User talk:Infomaniac/Open letter to Organic Design

First of all, I want to say I'm very impressed with your site and the work you're doing. Beyond that, I find myself in very strong concordance with your ideas, philosophy, world view, and vision. I feel very strongly that p2p wiki and payment systems are urgently needed. I hope I will find an opportunity to contribute. In the meantime, I have a proposal that might help. As it's not clear to me how to email you folks, or whom I should contact, I'm contacting you in this form.

I'm an American now living in Brazil. I work with a small group of people in Brazil, the USA, and Norway and we are developing several projects that are now exclusively focused on the Brazilian market.

The first company is a broadband wireless infrastructure deployment company. Brazil is one of those developing countries that urgently needs better communications infrastructure and has the potential (in many areas) to leapfrog copper and even fiber cable for the last mile. The economy is booming here (no fake economic crisis) and the government is spending billions upgrading infrastructure.

Among our solutions are city-wide IP radio mesh and regional microwave backbone systems. Such networks can carry high-capacity, low-latency local traffic without traversing the backbone. The radio mesh is inherently p2p and thus, fault-tolerant and self-healing. As a mesh expands in the number of autonomous nodes, its capacity increases and it is virtually impossible to take down. When one mesh meets another, they stitch together and extend the wireless backbone between the two areas. Eventually, a radio backbone like this can traverse entire coastlines, highways, and rivers, all but bypassing the centralized backbone. You can see where this is going...

The other project is the importation of eco-friendly and energy-saving devices and materials intended to foster sustainable construction. We have partnerships with major engineering companies already who can connect us to the great potential demand.

I'm the CIO of the two ventures, and my primary goal is to set up a collaborative workflow, project management, CRM, inventory, etc. system using semantic wikimedia. Until I found your site (purely by accident) I was planning to implement Ontoprise's SMW+ Now I'm looking carefully at the possibility of instead using your Wiki Organization. I'm trying to compare the two options.

It would fit very nicely with our 'mission critical' networking technology to eventually have a p2p wiki such as you are working on, and although our budget will remain tight until we complete the red tape with government testing and approval of our products so that we can proceed with large contracts, I believe that in due course, our budget will expand so that a synergy will be possible between us and OD.

Comparison of WikiOrganisation and SMW+

I still have to play the role of evangelizing semantic wikis to my group, and they are not familiar with it and don't really see the big picture I see, in terms of collaborative potential. Some of our group are open source enthusiasts, but others remain to see the light on collaborative systems. I have to sell them the idea, and I have to set up a functioning system that can expand incrementally in complexity. I have made a few experimental sites on on referata.com (see below). While I'm primarily focused on usability and it think SMW is fairly straightforward, the others in my group are not too impressed with the cosmetic aspect of it, and are scared off by the lack of click and point UI (such as Ontoprise's proprietary package has, which I think is primarily owed to the Halo extension), and they are not too keen on wiki syntax (old farts).

I am already somewhat familiar with SMW properties and the dynamic querying, but out of the box, if I were to install SMW on our server, a major task remains in configuring the workflow, project management, (etc...) structures. As your focus is on these aspects as an open source business template, it's very attractive. Ontoprise's system seems very complete and mature, but its many features are quite daunting, and after purchasing their license, it is not obvious to me that the canned structures are already there - it appears that a significant budget is need just to get the thing usable for us. I believe it would be preferable to spend that money on your consulting services, as it seems to me a better value, initially, and in the long run. But I have to convince them that WO is mature enough and has sufficient support. It is not clear to me what is functioning, what is experimental, and what is still in planning.

Also, to be blunt, Ontoprise's site could be said to be an engineering marvel -- being that they are Germans, that's to be expected. But while navigating the support forums, I get the feeling that I'm lost in a vast machine. Your site feels, well, more organic.

Furthermore, I don't understand how your semantic system works. I don't see the usual SMW fact boxes on any pages, and it appears that your query module is completely different than SMW. Perhaps you could enlighten me on such aspects. Basically, I'm looking for a comparison. Not in philosophy - I get that - but in the system components, dependencies, and capabilities.

I need to be able to get a site up with rudimentary functions of tasks and inventory, to be followed with more formal project planning and requirements. I think that your out-of-the-box business templates should fit the bill. Give me an idea of whether you are interested in at least holding my hand through setup, are able to take a more leading role in designing the ontology and workflow, how much money you'll need, etc.. Like I said, if we're going to spend 200-600 euro just for the ontoprise license, we're still stuck with basically an installer and no usable ontology and workflow. Additionally, their consulting and support is quite expensive. I'd much rather spend that money with you guys, knowing that a lot of the thought is already done and will benefit the community at large, if the system is already viable, which appears to be the case. We're still practically strapped in the startup phase, but we have major government contracts ready to go, so the budget will be there when we crack the first nut.

I'll probably be the only resident ontologist in the company, so usability is a concern. But I intend to emphasize the hiring of engineers who get the concept of online collaboration, wikis, etc. I think it's essential to remain competitive in the short run, and ultimately, is the only viable model for the future of civilization.

Hobby/Activist site

Brazilians are still very addicted to MicroCrap (tm) and practically none of them know anything about open source or wikis. Mentioning the word 'wiki' generally elicits blank stares. I want to create a personal wiki blog called "Entre Dois Mundos" (Between Two Worlds) - a bilingual site where I can introduce to them the concept of wiki collaboration, but also many of the ideas you discuss on your site. My intention is to make it a site that facilitates the collaborative translation of ideas that are already rampant in the English-speaking world that are practically nonexistent in Portuguese (conservation, sustainability, true-cost economics, anti-monetarism, etc). That will be my hobby in my off hours.

Model Sites

These are crappy, hastily cobbled together tests, in descending order of pride. The last one is probably not worth looking at, but it is simply a concept of catalog and ordering platform, with customer and supplier management. I only include them to indicate what I'm trying to do, and my level of proficiency (still paltry):

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