PlanetMath Administration (Main Document)

PlanetMath Administration (Main Document)

PlanetMath

Administration (Main Document)

Administration of PlanetMath

February 9, 2018

Contents:

1

About this document (jac)

1.1

Formatting Convention (Wkbj79, jac)

1.2

References to Other Administrative Documents (jac)

2

Administration (jac)

2.1

An Administrative Matrix (jac)

3

Roles of PlanetMath participants (jac)

3.1

Role of the President

3.2

Role of the Board of Directors

3.3

Role of Site Administrators

3.4

Generic Roles of Community Members

3.5

Community Initiatives

3.6

Proposals for change (jac)

3.7

Comments on Administration (Wkbj79)

4

Business (jac)

4.1

Basic Data on PlanetMath as a Business

4.2

Human Resources in a Mostly-Volunteer Organization

4.3

How to employ people in a non-profit organization (alozano)

5

Economics (jac)

5.1

Free/Libre/Open {Software, Content} Business Models

5.2

Semantics of Cash Flow

5.3

Ways to Make Money

6

Governance (jac)

6.1

Bylaws (jac)

6.2

Board of Directors (jac)

6.3

Member Rights (Wkbj79)

7

Processing Results of Words on Fire Consultation (jac)

7.1

Mission (quoted form WOF)

7.2

Work Plan

8

Technology (jac)

8.1

Current Technology

8.1.1

Noosphere

8.1.2

LaTeX

8.1.3

latex2html

8.1.4

Wiki

8.2

Current Technological Efforts

8.2.1

Coding

8.2.2

System Administration

8.3

Ideas for Technological Changes

8.3.1

Issues

8.3.2

Proposals

1

About this document (jac)

I wrote this document to address what I think is an overwhelming need
for improved communication among PlanetMath participants about
activities, goals, and resources. It is early in its life cycle;
however, I hope it can serve a useful organizational role as it
develops. Over the course of the next couple of months, I intend to
flesh it out with many additional details on goings-on around
PlanetMath, and supplement it with links to other documents of
administrative

interest

. At the same time, I have made the document
world-editable, so that other PlanetMath users can add details or if
necessary make corrections directly.

1.1

Formatting Convention (Wkbj79, jac)

In order to make it clear who said what, the following convention is
used: In any

section

or subsection, the author(s) of that section will
put their username in parentheses. Unsigned subsections of a signed
section should be assumed to have been created by the main section’s
main author. Contributing authors should feel free to modify existing
sections, although major thematic changes should certainly be signed
so that everyone knows roughly who said what.

1.2

References to Other Administrative Documents (jac)

This document will be a high-level map, and other documents
will go into detail on specific areas. In general references
to these documents will appear in the text, with URLs in footnotes.
However, here is a short list of several documents that are
either especially important or that just haven’t been integrated
into the text here in the manner I described.

1.

PM Community Guidelines

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=112

2.

PM Content Committee

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=113

3.

PM Member Rights

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=116

4.

PM Point System

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=114

5.

PM Task List

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=118

2

Administration (jac)

We should try to understand the terms better. When I say
“administration”, really you could just think of a live updating map
of what is going on in the project, but it should be both as detailed
and as foldable as any

individual

wants, and capable of being viewed
from on at least as many different sides as there are viewers.

In other words, this is what I have been talking about with the
scholium system or “Arxana” all along

1

1

URL:

http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/A_scholium-based_document_model

– except that it is not just some abstract construction – the
administrative map should of course be filled with actual details such
as who is doing what and who is responsible for what, so that if
anyone has a question about the project, either they will find an
answer on the map, or they will find a good place to stick their
question to get it answered.

Now despite my optimism that some version of Arxana will be available
and consumable by the end of the summer, people have administered
projects for millennia without it, and I think it would be very apt of
us to look around for some older technology which we can use to build
our administrative map.

I would like to suggest a simple latex file saved as a PlanetMath
collaboration. Sections can be cut and added, content can be moved
around or changed, questions can be inserted. Additional
collaboration documents can supplement this one.

Thus, over the last few paragraphs I have done more than just make an
abstract suggestion – I have kicked off an actual solution. Let me
continue that briefly before I get on to my second question.

2.1

An Administrative Matrix (jac)

One of the key pieces of data about an organization is its

tasklist

. The tasklist is populated with tasks, which can be
defined broadly or finely, and which can be finite or ongoing.
Furthermore, each task can have subtasks, and this progession can
continue, down through the minutæ of meticulous Fordism, or up into
the ætherial realms of an organizational Mission.

But, we need not, at any given point in time, be so detailed.
However, the tasklist itself should be complemented by some basic

information

about the tasks involved. For example, a task might be
annotated with a description of its

participants

, its

consumers

(or “

stakeholders

”), its

schedule

, and its

budget

(or “

requirements

”). Other suchlike fields can
be added as interest and expediency indicate.

Having described what I mean by an

administrative matrix

, I
will now construct the beginnings of such a matrix for PlanetMath, as
an example (see Table

1

). Since I do not know enough about
all the tasks or all the details of all the tasks going on at
PlanetMath, this will not be particularly detailed. I will focus on
tasks that I know something about, i.e., things I have been working on
or following.

Please feel free to add or update with details on the tasks you have
been working on, if you like. Mainly I am posting this for
discussion: however, I would like to see a more industrial-strength
version of this sort of thing put into play on PlanetMath soon.

label

description

schedule

requirements

Arxana

Make browser and interactive store, retrieve, display, edit features.
Try to get clusions and occlusions working.

Maybe add a few more tiny things now, but
it seems like a higher priority to get elephant
and noosphere stuff worked out first.

Internally, this should follow our Elephant storage
and query design; externally, it should follow the
noosphere (re)design.

SLIME

Can SLIME connect to a MMTN server?
Can we once again use SLIME to connect to a

regular

server?

Low priority to connect to MMTN.
Get regular remote connection back up soon.

Long-term goal may depend on getting MMTN set up properly.
Short-term may depend on help from Nick Thomas?

MMTN

Implement proper daemon system.
Desocket for local connections (?).
Write a Lisp client.

Cf. chat client “erc” soon to see how it connects to Emacs.

Understand the current system.
Come up with trial application.

Elephant

Chalk out

ontology

and seach interface well-suited to our apps.
Locking and permissions.

Start right away listing desiderata.

Match our desiderata to the elephant docs.
Help from Ian Eslick and pals as needed.

aserve

Start with interactive web interface to elephant.

Perhaps get a REPL soon, as a demo?

Some time with the docs if we want to know what all this
thing can do.

noosphere rewrite

Survey to find featureset and reusable modules.

Our rewrite must be done by August 20 for GSoC review.

Would be good to talk more with APK as this develops.
Would be good to have a central place to do the
design and fill in pieces of code as they appear.

sys. admin.

Persist configs and work files.
Make laptops usably useful.

ASAP.

Internet

connection. Superuser passwords. Physical
access to the

computers

in question.

math/tech talk

Prepare (and give) 15 minute talk on PM and HDM for Mathfest.
Use a holistic perspective and try to convey mathematical
connections/relevance.

Must be finished by the beginning of August. May give
a variant talk around August 8?

Need a place to develop. Feedback from Ray, Aaron, others.
Perhaps some background reading/references.

“main” for PM

Keep maintaining this document.
Survey various tasks that other PM people are
working on, and provide annotated index here.

So far this is a “whenever I want to do it”
thing. But interestingly, or ironically, this
sort of matrix/map (especially in an improved format)
would be the sort of thing that would be good to
update everyday.

For this to work

extremely

well,
it should be networked into people’s methods for
participation, and have many participants.

content committee

This is Chi, Alvaro, Ray, et al’s thing.
I’ll want to watch and record what they
are doing, or involve them directly in a
suitable administrative approach to this
effort.

Would be nice to be updated of changes/progess,
and act on them to have them reflected right
away.

Some degree of cooperation from other the
content committee’s participants will be necessary.

networking

Figure out possible places to get

support

for our efforts.

Want to have a number of good options
lined up by the end of the summer.
Should build a more detailed schedule/plan
of action.

Phone (check); travel budget for West Coast trip;
some sort of sanction from PM to act as its
representative.

fundraising

Figure out and share value

propositions

with possible
funders. (This is in some sense a

projection

of “networking”.
Note that by building PM’s budget, our efforts may be better
supported at PM; but this is not the only approach worth pursuing.)

Want to have a number of good options
lined up by the end of the summer. (Hopefully
enough of a sample to see if our approaches are
going to pan out.)

Any individual working on this will need a PM sanction.
Other than that, collectively we will want a coordinated plan.

FEM

Make a print version of the PM encyclopedia.
Ideally it would be rebuilt frequently.

This project has been stalled for a long time:
it would be nice to revive it this summer, but
so far I don’t know of a specific plan or timeline.
First goal would be to make one

A major requirement that we noticed, but were not
able to institute, was a system for unified notation
among articles included in the print

collection

.
There are various other technical steps that we would
want to make this work well.

Table 1:

An example of an administrative matrix

Note that the format used here is pretty far from ideal, certainly
from the point of data entry (since it would be nice to just be able
to zoom in on the tasks and fields that one is particularly interested
in updating), and also, at least in some senses, from the point of
view of display (since it would be nice to be able to fold certain
rows and columns out of the way).

One of the makes this effort somewhat difficult is that different
labels (e.g. “noosphere”) may mean different things to different
people, so there is, at least at first, some degree of collision
between points of view on what a given task is about. I think the
ambiguity can be resolved with enough creative relabeling.

Another more complicated way to resolve this sort of conflict would be
to give each person their own matrix where they would be free to use
whatever labels they like. But it would take a lot of work to
reconcile this approach with the

properties

of “being an
administration” as I have defined them above.

3

Roles of PlanetMath participants (jac)

A quick mental check indicates that we have at least these broad
categories of participants:

•

President

•

Board Members

•

Site “Admins”

•

Content Contributors

•

Interns

•

Consultants

•

Bounty Hunters

In the subsections that follow, I will discuss some of the roles taken
on by people in these categories – I do not assert that this
discussion is in any way “

complete

” – rather I’ll just say, we can
come back and add details as appropriate, at any time.

3.1

Role of the President

•

Almost every web-related issue gets routed through Aaron.

•

Almost every financial issue gets routed through Aaron.

•

Most practical “beaurocratic” decisions are made by Aaron.

•

Many key “social networking” issues are routed only through Aaron.

3.2

Role of the Board of Directors

•

Less frequently, decisions are made by members of the board.

•

Given the fact that the board does not have public meetings very
often, the ability of general members of the community to oversee or
engage the board members

vanishes

to zero.

•

See the section below on Governance for more details.

3.3

Role of Site Administrators

•

There are some arcane and non-obvious rules and responsibilities
that devolve onto persons with so-called “admin” status on the
website: I do not know the

structure

of this continent, so I will
not say any more about it; it may be important for issues like those
that Chi has been talking about, may not be so important for the
actual business of “

running

the non-profit”, but who knows?

3.4

Generic Roles of Community Members

•

Obviously the most frequent role engaged in by community members
is developing mathematical content for the site. Currently most of
this content is in the Ecyclopedia, but discussion of math topics
in the forums also plays a significant role.

•

Media-wise, most “important” (at least, in the sense of being
at all “persistent” and “public”) conversations among the powers
that be get mapped through the cumbersome forum software deployed on
PlanetMath’s home page.

•

Other than that, there are various unofficial and more (or less,
in the case of the email list) transitory media

•

Various informal decisions and actions are taken by the
quote-unquote “powers that be” around PlanetMath, which include
myself and too many engaged PM contributors to list here – but note
that these powers are almost universally “unofficial” powers (all
binding decisions must go through Aaron or, possibly, the board).

3.5

Community Initiatives

•

content committee (otherwise known as “community guidelines”; I don’t
know what the latest perspective is, but see footnote for reference to
one writeup

2

2

URL:

http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/Community_Guidelines

)

•

maintaining this administrative document

•

fundraising and other outreach efforts

•

coordinating the PlanetMath membership situation (cf. section on
Governance below)

•

…

3.6

Proposals for change (jac)

•

Well, I think that Aaron’s current set of responsibilities made
handleable by more people. Not because he has in any way “done a
bad job” – far from it – but because the rest of us have done
essentially nothing, due to the

existence

of an administrative
bottleneck that he just happens to mostly fill.

•

I would like to see somewhere an

official

record of the
things people are working on – including me. This could eventually
lead into either “job titles” or “volunteer roles” (such as they
have at

Wikipedia

), which I think would do quite a lot to give
PlanetMath more than one “official” public face.

•

Extending this (and this is something we have talked a lot about
but I think left sitting for a long time), I would like to see a
clear description of “members rights” – hopefully made with at
least some serious participation by members.

•

I think that many of the problems around PlanetMath – probably
most of the serious ones in my view – are properly administrative
in nature (according to my

definition

above: we lack a good map!).
But I think that this has repercussions for “morale” (among other
things). Participants who do not have any institutional authority
are not likely to do much in the way of outreach, for example – or
to be able to do much.

3.7

Comments on Administration (Wkbj79)

Please add additional subsections if you wish to make further comments
on what has been said in or about the section on Administration.

With regards to the first point in the second bulleted list above. It seems unfair that Aaron has had most of the burden placed on him.

As for jac’s “proposals for change”, why not add such an official
record to this document? [Done or at least begun: see “Community
Initiatives”. –jac] On a related note, information about the soon to be formed content committee is available in other collaborations and documents which are

similar

to this one.

4

Business (jac)

4.1

Basic Data on PlanetMath as a Business

•

The nature of the institution. We describe PlanetMath as being
“a non-profit”, “a commons-based peer

production

system”, and “a
community”. As the name indicates, “math” is the main focus.
(Although if we follow Marnita’s advice, we may build several
spin-off, partner, or child institutions.) At present, there is no

permanent

paid staff retained by the non-profit.

•

Legal status. The organization is (not without some technical
snafus, at least

potential

ones) a tax-exempt charity

based in
the

United States of America

; and the content and code is made
available

worldwide

under some “free” license or other.

•

Revenue streams. Subject to limitations placed on charity
organizations, PlanetMath can receive donations, have financial
sponsors, get federal and other grants, and sell a few things (but
not too many).

•

Work

product

. The content of the PM site (encyclopedia, forms)
and the code behind or adjacent to it (Noosphere,
NNexus

3

3

URL:

http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/NNexus

, Arxana,
etc.).

4.2

Human Resources in a Mostly-Volunteer Organization

(And, in particular, how to have them without upsetting any apple
carts.)

Experience indicates that paying someone for a service is not always a
good idea. A volunteer might find the idea of being payed to work
distasteful: “I’m doing this because I want to, man, not for

money

!”

The person speaking could be an ideologically motivated hippie or an
ideologically motivated millionaire, but in either case, offering to
pay them may seem like an attempt to rob them of their chance to give.

At the same time, many people do like – and most need – to be paid
for some form of work. Different payment schemes can be more or less
motivating for different people, in different

contexts

. I’ve known a
number of people who have gotten paid a flat hourly rate and who
happened to learn that they could get away with very little or no work
on the job. Certainly even for wage-laborers, money is not the sole
motivator. There is also something to be said for such things as
pride in one’s work, a sense of growth and achievement!

Which further highlights the fact that a “payment scheme” is not
going to answer all questions of personal motivation.

Speaking for myself, there are a number of different things I like to
do – but I might not be as motivated if I was compelled for some
reason to focus exclusively on one of these things. (At the same
time, complete dissipation wouldn’t work so well either.)

•

Payments for administrative work.

Since I might be get
into a payed arrangement with PlanetMath that includes
administrative work, I want to think about how to do this “right”
– for my own personal, subjective, reasons. However, other people
may get into similar relationships, so, it is also good to think
about suitably general ways to make payment for services work in
this community. (Cf. the section on Work Plan, below.)

•

Payments for coding work.

In a setting in which most
participants are not programmers, payments for coding may be the
only way to get a

sufficient

flow of code into the organization. At
the same time, I think the software projects associated with
PlanetMath should be very carefully administered, especially so that
knowledge transfer can make it possible for more participants to
become volunteer programmers.

4.3

How to employ people in a non-profit organization (alozano)

This section describes an ideal policy for hiring.

1.

First, an active board should be elected, that closely oversees the

operations

of the organization (the current board at PlanetMath is sadly
inactive in the community, except Aaron).

2.

Second, the board needs to explain (or somebody needs to explain to the
board) the position to be created, the duties, responsibilities, etc attached
to the position. It needs to be stated clearly how and why such position needs
to be created, and determine what is the salary (if a salary will be awarded).

3.

If a salary is to be awarded, the board (or whoever proposes the creation of a position) needs to guarantee that the salary will be sustainable within the current (and foreseeable) budget and finances of the organization.
Most importantly, since the organization is built in volunteer and
collaborative efforts, it needs to be stated and explained the need of paying
for such position and why the duties cannot be fulfilled by the volunteer body.
The board also needs to determine the

minimum

necessary qualifications for an
applicant to be eligible for such position.

4.

The position needs to be approved by the board.

5.

Once and if the position is approved, an application process shall occur.
Since the company is a non-profit organization, the company needs to find the
person most suited to fulfill that role. As in the case of “code bounties”
the position should be made public, so everyone is informed about the job
opportunity. It is of the outmost importance that the organization hires the
person most qualified for the job.

6.

The position shall be advertised in and by all reasonable channels. In
particular, the board should advertise the position in channels where the most
desirable applicants may hear about the position.

7.

A reasonable period should be given for the position to be reasonably
advertised. Once the period elapses, the board will review the applications and
choose the best candidate available to fulfill the position.

5

Economics (jac)

Personally, I am hopeful, that in a time when “Y-Combinator” is
becoming a household word (see Newsweek Magazine, May 21 2007), there

is

money out there to support even some of our most outrageous
schemes.

But in this case, I think good things do not come to those who wait –
they come to those who ask. And to ask a good question, you need a
good formulation of the question, hopefully together with an
illustrative example, model, or sketch.

5.1

Free/Libre/Open {Software, Content} Business Models

In case you are getting the name of this section is a bit awkward, I
agree! I think people in the world of Free/Libre/Open Source Software
and content (acronym: FLOSS) have not found very clear ways to talk
about the economics side of what they do.

At the same time, there is at least one “economicsy” term that is in
use to talk about the way people

produce

this stuff. The term
is “Commons-Based Peer Production” (acronym: CBPP). The connection
to economics is the suggestion that, for participants, their voluntary
contribution to the commons is a

rational

behavior.

Whatever else the

analysis

behind this term may get into, I don’t
think it has much to say about the ways in which commons-based systems
relate economically to other systems.

I would like to simplify matters a great deal and point out that
frequently the things that these systems are generating have

public good-like

aspects from the point of view of agents
outside of the system.

This is important, since it says something about how money might be
expected to change hands to support the projects. Specifically,
public goods tend to be paid for, and regulated, by governmental
bodies.

It would be great to get into a further analysis, but for now I am
just going to list a few words of wisdom on the topic of FLOSS
business.

•

“You can’t sell something you’re giving away for free.”

•

“The best way to make money related to free content or
software is to sell services.”

•

“There are no

restrictions

on selling copies of free
content or software.”

– this is relevant to, e.g., the FEM, if we
ever get that together. (However, there may in fact be some
restrictions coming from our legal status as a charity
organization.)

5.2

Semantics of Cash Flow

(This might also be called the Cash Flow of

Semantics

. I haven’t
gotten all the details worked out yet.)

These “brainstorms” are a tentative sketch, based on my thinking
about Arxana. For some further thoughts along these lines, see my
essay on political applications of the scholium system

4

4

URL:

http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/HomePage/social%2c_political%2c_Ωand_economic_scholium_systems

.

•

Every connection, every link, is an arbitrage opportunity. The
moment I realized that, I was pretty excited – since a lot of what
I think about is links. This is why Google Answers worked (for a
while) – but since they stopped working, we have to be careful.
Not every arbitrage opportunity is “viable” and one can fail to
make money for myriad reasons, whereas one must wait until the check
clears to actually make any money (and, OK, even then, there are
expenses to worry about!).

•

By the time a link has been made, you might say that the
arbitrage opportunity is already gone – but despite that fact, a
new link may open up a whole “plane” of new arbitrage
opportunities in the form of potential links, i.e. annotations,
running

perpendicular

to it.

5.3

Ways to Make Money

•

One idea is to get people to pay us to customize Noosphere; but
an easy complaint is that we have not been able to pay to customize
Noosphere in the

directions

we want. The synthesis is to seek
synergistic relationships – customizing Noosphere in directions we
want, and having someone else pay us to do that!

•

There are a number of similar ideas related to “other” or
“next-generation” software systems we have been discussing
(Arxana,
CodeMarket

5

5

URL:

http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/Code_Market

).
Given that a number of our proposals fall outside of PlanetMath
proper, I think that we would do well to put together an
“über-administration” that covers all of the things that we
might want to share work on.

For any project or scheme for making money, I think it would be
worthwhile for us to come up with what’s called a
“value-proposition” (or, in some cases, an atlas of such
propositions).

6

Governance (jac)

6.1

Bylaws (jac)

The organization was incorporated with bylaws that
help it meet the legal requirements of incorporation

6

6

URL:

http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/PMByLaws

.
These bylaws were revised

7

7

URL:

http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/PlanetMath_ByLaws_2.0

.

(I’m not completely sure whether the second draft of the bylaws was
ever really “put into effect”.)

6.2

Board of Directors (jac)

The role of the board of directors is described in the bylaws
mentioned above. However, it is not completely clear that the board
has been following the protocol described in these bylaws.
This suggests that a review and possible a reconstitution of
the board and of the protocol is in order.

6.3

Member Rights (Wkbj79)

Members, especially new members, should be aware of what their rights are. One aspect that instantly comes to mind is freedom of mathematical

expression

. After all, PlanetMath is supposed to be “Math for the people, by the people.” A good example of freedom of mathematical expression is the

Smarandache

entries. A poll was taken on PlanetMath regarding such entries, and although most active members here have doubts about the mathematical

significance

of the Smarandache entries, the decision to keep them here was the right one. If this were a right
that were clearly expressed, then such a poll would not have had to be taken.

7

Processing Results of Words on Fire Consultation (jac)

The new info we got from Words on Fire

8

8

URL:

http://web.mac.com/marnita/iWeb/PMPlan/Tools.html

will certainly need to
be processed somewhat; and indeed, following through on this is certainly
an administrative

function

. At the same time, some of this content
may be worked into the other sections of the current document.

7.1

Mission (quoted form WOF)

PlanetMath.Org’s mission is to build and sustain an engaged
collaborative math community that is free and open for all individuals
with a serious interest in mathematics.

This is the jumping off point for your mission. Before you can fully
articulate what you do, you have to agree on this basic element of the
organization. Everything you do flows from and to your mission.

7.2

Work Plan

Some version of this is in the WOF documents, and Aaron is currently
putting together a working version this work plan.

8

Technology (jac)

8.1

Current Technology

8.1.1

Noosphere

PlanetMath runs Noosphere

9

9

URL:

http://aux.planetmath.org/noosphere/

. Understanding what
this means is in some sense an administrative problem – and may also
require some data archeology.

8.1.2

LaTeX

Noosphere is integrated with LaTeX.

8.1.3

latex2html

This is the current rendering engine for Noosphere.

8.1.4

Wiki

A goodly amount of project-coordinating information is available on
the AsteroidMeta wiki

10

10

URL:

http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/HomePage

, although
the wiki is not in very good shape and will hopefully be replaced soon.
(An effort to do this is underway thanks to effort thanks to the
Ghestalt team.)

8.2

Current Technological Efforts

8.2.1

Coding

Right now the primary coding efforts are related to work being done on
Google Summer of Code (see the wiki
page

11

11

URL:

http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/2007_PM_Summer _of_Code_Coordination

for basic coordination information, and the project proposals
submitted by our interns for further details

12

12

URL:

http://groups.google.com/group/planetmath/browse_thread/thread/532e776555dΩ%****␣40A05-PlanetMathAdministrationMainDocument.tex␣Line␣800␣****8884d?hl=en

).

•

NNexus is being extended

•

MUSN

13

13

URL:

http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/MUSN

is being developed

•

a ratings/reputation system is being developed

It would be nice if more communication was taking place between
people working on code and other members of the community.

8.2.2

System Administration

As mentioned above, this is currently routed almost completely through
Aaron.

8.3

Ideas for Technological Changes

There are many ideas for features around, including
a recent compilation in another collaboration document
on PlanetMath

14

14

URL:

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=82

and the huge ongoing feature request list from the wiki

15

15

URL:

http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/Feature_Requests

.

For the current document I am going to mention some of the ideas about
technology that I think are most related to “administration” in the
sense of this document.

8.3.1

Issues

This is a short

sequence

of points that develop a basic theme.

•

Keeping track of things.

On all of the different
task-areas mentioned here, it would be great to know who is doing
what. Similarly with mathematics items in the encyclopedia – which
items have been modified recently? Linked to recently? Viewed
recently? What, in general, is going on? – The question seems too
general, but in an administrative setting, we should be try to be
most aware of the things people are most concerned about. What are
the biggest annoyances? What are the best hopes we have for doing
anything about them? And so forth and so on.

•

The multidimensionality of information landscapes.

We
might be interested in integrating data from some field of
information, and we could put this data into some sort of aggregator
(see below). But then, when we have a collection of aggregators,
we’ll want to see which ones people are using. And if Alice
realizes no one is addressing issues of concern to her, then she’ll
have to think about which factors are relevant here. Why is does
she care about something other people aren’t interested in? Or
maybe other people are interested, and she is not using the right
set of aggregators. Or maybe the aggregators are not pointed at the
right dataflow. In either event, she will have to debug her own
thought processes to find the answers – which will require other
introspective data aggregators, and probably some field research.
As the cycle continues, there’s more and more information to manage!

•

Network effects.

Is any given task ever completed
perfectly? Or will there always be problems that come up? I
suppose it depends on how your point of view; I suppose my point of
view is that these actually aren’t very good questions. In the
physical theories, systems flow towards a lower energy state. They
do not get to their destinations instantaneously, nor do they travel
directly to the lowest energy state. To call this either
“perfect” or “problem-ridden” seems to stretch the

language

pretty thin. In human affairs, the things we call “problems” are
often opportunities for

greater

efficiency that we notice. A quite
general

challenge

lies in the fact that many interpersonal or
technological arrangements could be made more efficient in many
different ways. Any given event or class of events might have
numerous criticisms associated with it – indicating improvements
that can be made along many different

dimensions

. The first step in
facing this challenge is to find a way to get these critical remarks
“networked in”, so that they can be processed further and not
forgotten or neglected.

8.3.2

Proposals

•

The basic interface is might be some collection of data
“aggregators”. Just the other day I was looking at the PlanetMath
homepage, and thinking about how it would be nice to have it work
more customizable (like Mac desktops or Google homepages… or
GNU/Linux systems!), allowing users to select or even create new
widget-like tools to inspect the data flows they are most interested
in.

Title

PlanetMath Administration (Main Document)

Canonical

name

PlanetMathAdministrationMainDocument

Date of creation

2013-03-11 19:32:23

Last modified on

2013-03-11 19:32:23

Owner

jac (4316)

Last modified by

(0)

Numerical id

1

Author

jac (0)

Entry type

Definition

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