User:Jukeboksi/Blog/March2004

30.3.2004

I'm changing operators about now and thus for a little while I don't have a connection at home. Hopefully the connection will be restored soon

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27.3.2004

Preoccupied in some behind the scenes actions.

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26.3.2004

I keep getting fun books from my sister. Now I have a Finnish translation of "Die Börse" by Max Weber, which should provide for some interesting reading moments.

It seems that at the time of writing (1894 to 1896) Max Weber was a professor of macroeconomics. Commodity exhanges and stock exchanges were not differentiated at that time

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25.3.2004

I've been busy with application procedures to get admitted to study International Business in Tampere, also the preparations for the Finnish Social Forum are underway.

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22.3.2004

Today I'm mainly busy translating and collating material to Finnish for a presentation at the The Finnish Social Forum.

We are launching a Finnish language Development Wiki as soon as I get the new database required for it. If there is some notable action in the Finnish Development Wiki I will try to periodically update the English wiki on the developments. Not all articles here are planned to be translated into Finnish, just the cream of the crop.

Research Wiki and Publish Wiki are the wikis we are going to work with. mmkay?

So it's Develop, Research, Publish? Fine. So some process turns what "we publish" into the Consumerium buying signal. Fine. That works. The Consumerium Process is going to require some updates to reflect the Develop->Research->Publish->Signal->Feedback->Develop service cycle of Consumerium:Itself.

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21.3.2004

Today I've been concentrating on outlining the Consumerium Process in relation of Noise Wiki to Signal Wiki trying to take both troll friendlyness and stability and reliability and practical issues of technical implementation into account.

See comments at Talk:Research Wiki. Noise implies Development Wiki more than Research Wiki. The name "noise wiki" is bad for many reasons. What prevents anyone from putting in any crap, and why should someone who is not basically worried about the Consumerium buying signal, but just wants to write articles, contribute stuff to be called "noise"? They'd contribute diligent "research" to a Research Wiki, probably, but why volunteer good material to a wiki whose very name invites crap? But anyway get the functions right first, names right later.

I'll try to merge the material from Content Wiki, TCE, Campaigns, Opinion Wiki, Direct Votes,�Indirect Votes and WikiVotes to these articles or somewhere where we can have clarity on our implementation plan

Please combine all the voting stuff into edits, votes and bets or at least argue for this design there so we can look at how they interact. And yes spending time reading something is a bet of your time.

There is no final design, so this is not just about "implementation". It's ONE PROPOSED DESIGN. We should have three or four, and they should compete.

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20.3.2004

Exhausted today. I'm planning on holding a discussion of Consumerium.org goals and means in The Finnish Social Forum and that takes some preparation.

Try not to turn it into a Nokia ad! l-D Make them pay for such ads!

No way. The way they've been slowing down bluetooth adoption, even if their motivation is to avoid by all costs associating Nokia with blutooth malware or bluevirus. But still inability to use SyncML and XHTML-browser over bluetooth is unacceptable for a leader of the pack type of company's products.

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19.3.2004

The box I installed Debian on was all segmentation faulty burned up hardware and I'm hoping to get another (hopefully working) old box to install Debian on next week so I can try out GORC and other software. Luckyly our Development Wiki is running on reliable http://pingviini.net server.

Sent an email about Fairtrade On Demand to fairtrade organisations and awaiting what their stand on the idea is.

I'm doing some Wiki maintenance. Mainly deleting stale irrelevant articles and linking orphan articles. I might be looping though all articles to do minor fixes and relinks since i have no new ideas about Language vs. Area or New Summaries or Consumerium Process or Product recognition

Good work mostly. Before Consumerium timeline becomes a revert war, it would be useful to have one past history, and the future goals it relates to, maybe milestones and a definition of pilot. And speed matters, but what is really required is some stopwatch results on how much time real people spend really shopping, and how much they can or could spare with their hands to flip through a book or look at a screen. Regarding AWR, trolls will attempt to formulate general Consumerium:policy that is not offensive but doesn't always require reference to the worst example in the wikisphere by name.

Also, before we get too used to it, what about the name "code.consumerium" rather than "develop.consumerium" ? Though there's more to developing than code.

No way. I already pissed our root of by requesting the original devel. to be changed to develop. we also have http://en.consumerium.org and http://fi.consumerium.org available for use now. These are distinct from http://www.consumerium.org due to the enlightened advice from our root that we should www. as a place to store non-lingual comics or stuff about consumerium. --Juxo

Also presumably there is "research." or "buy." or "signal.", these are in different languages, so "en.consumerium", "fr.consumerium" might be better to make standard wiki URIs. Research in each language can be at /wiki/ while the un-wiki'd URI (like http://en.consumerium.org/Nike) always has the Signal Wiki content - since only a very few people can edit at that stage. That keeps the language subdomaining the same as Wikipedia for standard wiki URI, and differentiates signal and research only in the end of the URI.

Good points. But how do we make the Consumerium Process work so that people don't go straight to Signal Wiki to write stuff that should be in Research wiki. We could have either signined articles and/or unedited for some period of time automatically sucked into signal wiki. We should still consider Language vs. Area questions before setting that we use language as primary divider and area sensitive information goes however it does. --Juxo

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18.3.2004

The Development Wiki has now moved to http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/ with rewrite in the old http://www.consumerium.org so that all requests to the wiki/-subdirectory get rewritten to use the new domain. This leaves the www-subdomain available for something else.

Contacted J�rg Schulenburg, the author of GORC, a GPL Optical Character Recognition softaware by email. It looks like GORC could be used as product recognition server software.

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17.3.2004

Ok. It seems that my ugly hacks got rc4 finally up and running. I've been fighting to get this work all day. If something seems broken, please email me. Sorry for being out of service. I should be more careful in the future when upgrading or changing the configuration --Juxo 21:11, 17 Mar 2004 (EET)

As a result of a major mistake in updating from rc3 to rc4 I have temporarily downgraded to pre October 2003 installation, which may or may not work. Please bear with me. I'm working on it but have some curious problems on getting the newest or even second newest or third newest install working. I've locked the database, as a security measure that we don't mess the database structure and that no edits are lost, so editing is no longer possible for the time being.

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14.3.2004

I will think for a while. I may be onto something or maybe not, but I will think instead of arguing over Interwiki link standard or other minor details.

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13.3.2004

I've sent an email to robf who is the manager of http://sourceforge.net/projects/upcdatabase/ , which has it's home-site at http://www.upcdatabase.com/ to inquire about the copyright status of the databases they offer. If the copyright enables us to use the upcdatabase, then it surely will be one of the essential projects

UPDATE: The database is licensed under GPL, which is a bit strange considering that there is no program code but just database entries

Can we test its completeness? A good test would be if it includes the obscure scary food products!

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8.3.2004

Going to try updating the MediaWiki-installation to provide XML-export

Successfully updated to MediaWiki 1.2.0rc3 with XML-export now working

Special thanks to Brion for helping out.

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6.3.2004

Dear Lowest Troll: If you look at the Most Wanted Pages, you find two kinds of pages there. Almost all are obviously defined things that have some obvious relevance to consumerium, that we just haven't bothered saying exactly how they relate in detail to the main design, like accounting standard, labour standard, environmental standard, hardware standard, or subterms like prison labour. We don't need to bother filling these in now. The other kind though is terms like trollish which probably should never be defined but which we should link to often. ;-) If you find ANYTHING on that list that should be defined now for clarity, say so, because we ordinary/Lowly trolls think that there is really nothing that is more than a fill-in there. By the time we have to fill those in, we are dealing with details.

When writing a new article, at this point, one should not be introducing new terms. We have covered the basic concepts well enough and introduced as many unique or strange terms as we have to. Eventually we may even get rid of those or standardize them with other large public wikis to enhance usability, but those unique to our troll-friendly culture should and must remain.  ;-)

5.3.2004

Now there is serious unclarity of which Wikis we are planning to implement. I hope that 142.177.X.X who introduced this competing Research Wiki+Signal Wiki scheme will clarify what is gained in this venture into further internal incoherence in this wiki.

See Talk:Wikis and values. Calling things "Content" or "Opinion" is to make a choice to assign certain values to certain processes applied in each. This is just not right. Processes don't have values. Nor do the institutions built on them. People have values, and people use our wikis for research, and signalling to others, and development. Calling what they do or say "R&D" or "content" or "opinion" is an overlay of YOUR values on THEM. A good system does as little of this as possible. We KNOW we are doing some Development, we KNOW we are doing some Research, we KNOW we are sending a Signal. NO one would dispute those terms. So they do not ask for trouble.

Anyways I've noticed lately that internal incoherence seems to be an universal phenomenon in wikis due to that it's so easy to misplace information by making overlapping and competing articles instead of seeking consensus on one article. Naturally trolls will insist that the ability to express dissensus is a great feature of wiki in general

Absolutely. Without this you never get to a two-party system and factions that agree to debate civilly instead of always forking and fighting, which is exactly what is happening at Wikipedia. Trolls insist on dissensus and will even sometimes make some visible where it is hidden, to drive this evolution. See m:troll for a detailed hierarchy of roles based on this.

As to Consumerium:Retrospection that requires much more concentration on my behalf since I'm the one with the earliest plans in my head to retrospect on.

Probably Greenpeace and Adbusters also had early plans, but they did not work out. Why not? What is preventing this service from coming into being? What is the basic error we are all making? Perhaps it is assuming that consumers will drive this, as opposed to institutional buying criteria. Perhaps it is failure to see the healthy signal infrastructure as one thing that requires great global cooperation and a mind-set shift even into hardware. Perhaps it is bad wiki code, refusal to see price premium or factional logic, or tying ourselves to a permission-based model, or not being troll-friendly enough. Who knows? We must explore all of these... and be our own worst critics (thus threats and worst cases analysis).

One thing I've noticed that I should make a note of into Consumerium:Retrospection once the competing wiki-schemes issue becomes more clear is the shift from formally correct markup into associatively correct markup this is naturally due to the shift from using XML to Wiki code

Let me elaborate. Rather then Company:X, Brand:X and Product:X just have X which states

"this is a product under a brand by the company of same name. 
The company in question is a Multinational Corporation that has an 
wholly owned subsidiary somecompanyname LTD in this country. 
The Multinational  Corporation is based in country, subregion village 
and it is enlisted in somestockexchage as somestocksymbol etc..."

? They aren't opposites. GetWiki uses XML properly, as an exchange. ConsuML will be easy to suck into GetWiki and turn into the Research Wiki and Signal Wiki default pages. But then trolls must get to work before these can be accepted as the Consumerium buying signal.

What is "formally correct" and "associatively correct"? You refer to links? That is more a wikitext standard than a wiki code problem.

I have a feeling this will go deeper into our instructional capital needed to run the wikis or deliever The Features planned or Consumerium Services whatever the underlying technology used to markup and store information in the sense that maybe we shouldn't be wasting time and effort into modelling business structures as was mentioned in the original concept plans

It may be futile, as they shift so fast and it's so hard to say what goes into a company. Much easier to say what goes into a product probably until you get to the commodity level where the commodity markets fuzz it up - deliberately! Those markets are all for stolen goods, really.

and shift more into modelling consumer experience that is to say that the distinction between a product, a brand and a company is often superficial in the sense of consumer perception and though there are ambitious plans written about how Consumerium Services will affect institutional buying criteria etc. the main goal is still to affect consumer perception

Any marketer will tell you his brand is where the value is. That is, if a brand is trusted, it generates free money. If not, it generates just liability and must eventually be discarded. Like any repute. So work done on companies and products and commodities is probably there ultimately just to build up or tear down a brand. Our users will be friends of some brands, enemies of others, so "Praise/Criticism" is appropriate for Consumerium:intermediate brand page <-- brand can be to product or service or experience or whatever, it's more generic.

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2.3.2004

I like the distinction between product and commodity. This makes for a more clearly defined scope on all things material, though currently commodity is a redirect page and I think that things that are sold in commodity markets globally should be their own category ie. coffee, sugar, cocoa etc.

The distinction between a product and a commodity is basically only that of pricing on w:commodity markets. Even if something is not purchased through these markets, the price quoted on them affects all pricing on that commodity anywhere in the world - with transport costs being the only real price differential. There's a gradation here, and the idea of an industrial ecology where the waste disposal method of one process is the resource extraction method of another (!) is directly opposed to the idea of any kind of commodity market. We should think in terms of the service economy and imagine a world of high transport costs where commodity is more and more a fiction.

Also reversing the linkage relation of campaigns that came to me inspired by Connelly Barnes's idea of an incredibly simple Consumerium standard wiki format seems like a good way to go.

Yup. Though we do have a fairly complex service cycle to model to get to any kind of idea of the comprehensive outcome of any process whatsoever.

I'd also like to thank 142.177.X.X for some great work s/he's done around here the last days. It was starting to get irritating when s/he was constantly just on a AWR-rage

Just don't want us to go down any wrong paths. Reading the Wikipedia mailing list lately, it's a war zone over there, and when even Wales starts to use terms like sysop vigilantiism you know there's no due process at all. It won't be long now before they have to put some real governance in place, or just give up. Maybe they have enough interest and recognition to recruit that m:board now. But whatever they do it should not be our problem here.

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1.3.2004

Yesterday I installed Debian on an old box that's been lying around for ages and now I'm playing around with it to get more aquinted with Linux naively hoping to some day accumulate enough *NIX skills to make a living out of it. I am getting into Python also and learning Dutch and German by reading the Wikibooks on them

One thing I need right now is a job.

Give Juxo a job, please.