So, after another long pause, I'll try to answer the question which
remained at the end of my previous
post: how does my friend Jim's being in jail make me
busier?
Well, you see, Jim had an interactive Web site, which he
referred to as a wiki, and which he'd set up, more than a year
earlier, in order to experiment with how wikis work. When he
found out, in May of this year, that he'd being spending six months in jail, Jim had the brainstorm
that this existing wiki could be repurposed: it could be a
communication vehicle for those who wanted to stay in touch with him,
and otherwise support him, while he was in the correctional
facility. For example, he could write something like a "blog"
which could be posted on the site. (No, he doesn't have computer
access in jail; he writes it by hand, a Minnesota Friend
transcribes it and e-mails it to me, and I put it up on the
site. But that's getting ahead of the story.)
Jim put a quite a lot of energy into getting the site ready for this
use, during the short time he had before reporting as ordered.
But he knew from the outset that, for this to
work, someone else would need to administer the site while he was
actually "inside". As he and I are pretty close friends, and
fellow "semi-retired" computer professionals, he asked me to do this,
and I readily agreed.
And for weeks (through, and well beyond, the last update to this Radio
blog), I, in turn, poured a great deal of energy, and more than a
little worry, into it. As for the worry part: at least part of
me knew, all along, that nothing really critical depended on getting
this wiki (which I prefer to call an "interactive Web site") set up
"just right". But I was upset about Jim's having to go to jail;
felt "there must be something I can do to help"; and when the
opportunity to do this presented itself, I not only was happy to
oblige, but undoubtedly invested it with some of the emotion that I
wished I could invest in "fixing things" so that he didn't
have to go to jail, if only there were a way to do that. I'm
sure there's a technical name, among shrinks, for this phenomenon.
One issue with which I wrestled a lot was whether to take advantage of
the wiki software's capability to restrict access to the site, so that
only those with a username and password could "get in". I ended
up doing so, but it was a hard decision for me, because it wasn't what
Jim had intended, when he handed it over to me; and I wanted to
respect his wishes as much as I could. But I ended up concluding
that I would have to trust my own instincts: he was "inside", by the
time that I understood the pros and cons of this issue.
Anyway, that's only an example of the things I've agonized over, and
labored on, in trying to make this site serve its several purposes, as
best I could.
I can imagine that I might have made you curious to see the actual site in
question. Actually, I think part of me hopes I've make
you curious. But it wouldn't do much good to list the URL,
since, as I said, you'd need a username and password in order to "get in".
I will tell you that the "wiki" software in question is known as
JotSpot. The people who developed it call it a "wiki", but more
specifically, an "application wiki". This means that within such
a site, you can have various pages which embody various kinds of
on-line applications (from forums to spreadsheets), not just the "web
pages you can edit right in your browser" which are most commonly
associated with the term "wiki". That's part of why I prefer to
call it an "interactive Web site"; the other part of the reason is
that some people don't associate anything with the term
"wiki": that word is just not part of their vocabularies.
I could take this bit of writing in different directions, from
here. I could talk more about the JotSpot technology: why it
seems potentially promising to me, and why I'm worried that the
promise will not be realized.
I could also talk about Quakerism: Jim and I are both friends and
Friends, i.e. members of the Raleigh Friends Meeting, and most of the
people participating in this support effort at the Minnesota end are
members or attenders of the Twin Cities Friends Meeting. So it
would be interesting to discuss whether the way I've been able to
build cooperation with these people, whom I've never met, reveals
anything that's special about the Religious Society of Friends (the
more formal term for the faith tradition known as Quakerism).
Perhaps I'll do both of those things, if I can find the time.
But that will be in posts yet to come.
2:07:35 PM 
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