Appropedia Blog

We've been talking* about how to make Appropedia something that the community as a whole takes greater ownership of. Here's some ideas:

• This post reveals that what we call admins are known as librarians on the Spanish Wikipedia. I love it! It loses much of the connotations of power and control which are contrary to the spirit of a wiki, and it describes the role much better, I believe. A big part of explaining what a community wiki is about is explaining that noone owns it, and this could help.
• A broad wiki is easier for people to get involved in. You want something on the wiki? Great, do it! Appropedia has always been deliberately very broad, but I wonder if we can communicate this better.
• As many communication channels as possible (like OLPC's many channels):
• Communicating with Mailing lists. So obvious, but for a long time I operated on the assumption that we could get talk pages and some kind of forums to meet the needs for communication. But of course, many of us emailed each other constantly... and by nature that's closed communication. A mailing list lets anyone in who's interested, and puts our ideas out there for all who might be interested.
• Communicating with talk pages on the wiki. We could making the talk pages work much better, and this is where we need geek help. A way of making a more finely controllable recent pages page, that could give us all changes to the various talk pages. This would help keen people track conversations more easily, and give people answers more quickly.
• Communicating with an easy-to-use chatroom. I like OLPC's chatroom, in that it's geek-friendly (IRC!) but accessible by normal humans via the web.

That's by no means a complete list. How does it sound? What else can we do?

* prompted in part by comments by SJ from OLPC.