toni --  tony at irational.org
Thu Apr 18 21:14:03 2002

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hola :)

* update on wiki situation *

work on seting up wiki was done by matze,jb and myself. matze and i worked
on Twiki which lives at doc.indymedia.org . this is nothing new, as we
learned that wiki's were used sucesufuly by sf-imc and bandwidthcoop in
the past. howevere, we needed more of it, and more agreements on how to
use it. so that we don't repeat the old mistakes of todo.indymedia.org .

* Indymedia Documentation Project + switching to Twiki *

MoinMoin was installed by jb after a quick post irc chat between two of
us, 6 weeks ago. it was a quick decision done because jb was familiar with
it. idea that was driving force behind my work on this was to start an
Indymedia Documentation Project. a place that will be easy to use and thus
likely to be used by global working groups and local imc's as much as it
is used now by techs. talking to future/current users, i found few
features to be essential, but missing from MoinMoin: 

- user identity (so that it's known who wrote what)
- access control (needed by working groups and protection by vandalism)
  note: default is open access, unless requested by a group
- good revision control
- ability to rename pages from web interface

since, i used many wiki's http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/WhyWiki
installed 3 of them (MoinMoin,Twiki,UseModWiki) and evaluted it's
features. matze and i agreed on twiki being the best match to our needs.

* time to switch *

we have to make a move, if we want to switch to twiki. if we wait longer,
i'm afraid that it will be difficult to do it and longer we stay on
MoinMoin, more complaints we might get when we move, because people get
attached to tools - as we all do.

so here's the plan:

1) decide now what list we use for this work:
  - imc-tech-coord
  - imc-tech-docs

i think that for initial move to Twiki we could use imc-tech-coord.
then later we switch to discuss documentation to imc-tech-docs
advantage of imc-tech-docs are people who have been working on
documentation in the past, and advantage of imc-tech-coord is a fresh
energy.

2) decide on time that suits us (matze and i will be doing this
together,manualy,but help is always welcome) 

2b) prepare twiki further, simplify the look a lot, create spaces(webs)

2c) write good, simple HOWTO for steps to be done to start using Twiki
from the user point of view

3) let imc-tech and other using current wiki know about the time of switch

4) when done, put moinmoin to sleep (remove web access to it) and provide
support for twiki - keeping both wiki's alive, once we switch, could
create far more confusion than doing binary switch (eg. after Twiki takes
all content, moinmoin goes off-line)

* on Twiki structure *

Twiki provides separate namespaces, directories in which it keeps
files. These are called _webs_. matze and i thought that some separation
would be good since it allows more fine grained access control and
cleaner namespaces. it is trivial to reference(link) files in different 
_webs_, so no artifical separation would be impossed in that sense.
for now, we are thinking on four different webs:

- Local    : all local imc's stuff
- Global   : all other global working groups
- Sysadmin : global sysadmin effort
- Devel    : global tech development effort (coding)

if use of wiki goes up and some working groups request their own _webs_,
of course, that can be done. however, we have to think from the point of
time that goes in administration of each _web_ and be realistic about the
tech support that we are able to provide.

later,

toni

-- ToniPrug - 02 Nov 2004
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