Here we describe wiki as a bundle of affordances in the space of the 'extended trinity' of tools for distributed collaboration.
This has particular bearing on the characteristic wiki practice of Podding.
Here's the basic mapping frame: the extended trinity-space Extended trinity
Toolstack - Categories of affordance in extended trinity-space
There's quite a lot to expand here. Just for starters, we can say that the affordances of wiki within trinity-space seem to be:
Basic communication tools (1st triad) - Library - the persistent, universally web-accessible wiki page
Share tools (2nd triad) - Cloud repo share (assets, server plugins, etc?)
- Author share - via a nominated registrar. See The registrar and the canonical wiki - To be added xxx Meanwhile, see: Wiki events, commons events and the registrar
Engagement tools (3rd triad) - Maps - as 'commonplace book' or journal or lab notebook, wiki is fundamentally a mapping toolkit. See also Graphviz To be added xxx
- Analytics - scraping wild feeds, and putting the data in an explicit relationship with themselves and with other domesticated heaps of event, seems to be a basic urge in the wiki community The analytics urge - To be added xxx
- News - wiki is an Awareness engine. Flags in the header, <Recent changes> and rosters conspire to bring 'news from elsewhere'. This is one of the 'six Rs' of civil-society collaborative, activist capability. Fragmenting in the mutual sector - Seven Rs
It seems that this third triad - of affordances for engaging from 'here' with a selectively-focused world 'out-there' - is where wiki really shines? Is this the heart of wiki? Certainly, this third triad is where we, in general, are most lacking in capability, compared with the more mundane capabilities of the 1st and 2nd triads?
What wiki does NOT afford
We also can say, for starters, that wiki does not bring affordances in:
- Text chat - even though reponses thro \<Recent changes> could be fast; and deno will make things faster? wiki folks use Matrix.
- Issue threads - within git there are tech issues. But the broad wiki community doesn't have a space for 'community' issue threads, extended deliberations, persistent posts. Matrix, as chat, simply doesn't do a good job on this. Dogfooding, wiki folks seem to use wikis for this purpose? But isn't a thread-space required, for a community aka commons?
- Video room share - Ward hosts the weekly hangout, currently in Zoom. Would we want a wiki plugin for this? Wouldn't it be good to use BigBlueButton - a FLOSS codebase?
If these are the only affordance that wiki isn't expected to bear (?), does this mean that wiki PLUS Matrix PLUS Discourse/Loomio/Mattermost/Zulip PLUS BBB equals everything a community of radical collaborators needs?