Here’s the thing about wikis, and it’s one of the things that inspires and fires the AboutUs crew: Wikis are self-organized, self-organizing, forms of retaining and sharing information. Access to information has increased to such a degree that it can positively overwhelm people. The wiki helps to order this information. But instead of doing it top-down, it is a kind of informational democracy, in the sense that people vote with their actions to create organic hierarchies of information, called folksonomies.

Wikis are also infinitely extensible websites. There is no limit to the size or the velocity of expression. However, this comes with a few problems for AboutUs, the company. AboutUs is a very large (though not infinite) website. It consists of millions of wiki pages, bound to themselves, to each other, and to the rest of the world, with tens of millions of links.

Now, although most of you have come to AboutUs via one of the subject wikis on it, possibly one of the many wikis devoted to a specific company, few of you understand what the company is about. That’s our fault, not yours. And the way we’ve decided to remedy that problem is by revitalizing this weblog.

When I first got together with Ray King and Mark Dilley at AboutUs Towers, overlooking the mighty Willamette, I suggested a blog could be a kind of coffee shop, a place we could get together with you and talk in a low-key way about wikis, AboutUs, your undertakings, whatever was of interest to us. In this coffee shop we also intend to articulate, clearly and loudly, our points of view on what we do, on privacy, on information democracy and many other things. Then, we’ll break and we’ll go back to our wikis and we’ll get some work done.

My name’s Curt Hopkins. I’m a longtime wiki user. Probably the most prominent wiki I was involved with was Blogsafer, a multilingual safer blogging guide, funded by Spirit of America. I’m also a longtime blogger. My personal blog, which I’ve had since November of 2004, is Morpheme Tales and I’m the founding director of the Committee to Protect Bloggers.

Most importantly, I am currently the Guest Interloper at AboutUs, where I’ll be nosing around, eyeballing things, trying to see the shape of the company and its message from the outside and help the crew inside to speak to you in their own words. I guess, I’m the guy serving the coffee.

Talk to you soon.

CurtHopkins posted this entry on 19th April 2008 and tagged it as Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.