The changing landscape includes the fact that online, the for-pay
information economy is growing explosively and either does now or will soon
do a pretty good job of meeting a lot of information needs. The
expectation is that micropayment technology will create educational markets.
I would want to hoard the impulses of potential volunteers to fill gaps:
meet needs the market is ignoring.
A better gateway allowing effective information retrieval from what is
published to the WWW by people with email-only and narrowband pay-per-byte
access channels could be a worthwhile example. It would also be a project
worthy of a TIIAP grant.
As far as editing goes, it needs to be a distributed authoring and
versioning machine which recognizes the decay of data utility over time,
and it has to have more developed notions of authority to filter out
misinformation and stuff that is simply outdated. This is a great topic to
get creative with strong democracy. How does one build an information
space which recognized authority without creating editorial despots? But
this is a level of social organization that the Usenet community has
avoided so far. How to create, sell, and proliferate it now?
For son-of-FAQ, the unit of change needs to be something on the order of
the Q&A pair, not a topical collection. The natural system is one with a
database of these which is projected or view-extracted into a variety of
interaction contexts.
The editing quality of the original FAQs was motivated by the limitations
of the distribution channel for Usenet discussion. In today's more
profligate environment, there have to be other reasons why people put
effort into clarifying and condensing information.
Al
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