. Into maybe 20 languages or more. Tell others in your networks about it, please.
Now that I think about it, both the wiki, the forum, this blog, the whole internet - are just something we're co-creating in order to cooperate. It just sounds more difficult than it is, really. It's in our genes.
Thanks, Reveres and all!
lugon: There were so many to mention but you deserve special mention for your devotion to the idea of our collective and emergent wisdom. You were there early and have remained. Our thanks to you!