on Foss

The foss.in conference ended yesterday. And I was glad to be a part of it.

I learned two things at FOSS:

1. There is a real interest in an agile wiki. The difficulty of refactoring wiki content is well known.
2. The user interface to the Ark is just too big a speed bump. Without a major effort in this area, the Ark can not be used to build communities around content.

So I cranked out the guest interface, a step in the right direction. But only a small step. I expect to be spending a lot of time working on version 2.1, making things easier to learn and understand.

I've spent the day working on the new basic user interface, but it will take more than one day to develop. For example, you can't just have a "de" link to destroy a topic--that's too hostile. For a click-based interface, some things need to be confirmed.

Documentation will need to be reworked once the basic interface is in place, especially the introduction page for the Ark. And on the project page, I want to spend more time talking about the Ark as an agile wiki and less time on Rolonics.

One thought I've had is that with typed topics, you can have type-specific help. But that will come later.