>> Wiki-fy it perhaps?
> For those of us who are terminally un-hip, could you translate that?
Luke beat me to this. Rather than translate, it's easier to demonstrate:
http://lokarnos.com/article.pl?sid=04/05/10/0632258 describes the Whitewall Wiki, a project which started very similar to the Stormsteads project but chose a different technology.
If we had been restricted to the mailing list, we would have suffered the same fate as Stormsteads.
> --Bryan
>
> PS. Stormsteads bogged down when we got to the nitty-gritty of
> trying to describe large number of inhabitants of one stead (combined
> with the population distribution issue, which was resolved but seemed
> to kill much of the momentum). The problem in part is that a large
> number of people with different viewpoints, trying to agree on
> something by consensus, is seldom swift or effecient.
That's where mailing lists fail, encouraging discussion, whereas wiki-projects prosper, because people are encouraged to present their ideas as textual examples.
Interactive editing, with the stress on adding to the text and content rather than discussing things away, has that effect.
> The alternatives are to let a few people have essential design freedom
> over certain areas,
Basically implied in the Wiki-setup if you take the convention that the original author has sort of a moderatorship over the sub-project started by him.
> or to set up some sort of voting system.
Voting by adding to a story - as in the Wiki - has proven effective.
> Well,
> there may be other alternatives, but they don't leap to mind for me
> at the moment. I have substantial amounts of material in my head
> that I never wrote for the project purely because of the issue trying
> not to take excessive control merely through pre-emptive writing....
You should not be that polite if you want such a project to succeed. Without people providing a stream of input, projects tend to go to some state of sleep - take whatever big recent splash there has been, just like Whitewall, kethaela.free.fr or Lokarnos.com. All of them still operating, just varying levels of hiatus as people prepare for other events like Continuum.
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