[Radiance-general] Radiance wiki proposal

Wed Feb 5 12:03:05 PST 2014

Dear 'Googs', Fellow Renderers,

Thank you for your thoughtful response. Wikis do not take much money to 
run (far less than $50.00 per year), and they certainly do not (or 
should not) have any realized (or sense of) personal ownership. The 
information is collectively owned by the community of Radiance users, 
its contributors, and the public who pay for it. Admittedly, taxpayer 
money handlers, administrators, and other bureaucracies are perhaps 
involved in certain aspects of Radiance and its software; however, the 
information can and should be freely accessible—a state that is not as 
transparent or fully realized as the insiders and professionals of the 
Radiance community might believe or project onto the public.

Admittedly, many wikis fail, although many (i.e., all currently 
existing) wikis succeed, which is why I showed two successful, active, 
and useful wikis of sufficiently divergent topics and obscurity to make 
my earlier point. In addition to Wikipedia.org, there are countless 
wikis that are supported by communities of the same size as the Radiance 
community (in other words, we have critical mass, but still need 
critical collective exertion/belief/effort, etc..) If Radiance were born 
today, there would be no question as to whether or not to inform the 
community with a wiki. In fact, I can't think of any other serious 
software besides Radiance that doesn't have an active wiki where faq's, 
tutorials, and examples are shared and edited by the community...what 
does that say about our current situation?

Most of your arguments, from my perspective, are actually in favor of 
having what I would call decentralized content. Clones, backups, 
redundancy, historical tracking, and forking (if and whenever necessary) 
are just a few of the advantages of wiki content, which is naturally 
fully capable of supporting fast-changing and evolving topics such as 
Radiance. In fact, wikis are better at this than the current 
web/email/gatekeeper/server/owner models. The content should be shared, 
copied, archived, cloned, and forked as the evolution of the software 
and its users (USERS, are not exclusive to paid professionals and 
developers) deem sufficient and/or necessary. It is just a matter of 
time before a wiki is realized by current or future Radiance users—the 
relevant questions are: how much time will it take; who (if anyone) has 
to retire, step aside or be ignored; and who will be brave enough to 
champion the inevitable: a completely shared, open, free, nonlinear, 
user-based Radiance community?

The problem with naysayers is that they either fundamentally 
misunderstand or loathe the concept realized by Wikipeida and its 
clones. Bureaucratic entities are horrible at sharing information 
(because they want to, or must, control it), which may be part of the 
reason for why it is presently so darn hard for folks to freely learn 
and use Radiance. Perhaps this is an anticipated or desired effect, but 
fundamentally Radiance is fantastically simple to understand and use, 
once you figure out how to get a book, find a mentor, or otherwise get a 
handle on the current instructional tools. The current problem and 
reason why the Radiance community is not larger is because the teaching 
methods are outdated and obscure. Better methods of communication have 
been around since the birth of Wikipedia. Furthermore, the 
radiance-general mailing list is not as intuitive and easy to use for 
beginners as it might appear to someone who has been in the business 
since the very first Radiance workshop. And when (the linear and clumsy) 
radince-online server shuts down, who is going to pick up the pieces and 
carry on the legacy past our current generation? Probably Google, which 
is the only real way to access (read as: stumble upon) radiance-online 
content. Wikis are for all levels of users, including beginners and 
advanced, who will eventually be responsible for the software and 
community's future. Newsflash: you can't make money writing content for 
using Radiance. So, why not make it free, freely available, freely 
editable, and freely distributable? I urge anyone to think hard about 
this question before submitting a pseudo-philosophical answer.

As I noted in my earlier email, I am interested in hearing from positive 
responders (e.g., the thoughtful and defiant students who value the 
points that I am trying to communicate in this thread, the artists who 
want to share and inspire their work, the scientists and mentors who 
want to advance our collective knowledge—in a freely open and 
fully-peer-supported fashion). I am represented in all of those 
descriptions, and I imagine or hope that there are many like me. Let's 
get together and compare notes, publicly or privately. The professional 
naysayers, administers, gatekeepers, and content owners might best serve 
the public by simply listening to (or ignoring) this thread, short or 
long as it may be...

Sincerely,
Chris

On 2/5/14 12:26 PM, Guglielmetti, Robert wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
> I was about to respond to your earlier emails when this proposal came in. Thanks for your generous offer, first of all. Here's the thing: this has been tried and done before. Search the archives for radiance-general (which has stood the test of time and the ebb and flow of federal funding, BTW) and you will find initiatives started up, going all the way back to the very first Radiance Workshop in 2002. Collaborative efforts never got off the ground, and it's not for lack of someone offering to register a domain name and host the thing. People move, change jobs (careers, even), funding comes and goes, people get funny about ownership and distribution, and here's the big one: Radiance itself changes. The fact that Radiance continues to evolve and remain a high quality, well-documented bit of software is friggin' amazing to me, particularly in light of the fact that it's largely the product of one dude. But evolve it has (and does), and as it does the rules change. In response, the Radiance community takes up the new stuff (and new folks take up the old stuff), and we all document our successes and failures in various ways. There are papers, web pages, tutorials, resurrected out-of-print textbooks (thanks Fritz), all over the web, most of which are linked in some form or fashion from the radiance-general archives. And, as ever, there are the release notes, manpages, and the source code.
>
> Efforts are underway to make some energy modeling wikis, and some of these efforts are budgeted thousands of dollars, and they still suck, to be honest with you. I think the Radiance community does a great job on a largely volunteer basis producing what it does. The effort of maintaining a wiki, while noble, seems like just more administrative work for not a lot of benefit. The stuff is out there, and when things disappear, its usually for a good reason and when it's just someone pulled the plug on their website or whatever, these things can be found by coming to this listserv.
>
> I'm probably sounding like a dick right now, but all I'm trying to say is that your time would be better spent creating your own list of links and HOWTOs and adding it to the constellation of other stuff that's already out there. Again, I for one appreciate your enthusiasm and generosity. I just think that the Radiance wiki has been tried before. In fact, you might want to ping Andy McNeil because he was in the process of trying to add such a beast to the radiance-online.org site. Maybe it's an idea whose time has come, and I AM just a dick. Who knows?
>
> - Googs
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Kallie [mailto:kallie at umn.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2014 9:54 AM
> To: Radiance general discussion
> Subject: [Radiance-general] Radiance wiki proposal
>
> Fellow Renderers,
>
> This is my offer and proposal for a Radiance wiki:
>
> With your collective approval, and if enough Radiance users pledge to contribute to a Radiance wiki (i.e., coauthor, manage, and/or otherwise create, edit, and maintain pages and entries), I will offer my services to register a domain name, pay for the hosting, and setup the wiki server.
>
> (Also, I would be content if someone or everyone would prefer to appoint someone other than myself for such an initiative.)
>
> Sincerely,
> Chris
>
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