That is extremely cool, thank you for posting it.

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Genius.

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Nicely done. I can't help feeling it also deserves a Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest prize of some description.

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Oh. I actually thought it was rather good... (I had to Google to find out what the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is, so I may have misunderstood, but from what I can see it's aimed at bad writing.)

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but from what I can see it's aimed at bad writing

True, but looking through the past entries, it seems there are definitely marks for cleverness and witty punchlines too (the more tortuous and torturous the better). And I am both impressed and amused that someone really sat down and thought that up as a rebuttal. Take that, Chomsky, indeed.

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A thing of beauty is a joy forever!

(just passing through on an interests hunt)

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Hello! Which interest(s) did you find interesting, then?

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Version control is the one I was hunting on (I do configuration management and knowledge gardening for a living), though we have other interests in common.

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Ooh. What's knowledge gardening? Sounds interesting. I get the impression from Google that it has something to do with organising data contributed by lots of different people?

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In my use, it's a phrase I came up with myself, though I'm not stunned to hear others using it differently. Part of my job is encouraging my team (and teams we work with) to capture their knowledge (engineering, business opportunities, etc.) and generate more knowledge and understanding, via practices (behavior / expectations / thought patterns) and collaborative and social software technology. Some of this I do by seeding different internal forums, wiki pages, etc. Some of this I do by sending out specific suggestions to individuals (to write this or that up). And so on. It's knowledge management, but at the nurturing/social/practicioner end rather than theoretical, taxonomic/ontologic etc.

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That's fantastic. It's a really useful thing to be able to do, and I bet it can be really rewarding. It's great to see this actually acknowledged as something that needs to be done, and in a skilled way.

Have you done any of this sort of thing for any volunteer/open source projects? It seems to me that in such contexts it could have the side benefit of making contributors feel more involved, and hence more motivated. (I've been thinking about motivation on voluntary projects recently, in a couple of contexts.)

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It's fun when I see folks who used to roll their eyes at "documenting" stuff cheerfully update wiki pages -- I don't want to be the bottleneck ("send it to Selki, who'll get around to entering it eventually"), I want to empower everyone on my team to just add it -- and I can reorganize or crosslink to clarify later (I have change monitors everywhere to catch potential issues). But what's really rewarding is when I see folks using our knowledge base to actively collaborate (not just "vault it" for some possible future use). And it's great that my manager supports it and actually lists knowledge management as part of my job in budget plans.

I have not yet done this role for volunteer / open source projects. I think the potential interface between open source social software (blogs, wikis, tagging, etc.) and knowledge management is very exciting, though. The benefit to grassroots activists (facilitating collaboration) is obvious to me.

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(not that there aren't any possible drawbacks/pitfalls to watch out for!)

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Sounds like interesting stuff!

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Yes -- lucky me!

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I don't mean that snidely -- I'm thankful. I replied in more depth to nou, above.

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