blog. Wybo Wiersma .net

A poster on LogiLogi, and it’s “Quest for Critical Mass”, was presented at Digital Humanities 2010. And we won an European Science Foundation bursary for it. On our poster we report on recent improvements of LogiLogi, provide some background theory about critical mass, and identify factors that can be of influence on attainment.

The conference has just ended, and it was a great event, featuring topics as diverse as literary ...read more

LogiLogi, and it’s Quest for Critical Mass will be presented (as a poster) at the Digital Humanities 2010 conference in London, this June. First of all we will analyze the concept of critical mass, as it applies to collaborative (hypertext Digital Humanities) web-applications, and at all the factors that come into it, such as network-effects, and bifurcation points.

Surprisingly little has been written ...read more

I just came back from the ‘second snow workshop’ of the LiquidPub project in Ovronnaz, Switzerland. Besides the location (first time at a winter-sports resort for me), the topic of the workshop was fascinating. It gave me a better understanding of the LiquidPub project, and while I had read most of the papers on LiquidPub before arriving, nothing can replace some face to face interaction with those in the project. There ...read more

LogiLogi is, as of today, ready for translation. We have worked on this because a German philosophy journal will start using LogiLogi some time within the next months. They asked us if they could have it translated. In addition it was something that was on our todo list for some time.

We use the I18n (Internationalization) framework provided by Rails, and the Translate Rails plugin for editing the ...read more

Just got back from the ECAP (European Conference on Computing and Philosophy) 2009 in Barcelona. Though it was quite a broad conference, and the quality of the presentations sometimes varied, I found it to be a fascinating and definitely recommendable event. Last year I also attended and presented at it, in Monpellier. A video of this is now available in ogg format, (and flv, slides of 2008 are here).

Drawn from the ...read more

The Philosophers Rally – The Future of Philosophy was a vibrant, interesting, local conference. We had many interesting discussions, and there were good talks to attend, not just of the keynote speakers such as David Gamez, but also of Johnny Søraker, on virtual worlds, of Marleen Moors, on technology, certainty and death, and of David Koepsell, on copyrights in the nano-age.

And of course LogiLogi was also presented ...read more

The FOSDEM was pretty amazing. The Friday night Beer-event was overwhelming to say the least, and on saturday morning there was a very interesting keynote talk on the future of ‘Free and Open’ with many applications moving into the cloud by Mark Surman, of the Mozilla Foundation.

And there were many other good talks, of which for us quite a few were on sunday in the Ruby and Rails developer room.

I arrived ...read more

Over three days we will be releasing Rails Plugins extracted from LogiLogi.org in a little Plugin Triathlon. And then on Sunday, the fourth day, we will present the three of them (at least two, three if time permits) in the Ruby and Rails room of the FOSDEM in Brussels. And the first one is released today. It is Thorny Form

Thorny Form is a Rails plugin for unobtrusively protecting forms against form-SPAM. It adds extra fields ...read more

We’d like to let you know that another paper about LogiLogi has been written. It is about the differences between LogiLogi and Talia/Philospace. It was written by Wybo Wiersma, of LogiLogi, and Stefano David, who is working with Talia; and for the Digital Humanities 2009 Conference. You can download and read the paper here.

Yesterday we were at the Software Freedom Day kickoff in Baarn, the Netherlands. We gave a presentation there on Freedom on the Brave New Web, and on LogiLogi.org, and a bit on our current efforts to make it usable to the max. It went well, and there also was a nice discussion afterward.

The slides of our presentation can be found here. A video might also become available, and in any case here is already a pre-view of ...read more

And the FKFT was a great experience too. I’m typing this some days after the conference while waiting during the night at the Airport for my early-morning flight to Amsterdam. A few days after the fact because not just the conference was great: Barcelona also is; I love this city. It’s one of the best of Europe: grandiose architecture; not just Gaudi, but everywhere, public culture, statutes, museums, street ...read more

The RMLL was a really cool & interesting event. The atmosphere rocked, and there were plenty of good & interesting people around :) Sadly enough I could not speak with many of them, and follow even fewer talks, as the RMLL was French, very French. I did not expect this as they announced it as an international event. But I should have guessed it as they used the word “mondial”, instead of “global” ;) Anyway, their friendliness made up for ...read more

The Digital Humanities 2008 conference was the conference to visit! It covered topics ranging from computer linguistics, dialectology, corpora, digital text-editions, and last but not least information- systems for people from the humanities and philosophers. In this last category there were 2 projects presented that we think are are especially interesting; of course besides our own project, LogiLogi :-).

The first was Discovery ...read more

The ECAP08 was held in Montpellier, France, from 16-18 June. It was a very exciting, fast and inspiring conference, about the cross-roads of philosophy and computer-science/informatics. Talks ranged from the philosophy of information, gender and information- ethics to (ideas about) applications for philosophers.

And in this last category 3 interesting live systems were presented. The first was wiki ...read more

And the good news just keeps coming: LogiLogi Manta will be, besides at ECAP, at Digital Humanities, and at the RMLL conferences also at the Free Knowledge, Free Technology conference, in Barcelona, Spain, from the 15th till the 17th of July. At this conference we will especially be going into the peergroup-system and into how we think to be able to combine quality and openness.

And for the development ...read more

It’s there!, almost… LogiLogi Manta will go live as public beta in just 4 days; on the 6th of May, 2008 AD.

The last two and a half week – since we planned the release – we have done a lot of heavy coding and radical refactoring. And we still have four days ahead of – quite intense – preparations, but it’s now really getting there…! We are now mainly tweaking the layout, writing some prelimary help-documentation ...read more

We have good news again, and this time there is no first of April in sight. Our submission to the European conference on Computing and Philosophy has been accepted! So besides our general presentation at the Digital Humanities 2008 in Oulu, Finland (June 25-29) we will now also be presenting in Montpellier, France (16-18 June). The presentation we give at ECAP will especially be about the philosophy behind Manta ...read more

We just received the happy news that our submission to the Digital Humanities 2008 conference has been accepted!

So some time between June the 25th and the 29th LogiLogi Manta will be presented in Oulu, Finland. The presentation there will be all-round; about Manta as a platform, and it’s (& the web’s) connection to the philosophical and wider academic tradition…

We also submitted abstracts on various aspects (philosophical ...read more

Freedom matters, not just for software like your Operating System or Firefox, but also for live web-applications. And with more and more functionality and social uses of software moving to the web it will soon only matter more.

About this was my talk at the T-Dose conference of one and a half week ago. I only now come to write about it as my (Wybo’s) father died just 10 days before the conference, ...read more

I (Wybo) am back from the PICNIC Conference in Amsterdam. It was totally 2.0. Many things were really outside the box, like the totally incredible analog red-fluid bottles SMS-screen, and what about a food serving dress?

Anyway, it was definitely interesting, especially the European Bloggers Conference, with among others Corry Doctorow of BoingBoing, and many famous European and Dutch bloggers. And besides I also visited ...read more