Overview of this website
Goal
- The goal of this website is to develop documents of all forms (html, pdf, drawings, images etc.) as well as computer software co-operatively. All subjects are welcome. The site will especially welcome articles on and by Victor Papenek, E.F. Schumacher and other gurus who advocated morally responsible designing. All documents/software placed in this website shall be collectively referred here as "submissions".
- All submissions would deal with the subject of architecture, and would be cross-indexed using the Art & Architecture Thesaurus from Getty Research as well as other thesauri developed over time in this website. Members of the website can chose to keep the documents under their own copyright license or put their work under the GNU Free Document License or any of the free software licenses available from GNU or Mozilla, etc. in case the submission was a software. Cooperative development of the submissions can be carried out as per the licensing condition that was laid out by the original author.
- All submissions, irrespective of the licensing conditions, will be de-mystified by all members of the website, as well as the casual unregistered visitor. The process of de-mystification is simply providing accurate comments with references that highlights things that are wrong or right about a submitted work.
Users of this website
- The webmaster of this site will remain anonymous. This is critical for the Delphi method to work. The webmaster is replaceable. i.e. The role can be passed to others from time to time. This would be useful if the webmaster wants to reveal his/her true identity at some point in time. But whoever who is replacing the webmaster will need to also remain unidentifiable during the time period when he/she is playing the role of the webmaster.
- Any visitor to this website can create an account. Once a vistor gets an account he/she would be referred here as a member. Each and every architects work are welcome. In fact, they need not be architects also — but the content must be something pertaining to architecture. This can be in words or drawings or images or software or whatever. It is recommended that members be anonymous (or rather pseudonymous, because some reference name is required from each member). But this is not mandatory. The member can chose to be involved under his/her own name.
- There are two kinds of roles available for a member. He/She can either be an "authenticated user" or a "reviewer". This is explained in more detail in the next chapter.
- Any member can become a reviewer. This can happen in two ways:
- a) The member is elected by at least three other reviewers. OR
- b) The memberis invited by the webmaster to become a reviewer due to some peer reviewed published work (not necessarily in architecture).
- All reviewers must take up pseudonyms when they are elected into the review board, even if they had initially joined up under their own name. This is also essential for the Delphi Method to work. However, reviewers are encouraged to keep their known identity also on the site. That means a reviewer could be participating under a pseudonym as well as his/her actual name.
- Though it is recommended that particpants use pseudonyms to register on this website, we also want members who are participating under their own names. Ideally, we expect such members to be from well known institutes and/or are recognized for having published works in peer reviewed journals. This should help improve the credibility of the website.
- No email addresses of any member(known identities or pseudonymous identities) will be listed on the site.
Features
- This website uses the WikiDot content management system. Contents can directly be keyed into the website from any browser from various entry points. More on this later
- Apart from the above content generation methods that are possible, comments are possible for all submissions, including forums.
- All the submissions would be slotted into the AAT (Art & Architecture Taxonomy) from Getty research. Currently the AAT is being transferred to this website in a sensible manner, but the task is quite large as there are many entries in this thesaurus and so it would take some time before all the entries are transferred. Other taxonomies would also be co-operatively developed by the reviewers.
- A feature on the site allows all particpants to be notified via email when there are changes to the contents of the website.
- Contents should be spell-checked before submission
- RSS/RDF XML feeds from important architectural websites all over the world will be shortly available. So headlines and short summaries of other websites can automatically be seen here too.
- XML feeds from this website can be freely syndicated by any other site. Use the XML button at the right hand side.
- This website has the ambition of developing a rating system for architecture. (To be done).
- A mailing list would be available for announcements. (To be done).
- This site was initially run without any advertisement content, but then the site got hacked into mercilessly and it was quite painful to get it back to shape. We would need money for maintainance. Now we've decided to put some Google advertisements. The financial accounts for this web-site will be published for all members to see. The site ideally hopes to live off voluntary donations. However, members can put up commercial software in this website, as there are no restrictions on licenses of individual submissions.
References:
- The GNU Free Document License at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html
- See also http://www.gnu.org/licenses/
- A free timestamping service available from http://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper.htm
- Read on timestamping security here: http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/faq/7-11.html that explains how timestamping can be useful to protect intellectual property.
- Commercial low cost timestamping available from http://www.e-timestamp.com/
- Read about Art & Architecture thesaurus here http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/aat/
page revision: 4, last edited: 01 Sep 2008 09:41