CS73N

Notes02

CS73N Meeting 02 Notes:

Started by Gio Wiederhold, 24 Feb. 2000, revised 25Jan2002, 16Jan2003. 8,15,17 April 2005. added material in Exhibits 23April 2005, updated 12 April 2006, 29 Feb 2008.

Topics Covered briefly

Writing assignment 1

Due Friday 11April 2008, in electronic form, of course.

Describe the setting and expectations for your project, taking a long range view. How will the world it lives in look by the time you graduate, or maybe 10 years hence? What sources will be available to serve and complement your project? What will your readers or customers expect? It should be suitable as a background page for your project.  If you have set up your website already, just send us a pointer to it.

Projects

Project plans should identify the contents, the intended audience, and the size of the audience.
Documents on the web are long-lived, but that means they'll need some ongoing maintenance to remain valid. Here is where intangible property created for the web differs from books and music, which are fixed.  The amount of maintenance required depends on the volatility of the contents.
·        A web page in Buddhism will remain relatively constant, only as new relevant writings become available.
·        A web change involving Stanford classes will require  some updates every quarter, and more changes every academic year, as classes and prerequisites change.
·        If the information is obtained from the readers, as a class quality guide, it is best to set it up as a wiki. Otherwise the maintenance would be horrendous. But even then some supervision is needed.
Without taking care of your website, the intellectual property it represents will diminish very rapidly.
This means that each CS73N project should have a simple business plan: where would long-term support come from?
1.      You yourself – how much time can you spend?
2.      Can you find a sponsor? An organization or business that would benefit from your site?
3.      Would money be collected – from who and how?
We'll cover more on the specifics listed below but think about these points:
·        Payment mechanism can be advertising payments – click through ads, or actual payments with choices as subscription, pay per use, freeware with limits and options, voluntary payment.  
·        If you are selling things, are they {tangible, fungible, intangible}.
·        If it’s information, what are the actionable benefits to the reader, new opportunities or efficiencies.

·         Why is your information better than that of others?

Class discussion:

What is the state of Education?  see [on Education]..

Can a radical new educational system be developed ?

Must a radical new educational system be developed ?

Can we do better with the money being spent?  Who supports education?

What is the business model for MIT professors putting their class material on the web.

Should Stanford professors do it? How can they be induced – the University cannot tell them to it unless it changes its employment contract with them. And that is a circular authorization, because Stanford is run by the Faculty, through the Faculty Senate, elected by the faculty.

Send me notes on items I forgot, or add comments to this class page on the wiki.

Back to class description


 

Comments

From Nina Hanyi Liu [128.12.32.252] - 2006-04-15

Hey guys, Jimmy Wales' lecture was quite interesting. He introduced wikipedia's concept, technology, business structure and  potential social impact. Here goes the outline and abstract of his points that I found interesting. Hope you like it.

 

Vision: Wikipedia, and the Future of Free Culture

What is Wikipedia?

-A freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands languages and  managed by "wikipedians" all over the world.

 What does “freely” mean? Free as in speech, not free as in beer.

How popular?

-         ~ 5 billion page views monthly

 

Technology Required:

Database, Web server, Web browser, Wiki

- All the technology has existed since 1995  (wikipedia started  late as 2000)

Wikipedia is not a technical innovation but a  "social  innovation" which features  "free licensing, neutrality, openness".

Design of wikipedia is design of community. (a future, better one)

We reject the predominant software design philosophy:

Prevent people from doing bad things – patent (restaurant and ape in cage model) - promotion of Trust  in Wikipedia community

How does this community ensure quality? 

We have a few hundred volunteers who know each other and work to guarantee the quality and integrity of the content.  London, Berlin Taipei, Frankfurt

 

Real time peer review

Ho does quality control work?

Every edit goes onto "recent change" page which is watched by hundreds of people daily

Users can set up personal watch lists

IRC communications

Consensus and democracy is planted in Wikipedia by voting to decide whether  to keep or delete a page/certain information. The free-form nature of wiki software lets the community determine how it wants to interact.

How do we make money?

Supported by advertisement – Free software makes free culture

IDEA:

Rational passionate ventures should not be only about making money but should have a "Vision" which could make a change and stick to it.

New Program:

Wikia

We are brining the community model of Wikipedia into context.

 Jimmy's Wish to Wiki world:

 

Wiki - Start to change the copyright debate – people do good work, and are responsible

-         Will be built on love and respect

-         Will be the norm on the internet

-         People are empowered and set free can do great things (from licenses)

-   Getting personal

Make wikilove, not war.

Problems and defaults of Wikipedia:

- Obtain creditable resource from both amateurs and experts.

- Sort out reliable resource and mantain quality with the expanding scale of wiki community

 

From Shirley [70.143.87.47] - 2006-04-14

Good catch, Jay. Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia, of course, not Amazon.

From Jay [128.12.34.157] - 2006-04-14

Founder of Amazon?

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Last Modified 2008-02-29