Borderland

Walked out this morning, don’t believe what I saw
Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
Seems I’m not alone at being alone
Hundred billion castaways, looking for a home
I’ll send an s.o.s. to the world
I’ll send an s.o.s. to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle… (Sting & Police)

A little over a year ago while I was in my truck driving to work I had the great idea to set up a wiki for the state of Alaska. The whole state. I wrote up a proposal on a scrap of paper while I was idling at a back table during a staff meeting, and emailed it to Wikia. In less than a day I was the founder of a new wiki territory.

The Wild

The experience of starting such an ambitious project reminded me a lot of how it felt to take up residence on the property I moved onto outside of Fairbanks 18 years ago. The land was raw, without access to utilities, and I lived in a canvas wall tent from April to October while I figured out how to build what passed for a house. There was so much to do, I can’t imagine ever trying such a stunt again. Sooo… this is an update on my attempt to (virtually ) colonize a whole state.

I put out a blog post that I called Message in a Bottle that told how it felt then. I learned a few things about editing a wiki, and I think I may have also (just today) learned something about online communities. The editing for the wiki took a fair amount of time in the beginning because I wanted to establish a navigation structure. I found a couple of people to help me work on it, but I did most of the work. Over the months I worked out the category structure, and devoted some sporadic efforts to write articles for it, but the only action other than mine was reverting the edits of spammers. No community. Even the spammers seem to have been locked out. That’s good, but I’ve been wondering how I am ever going to get the thing going.

As a personality, I am not gregarious. I live happily in a world all my own out in the country, at the literal end of pavement in North America. I like to write, but normal forms of socializing (like, especially talking on the phone) I’m not especially comfortable with, unless I’m with people I know well. My hermit tendencies are not well-suited to promoting the wiki. I’ve wondered how long it would be before Wikia put the wiki up for adoption.

Fresh tracks

That may not be a problem due to some recent action that seems kind of promising. AlaskaPaul appeared out of nowhere yesterday with some fresh ideas for the site, and he’s been fearlessly making edits to it. That’s encouraging! Never mind that the tidy pages are now full of lists of places and subjects that don’t connect to anything yet. I’ll organize it. He can create all he wants. I welcome the disruption and embrace the chaos that I was looking forward to. Things were happening today. It was fun to see stuff appear there that I didn’t do.

We’ve exchanged emails, and I’m happy to see him take up the slack. He’s from a different region of the state, and that’s a good thing. Alaska is so large that there are significant differences in culture from one end to the other. I only know my own little corner, a point of view that had only limited value for anyone from a different region.

The first thing AlaskaPaul did was to find a list of every school in the state and paste their names in a list on a page called Schools. That was interesting, I thought. Why didn’t I think of it? See how having another person around stimulates an idea? So I took the list and used the wiki syntax to make each school name a link. Now I’m in the process of creating a page for every school in Alaska, and putting them each into a Schools category so that their pages will all be indexed. Making a page for each school is no big deal, other than clicking on the link and pasting the name of the school and the category tag into the page. When I’m done with that project, I’ll have made a web page for every school in Alaska!

I’m wondering what I can do to encourage people from those schools to edit their web pages. AlaskaPaul has helped me to see that I need to continue setting up infrastructure, as well as recruit people for this project. In the interest of capitalizing on this new wave of energy, I posted a announcement on the Alaska flickr group and the Alaskanbloggers frappr group, because I know those are two places where there are people who might have a clue about the internet, and who are also interested in Alaska.

Resonance

These pages that are being generated in the wiki are like seeds. I’m hoping to set up enough pages that there might be resonance with some of them for a few people and prompt them to want to make it something of their own. It seems a little bit like fishing. I realize that to get this going now, I have to make it about other people and not about me, or what I’m interested in. To do that on a broad scale like for a whole state, it may be necessary to first create something that will seem a bit like a directory, or an almanac, that people will use to simply follow links to other sites of interest.

If, for instance, I made a bed and breakfast category, and made pages for all the bed and breakfast housing options there are in the state of Alaska, and notified the owners, the owners of those places might take an interest in maintaining the pages about their lodging facilities. Another idea that I floated past AlaskaPaul is that we could have a flea market where people could barter stuff. If the site supported an economy of some kind it might begin to work. In fact, that seems like a rule.

The site has to support an economy of some kind.

One of the problems I sense is that the mission is too broad to attract a coherent community of interests without breaking it down to support some practical functionality:

The Alaska Wikia features information about the physical, social, and cultural landscape of Alaska. It features information about Alaska that highlights both personal and scientific knowledge about the 49th state. The Alaska Wikia will inform visitors, researchers, and residents interested in learning more about this unique and diverse geographic region.

Nobody wants information for its own sake. It has to have a useful purpose. My neighbor who is a farmer told me that the day he could look on the internet to find out where he could get a truck load of horse manure, he’d be interested in using the internet. He’s the guy whose interests I need to target.

My real hope is for the schools pages, though. I’ve wanted all along to get kids from around the state more interested in what is going on here. My own students will be contributing more to our school page, and learning to link to projects from there. I wonder what the hook for teachers might be? I’m thinking.

Keep an eye on this project, if you’re interested in it. If anyone has any advice or commentary to offer, I’m open. Theres a lot here that I don’t yet understand. I still feel like I’m stumbling around on the beach, but I may have found a pathway in.

Just a castaway, an island lost at sea, oh…