2024-04-19

I want to help start an integrated regenerative research community, and I'm suffering from my usual bout of unclarity as to where to start. Open to offers of help here!

Driving me to action in the moment is an amazing opportunity to start connecting up a regenerative research – not sure what to call it – network? association? community? field? movement?

• Involvement in Life Itself is leading (through Rufus) to a more leading creative role in their research community, having participated and co-led a study group.
• From extensive conversations with Carsten the possibility emerges of my taking a leading role in the research side of Théra

They are both keen on something like the knowledge commons idea, so, starting this off for both of them is a brilliant opportunity to start something larger.

Many groups involved with regeneration, or transition, or addressing the “polycrisis” or “metacrisis” suggest that they are interested in research. Tamera, for example defines research as

a living laboratory where research is a communitarian process of practice-based learning, i.e. trial and error, in which providing mutual feedback, communicating truthfully, reflecting and evaluating are key.

It could be said that collective presencing adopts a similar approach to research.

But, though this kind of research is very likely to be useful to the individual, publishing it greatly enlarges its usefulness. It has become very common for people outside academia to publish blogs, articles and most especially videos (on platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, etc.)

This takes me back to my complaints about wikis. Not only is there no wiki software in existence suitable for a distributed knowledge commons, but the main approaches to creating a wiki or wiki-like site are generally incompatible and definitely not interoperable in any meaningful way.

Rufus would prefer, for the time being at least, to stay with the Life Itself writing stack based on the hopeful title: Make it Markdown. Because of the relative simplicity of Markdown, and its implementation in many tools, this is appealing, particularly for programmers familiar with GitHub. Despite its use in GitHub wikis, Markdown as a lightweight markup language was not really designed for wikis.

My review of this very well-meaning approach is here. If you know exactly what you are doing, it is feasible. But if not, it really isn't user-friendly, and I found it confusing.

Carsten, on the other hand, has got into the practice of using Notion (productivity software). I've played just a little with Notion, but not got into it sufficiently to be fluent in using it as a wiki.

Currently, on balanced consideration, I'm thinking that it is better simply to have a new DokuWiki instance.

Today I am (and yesterday I was) engaged with trying to write out an example of a set of wiki pages that serves as an initial starting point, a model for what could become a knowledge commons for regenerative research. Back a few weeks ago I spelled out what I have been thinking of for at least a couple of years, based on what I was thinking for a long time helping with the P2P Foundation wiki.

A good starting point could well be:

• Article title
• Author(s)
• Date
• Link to original (and any copies)
• Abstract, if any, or brief description
• other significant excerpts
• Links to other articles
• Commentary
  • this would be by members of the research community only, each of whom would have their own page explaining their interests and roles
  • the key sections commented on are placed as excerpts
  • commentators link to other places / sources

This would naturally lead on to a fuller knowledge commons, and with some more care and curation, to that commons constituting a learning resource

• Add tags/themes to articles, and learning level
• These tags become pages with some definitions etc
• These are networked together

It would thus grow from being a literature commons towards ontological commoning.

• Static site generation from HackMD content
• I was going to start an Outline for Life Itself Knowledge base back in February, but it hasn't been done. I might pick this up.
• I follow through on 2024-04-28.

• research
• connecting useful knowledge