Hapgood

Mike Caulfield's latest web incarnation. Networked Learning, Open Education, and Online Digital Literacy

Explaining Federation Through Family Movie Night, Part I

I’ve been struggling to explain to people why federation is necessary. In practice, federation doesn’t get you much until there are people around to federate with.

Worse, it doesn’t get you anywhere until there is valuable material in your federation. Valuable material takes time to produce, and people aren’t going to spend that time making federated content until they see the value. So we have a bit of a Catch-22 here.

Luckily, I’ve come up with an example of solving a simple, pressing problem using federation that does not take much time investment. It’s about family movie night.

This video explains the problem and why a non-federated solution will not work. The next video will show how federation can solve it.

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mikecaulfield

The infolit guy.

5 responses to “Explaining Federation Through Family Movie Night, Part I”

  1. More Federated Wikis | þoht-hord

    […] Caulfield is now explaining wiki federation and its benefits by means of a movie recommendation example.  In the (surprise) federated wiki he set up to document this, Mike […]

    Reply
  2. #indiewebcamp | Hapgood

    […] Explaining Federation Through Family Movie Night, Part I → […]

    Reply
  3. Tony Bowden (@tmtm) Avatar
    Tony Bowden (@tmtm)

    Hi! I’ve tried various searches but can’t find Part 2 of this. Can you add a link to it here? Thanks.

    Reply
    1. mikecaulfield Avatar
      mikecaulfield

      You know, I think I never published part two because people didn’t really get this scenario. (I went through half a dozen explanations on my way to the Clarke demo.) Were you just curious or were you really interested in this database-ish style use?

      Reply
      1. Tony Bowden (@tmtm) Avatar
        Tony Bowden (@tmtm)

        A bit of both. I’ve heavily abused SemanticMediaWiki in the past as an emergent-database, including using it as an accounts system, and I’m currently trying to get my head around SFW, so this example looked tantalising to me. Perhaps there’s another similar example somewhere I should look at instead?

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