Imagine influential authors writing freely together in private with the understanding that they are free to remake any part of their collective work as their own citing only the pod, not the individual authors who once shared in private. How would this work?
Influential authors have always had to choose their words carefully when speaking in public for fear that they or the organizations they represent might be misrepresented. The Chatham House think tank protects influentials with a generous twist on the non-disclosure agreement.
A similarly protected gathering of wiki authors would write within a private network where their identities represented by private sites are known only to pod participants. The subsequent challenge is for authors to join this network safely with other public sites where they might choose to write concurrently.
How would wiki's automatic attribution on fork come to acknowledge only the private pod, not its members?
How would the private pod ingest confidential or otherwise protected information for use only in private?
How could later publication be automatically checked for proper respect for privacy of participants and fair use quotation from copyrighted works they might have at their disposal?
# Compartments
The virtual private network (vpn) provides a useful model for the private pod whether implemented below http at the network level or above http with cryptographic mechanisms.
The firewall provides a level of compartmentalization of sites, those inside and those out. The author writing within the private network has access to both compartments and the ability to transfer content across the compartment boundary. With that ability comes the responsibility to respect constraints placed on the private work.
Individual sites within a private network could be further constrained by policies of the private group. Group attribution is one policy. Fair use is another. Non-disclosure a third. These are all possible because access is restricted and thus not considered "publication".
# Publication
An author operating within a private pod can prepare work intended for publication. Only at the last moment before such work is transferred to a public site do the responsibilities to respect compartment constraints come to bear. What then constitutes due diligence?
A simple question would be, what part of a page intended for publication contains work from other compartments? Do any item ids match?
Footer Item Search answers this question with respect to the visible federation. The private pod requires a similar search but one where the scrape that informs the search has been conducted within the private network.
# Affordance
The interpretation of constraints here falls within the realm of human judgement. A private pod item search would assist that judgement. We now consider how that or related technologies could support a sound publication workflow.
more soon, like this ...
Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offence) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both"
Wiki has instead a different understanding of public. She is strategic. For wiki to be public means to take what she values in the private sphere, to protect it, and to create a public space where these ideas can flourish.