Thoughts on the indexation of Neualtenburg Forum discussions of historic significance

Folks,

As part of my ongoing education as a citizen of Neualtenburg I like to sometimes take a plunge into the ancient discussion threads of this forum when I have the time to do so. I find it beneficial to see these exchanges to understand better the foundation of thought upon which the city rests. It is also a good way of seeing into the mind of the current oldtimers and understand what historical disputes and experience on which they base their views and opinions without necessetating them repeating their motivation to the benefit of yet another newbie citizen.

Since I am an avid user of the social bookmarks service del.icio.us (389 bookmarks and counting) and have been using this through some time now to archive and index selected news reports for an RL project on which I'm doing research I began to see how this service might possibly used beneficially to organise and make more easily accessible the old threads from the archive.

Consider this:
The Neualtenburg Projekt forum contains 464 threads at the moment of writing dating all the way back to September 2004. Many of these threads contain veritable gems in argumentation and analysis and are still relevant to this day yet they are hidden deeply beneath many layers of confusing user interfaces and pages of idle chit-chat or flaming.

With an expected influx of new citizens there comes an increasing need to be able to categorise old forum knowledge to make it more easily accessible thematically to any historically interested new citizens.

Also, since according to Gwyneth Llewelyn the forums apparently form a source of judicial knowledge through which the proposed courts of the Scientific Council will inform themselves prior to reaching verdicts it will become even more important to make this information available easily to every citizen to improve transparency rather than have them rely on the interpretation of a select few, who have been around for a long time and may remember whether a discussion on this issue was ever held in the forum before: This both to the benefit of new citizens who get to access this information 'unfiltered' and also to relieve the burden on the shoulders of older citizens, who do no longer need to spend as much time perhaps explaining over and over again the historical basis upon which a particular institutional agreement has been made.

Ideally, of course these conversations should be subject to a historical analysis and be summarised in some communicatively friendly form on the SL history wiki. This would be the end goal of the ambition I have in mind. However, such a project is far-reaching in scope and would require resources on a scale, to which I do not have access.

In the mean time I thought it might make sense to go through the old discussions in this forum select those of which have a historical significance or even current relevance, bookmark them in a dedicated del.icio.us account for Neualtenburg and annotate them with a short title, description and most importantly a selection of tags used in a semi-systematically fashion.

For example, the long thread about the Neualtenburger Church, how it should be run under which denomination and the relation between the government and organised religion in Neualtenburg could be classified with the tags "secondlife neualtenburghistory church kirche religion belief ra event services unitarian nondenominational jewish 2004".

Other threads could be filed using partially the same tags and the end result would be one day the ability for anyone to type in "http://del.icio.us/tag/neualtenburghistory+secondlife+church" and get a nice summary listing of all the significant threads posted to the forums discussing the Church in some way. Such a list would in my view be the ideal for any historian wishing to perform an analysis or a write-up on the development in thinking and political life in Neualtenburg and it could possibly also inform future analysis by the Law Society or RL researchers of the evolution of governance in virtual worlds.

I think the project has potential and would like to think further on how to practically implement it - ideally it should be done collaboratively on the basis of a set of shared guidelines - but first of all I thought I'd bring the idea to the forum to hear if any of you other citizens or observers have any questions, comments or ideas for further refinement before progressing with the initiative?

For reference - the website of del.icio.us can be found here

Diderot,

This is a great first step. The first hurdle to be surmounted is finding everything. I'd like to see it go further.

I'll take as an example my efforts to extract and collect the Neualtenburg Code from the forums and in world sources. Right now it's slowly taking shape on the Wiki. I'm working with Seldon on a plan to create inworld Thincbooks of this material. Perhaps the city could fund a similar plan for important historical documents.

The reason I think this is the right way to go in the long term is that it gives us redundancy of important archival information. If you'll recall, there was a scramble to collect information from neualtenburg.org when it went away earlier this year. This plan, applied to the Neualtenburg Code and other documents, gives us versions in the forums, on an external web site, and in world.

Fellow citizens

I have as a trial begun the selection and indexation of old discussion threads from the Neualtenburg forum of a historic significance.

To begin with I'd like to just get some experience with the process and produce a substantial corpus of material before documenting it properly and setting up procedures and documentation to enable other citizens to participate.

However, since the work entails selecting documents of historic significance there is some merit to the claim that it also gives the person carrying out the work the power to 'shape the perception of Neualtenburg history'. This is a contention that I acknowledge although I'd hasten to add that anyone seeking to shape the public's perception of Neualtenburg history would probably be more inclined to go to the SL history wiki and do his work there.

Nevertheless, I think it will be beneficial if we can make this process as transparent as possible. For now I do not want to spend time on documentation but I'd like to inform you all that I have created a user on the del.icio.us-service under my avatar name and have begun selecting discussion threads and annotating them with keywords of a semi-systematical nature. My hope is that as I add more threads and keywords a structure will develop organically. I have so far indexed 26 threads the newest of which is from February 2005 and deals with the initial calculations preparing the way for an actual budget for Neualtenburg.

You can follow the progress of my indexation using this link

There are already a number of indices for selecting subsets of the collection, but I will leave the documentation on how to use these indices for a later post.

Any questions, comments or complaints are of course cordially invited.