winterize-users team mailing list archive

[Max Polk <maxpolk@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello and welcome!


Saturday February 9, 2013 begins the launch of my magnum opus, a new 
wiki whose page content is written in any domain-specific language, and 
whose content is decentralized both internally and externally.


I offer this project, my greatest idea borne from years of planning and 
thinking, with excitement and hope, freely to the world.  The GNU Affero 
GPL v3 license was chosen so that it remains free (1), and because it is 
likely to be run over a network (2).


This wiki seeks to solve many problems and shortcomings traditional 
wikis face, along with solving problems we aren't even aware that exist 
yet, by means of a very simple set of principles and architectural 
constraints.  The architecture of the wiki will be two simple ideas: 
domain-specific languages and decentralization. Upon these everything 
will be built.


Instead of layering more and more upon a weak foundation, the idea is to 
remove and remove everything until you have a minimal core from which 
anything can be built.


An early idea is to first lay down a bootstrap instance of the wiki, 
then develop this wiki using itself.  To get started, let's lay down a 
few prototypes to see what patterns emerge that is best, and pick which 
one has the most promise to carry things forward, supporting only a few 
simple DSLs (3).  Of course, wiki markup is already a default DSL, so 
that might be first.


The logo for Winterize is a snowflake, a crystalline formation, a 
metaphor for how information can combined into marvelous unique 
structures, based on multiple sources and combined into unexpected new 
forms using only very simple bonds.


I am dedicated to the future of this project, and commit myself to its 
success.  Now let's go and change the world!


--Max Polk


(1) http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language