WikiWeb Dialogue

The term I'm using for holding Dialogue in an ecosystem that leverages the WikiWeb. From http://billseitz.tiddlyspace.com/#WikiWebDialogue

This is triggered (in 2011) by a Chris Dent node

In a "traditional" company (including a startup), where the main participants are putting significant time (more than half each) toward a venture with a relatively coherent Shared Mission, I'm still inclined to think they should have a single TeamWiki (which is an Issue Tracker Wiki). (Maybe I'll change my mind as the tools evolve.) In this mode of Wiki For CollaborationWare, I lean toward using Email Discussion Beside Wiki, again because it seems the most pragmatic.

The tactics that Tiddly Space is dabbling in seem more appropriate in looser groupings of people, such as

• general public discussion, similar to current Blog Comment or Discussion Forum environments
• a bunch of people nudging some loosely-Shared Mission forward in their spare time
• a bunch of people helping/following a One Man Show that's focused on a particular mission
• maybe in a Network Economy model, a bunch of people working part-time and explicitly-temporarily on a shared commercial venture, where the overhead and isolation of a "separate" TeamWiki would be irritating. (Note that as integration across WikiSpace-s improves, maybe this won't be as much of an issue.)

So, cutting to the chase, what kinda of process would it be good for Tiddly Space to support?

• I don't find the current "follow" model helpful for pretending to "compose" a discussion across spaces/pages.
• Giving your "friends" the power to edit one of your pages to have a ThreadMode discussion within a page doesn't smell right, as ultimately you want to converge that page in your own Sense Making direction, therefore comments another person sticks in there tend to get wiped/merged/edited by you, creating tension/conflict between you and them.
• I used to let "public" append to the bottom of any page in my WikiLog. That led to Comment Spam nightmares. I don't think Tiddly Space wants to enter the SpamWars.
• I think giving "friends" (a White List) power to append tiddlers to a page seems like a good compromise. You (anchor-page owner) could pull whatever you wanted from comments to update the main page (at risk of making some comments seem strange since they would have been on previous versions of the page - so be it).
• For non-friends (or future-friends, to let them comment immediately without waiting for granting of White List request), supporting a 3rd party Blog Comment tool like DisQus seems pragmatic. Rather than giving generic JavaScript-injection powers, Tiddly Space could have some tool that would let the space owner pick from a list of Blog Comment systems to use. That list could start with a single option.
  • WebMentions might be a better idea.
• One potentially nasty issue here: given Transclusion, will comments get disconnected from their origin (recipes vs tiddlers?)? Maybe that's acceptable (Good Enough) though not ideal.
• If you're going to support a Blog Comment system anyway, why bother building a native commenting system?
  • Because that Blog Comment system could close down, start charging, start injecting ads, whatever. So comments in that channel are more at-risk.
  • Because native comments are part of the WikiSpace, so can use WikiWord-s, etc.
• I know Chris Dent would prefer a Threaded Discussion. How hard would managing a hierarchy of comment tiddlers be?