Event

Event
13:40
-
14:40
Day 4
Federating knowledge: exploring ways to bridge wikis and notes
Assembly-Event
Most people and organizations have their very own way of acquiring, organizing, archiving, sharing, and collaborating on knowledge repositories. A broad spectrum of opinions and approaches resulted in a diverse and rich ecosystem of knowledge management solutions. Nevertheless, this also implies scattered and disconnected knowledge sources. What would it mean to build bridges among wikis and federate knowledge?

Update: collective notes from the workshop (editable link).

This workshop is going to be heavily centred on a twofold discussion, exploring the challenge of federated knowledge starting from two questions.

  • What does it mean to federate knowledge repositories?
  • Instead of pursuing a silver-bullet solution to embrace all use-cases, what would it mean to foster and enable interoperability for different software?

These questions stem from years of questioning and wondering how to integrate my personal note-taking and collective, participatory knowledge management at work, in organizations, institutions, and informal collectives. Recently, I began actively researching this topic as I started playing with the MediaWiki API to cross-synchronize my local Markdown notes and the XPUB wiki, the public learning wiki of the Experimental Publishing master. I am puzzled by taking advantage of the potential of a specific software (in this case, MediaWiki) while fearing of being locked-in.

Some further, more specific, insights and questions:

  • Local-first approaches and software (e.g. Reflection)
  • Interesting experiments based on existing protocols, such as Ibis
  • What do we take of semi-open and obscure yet very cool initiatives like Anytype
  • The power and the limits of plain-text: how to enable collaboration on simple Markdown files and build on top of it, as Obsidian does