[Tfug] ubuntu

[sitkaa at email.arizona.edu]

> the age of the centralized information/publication repository has passed.

Perhaps I am too old school, but that is hard to wrap my mind around.

How can you develop a system, no matter how distributed, that doesn't have an
organizational theme, and expect it to work easily/efficiently?

Last night here at the U. a bunch of people with bicycles gathered and milled
about. I asked someone who organized this event, to which the reply 
that no one
did. It just happened. And it continues to happen every Tuesday night 
at 8ish. I
hung around awhile to observe the process. Someone eventually shouted 
out to the
crowd that had a path that they were going, and to follow them. The crowd
followed this person who took the lead.

I think that a central organizational theme is needed, no matter how loose the
association, if decisions are to be made. For instance, (Mr. Linus?) acts as a
benevolent dictator. The real question (for me) is how to organize the themes.
I don't have the technical know how to lead such a project, but I think it
would be useful, even if outdated in modality.





Quoting Claude Rubinson <rubinson at u.arizona.edu>:

> On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 12:19:44PM -0700, Jeff Breadner wrote:
>> If you want to try to consolidate this all into one wiki/blog/whatever,
>> that would be an interesting project, but it will be a bit of a fight to
>> get the critical mass of people submitting and maintaining their own
>> content
>
> <snip>
>
>> For most folks, the gateway to this knowledge is your search engine.
>
>
> Back in the 90s, there were a few websites that did just this.  I seem
> to recall that two were especially good, both named some derivation of
> "linux on laptops" or some such.  This was also at the same time that
> the tldp (Linux Documentation Project) was an invaluable resource.
>
> As time has progressed, such efforts have fallen by the wayside.  As
> Jeff notes, the search engine has become the primary interface for
> finding such information.  Essentially, the internet is becoming more
> decentralized, chaotic, and anarchic than it was in the past--more
> people are using more tools to publish more information--and top-down
> hierarchical structures have become more of a hindrance than a help.
> Google was a great advance forward over Yahoo and their brethren;
> personally, I can't wait to see what will topple Google as Google's
> S/N ratio is dropping fast.  But Jeff's right, the age of the
> centralized information/publication repository has passed.
>
> C.
>
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