- Document what exactly is happening, in a neutral manner. This will help explain the situation to outsiders.
- Improve safety, for anyone who may be interesting in trying out some of the ideas, by being clear on all methods used.
- Carry a disclaimer to show that this isn't medical science; that it's more like a mix of piercing and computer science; even then it isn't recognized by piercers. "Don't be an idiot."
- Make it easier for users to find information
- Make things easier for lepht, who is the only moderator of a blog which is the centre of a growing movement.
- Encourage community development.
It shall attempt to fulfill these aims, by meeting these specific requirements in software:
- selfmodifier.org shall be a collection of experiment logs on low-cost sensory augmentation.
- The site shall have three classes of user who are capable of modifying the site:
- registered users
- moderators
- site administrators
- Experiment logs shall only be submitted by registered members and moderators.
- On each log's page, it shall be clearly stated that it is not a safe piercing, or medical procedure. It shall also state that the work has not been peer reviewed by researchers. It shall state that it is the log of an experiment by a private individual, and that it is not an instruction manual on how to perform home surgery.
- Experiments will be structured as the most plain and simple scientific reports. Each may have:
- Title
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Method
- Results
- Discussion
- Reference list
- Appendices
- This format shall not be enforced by site design, but it shall be encouraged by the moderators.
- The moderations shall be able to ban users, and edit all experiment logs.
- Users may be promoted to moderators, and moderators may be demoted to users, or banned, by the administrators.
- There shall be a comment system, to allow users to encourage good work and discourage poor work.
- There shall be a search engine, and tagging scheme, to enable users to find experiment logs
- Registered members retain copyright of their experiment logs. They shall license them to the users themselves, using the GNU Free Documentation License.
- The site reserves the right to remove content and suspend services at any time.
- The site shall respect, and only respect, the legal authorities of the United Kingdom. I.E. the only people whom the administrators are obliged to obey, are the U.K. police.
- Since this is a fairly harmless site about implanting things into your skin, anything that is obviously illegal is also irrelevant content, and shall be deleted.
- All source code shall be made available under the GNU GPL.
I'm all for it, seeing as Lepht's blog is being run over by new people. Don't get me wrong, that's fantastic, but this is the right time for this website.
ReplyDelete+1
WhutMaxSed. (Can you tell Java has re-entered my life?)
ReplyDeleteWould a host outside the UK be better/remove some of the heavy breathing of the law?
I think this would be a great idea.
ReplyDeleteIf you are interested, (I'm not sure if you already have the needed resources) I am volunteering to construct and host this site. I have reasonably large space and bandwidth available on my hosting service for this purpose.
ReplyDeleteHowever, my server and I are in America. If hosting the site, I would be happy to only pay attention to our law enforcement, who only vaguely care about this if we self-moderate and provide proper disclosures/disclaimers.
I can fastidiously ignore authorities in every other country. For better or worse, Americans are good at that.
I'd also be happy to help construct, administer, or moderate such a site anywhere else. I work as a technology consultant for investment advisors and have both the skill and time to do so. I'm a decent Joomla designer and have some experience moderating online communities, including those who have to be very careful how they say things.
Feel free to contact me if you're interested. (webcontact@gabrielcooper.com) I'd love to see a site developed and I'll become a member either way!
Hey! Thanks all.
ReplyDeleteHosting outside the UK would be grand! Someone offered to host it in the US, but I would like to keep this on my server.
It'll be written in a portable language, called Racket, so the site could switch servers at any time.
I confess I'm being a little selfish by using Racket: it's not a language I know well - I would very much like to use it because, well, it's bloody marvelous!
i've actually never heard of Racket before. hopefully it's a fairly easy language to get the hang of...
ReplyDelete~Ian
Great idea!
ReplyDeleteWell I'm sorry for the anti-climax but this is going to be hold for a wee sec while I set up redmine. I may redraft this post in a bit, if anyone can see any problems with redmine.
ReplyDeleteA couple points on your draft that I wish to raise:
ReplyDelete(1)"Scrapyard transhumanism movement" sounds somewhat demeaning imo. I'm not apart of the transhumanist movement, so I don't know if this is some already established term. Regardless "Scrap" & "junk" are synonymous, and if the movement is named after junk, people will always consider it a junk movement. I would suggest something like "Economic Transhumanism", or something that people associate with worth.
(2)Enforcing Dry Scientific reports? Even in the world of science there are many very different opinions about what are the best practices for conducting research. The mindsets involved, procedures, presentation of findings, ways of referencing differ greatly among various recognized and respected researchers. It isn't like everyone involved with science suddenly becomes a carbon copy. Set your goals a little higher. If your intention is to keep things professional, then enforce that, not that everyone conform to one particular "scientific" formula.
And I must apologies for my haste as I look over your draft again I realize I misread your statement. I missed the not in "not be enforced" :P
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback! I agree heartily.
ReplyDeleteParticularly with (2) - if this were to be redrafted into a "mission" for the site, the part you mention should be re-written to emphasise that a scientific process is important, and not particularly the way you write it down.
Again, need good moderators :)
Redmine should be up soon
keep going, Johnny. this is fucking fantastic and if/when it gets up, would provide a brilliant workspace/logspace for the whole damn community.
ReplyDeleteeveryone else: when Johnny says a language is new, do be aware that he writes his own. i don't think it's actually possible for him to suck at a programming task.
L
Haha! No, I suck often and hard. Which is why I'm really glad Alexy pointed us onto redmine - it saves a lot of work!
ReplyDeleteSaying that, I've had a bit of a bother installing it - between redmine not being available on debian stable, and between my server running out of RAM - I had to package it on my local machine and upload it.
The good news is that it should be up soon.
The bad news is that I have a rule where I don't configure linux if I'm really tired or otherwise out of order - so we won't get to play it 'till tomorrow.
The further bad news is that since redmine is written in ruby, it is pretty slow: for fuck's sake, I ran out of RAM installing it - wasn't even running it. We may have to consider alternatives:
* faster server
* write a simple, faster website
* uhhhhh
should just install mediawiki ...
ReplyDelete