The Wise-Nano.org website has just come online. The site is designed to support collaborative research on the implications of nanotechnology and how to deal with them. In the process, it will produce a body of work on the technology, risks and benefits, and policy.
The site is hosted by CRN and created by CRN's Director of Research, Chris Phoenix. But it is intended to grow far beyond CRN's control, attracting researchers from all over the globe who are concerned about the various aspects of nanotechnology.
It's based on the excellent MediaWiki software, which was written for Wikipedia (the free collaborative encyclopedia), which currently has over a million articles in dozens of languages.
This blog has seen some great discussions. But those discussions became inaccessible as soon as they were finished, because they're not indexed. We will be suggesting that some discussion threads move to Wise-Nano pages, where they can be categorized, summarized, and turned into articles. We will also be posting our Thirty Essential Studies there over the next few weeks.
We expect that these will be just a small fraction of the projects hosted on Wise-Nano.
Please let us know what you think of the site. Were you tempted to add an article or two? Did you? Would you use it to get feedback or help on your projects? Why or why not? What would make it more usable? What would inspire you to tell your friends about it?
Very nice layout, and I won't kvetch at the lack of content - way too early for that. Thanks for putting it up!
Question - At some point (perhaps one month after an article is posted here?) is there a way to automate output of the topic and comments from here to the Wiki? I'd hate to see some of the conversations that took place here go into the bitbucket... (if the typepad site has a 'lock' feature as well, you might want add a comment to the thread here with a link to the new page on the Wiki and then lock the thread)
As I get time, I strongly suspect you'll see a few articles/entries/comments from me over there.
-John
Posted by: John B | September 28, 2004 at 05:42 AM
John, the trouble with simply porting comments is copyright. Wise-Nano, like Wikipedia, is under the Gnu Free Doc License. We can't import people's text without their permission.
That's not just being legalistic. It's true that people who post here expect their work to be freely read and copied. But they don't necessarily expect it to be freely edited.
I agree with you that the conversations here are far too good to lose. I'm hoping that the posters (and even some lurkers) will copy their own work to Wise-Nano. I could imagine, in the future, we might move all discussion over there, and anything posted there would be under GFDL and freely usable. For now, though, please do port your own past content! All of you!
And if you see a really good idea from someone else that you think needs to go on the site, remember that copyright covers text not ideas, so you can paraphrase (Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, and there are subtleties I don't know about). But do give credit for the source of the idea!
Chris
Posted by: Chris Phoenix, CRN | September 29, 2004 at 01:38 AM
For myself, anything I put on the crnano.typepad.com web pages is put into the public domain - fold, spindle, or mutilate at your whim, just cite the original location, please.
And hopefully tonight I'll be able to start populating some bits in the new site...
-John B
Posted by: John B | September 29, 2004 at 07:33 AM