I think it would be very productive for forums like this to be able to document useful solid info that members are able to agree on. Normally, forums get lots of discussion with sharing of good info, but very little comes of it all. Maybe we can improve on that.
Background.
I've been occasionally discussing such ideas with others since at least 2013 mainly on the forums at
The Thunderbolts Project ™ – A voice for the Electric Universe where I've been a member since shortly after the site started in 2007. My username on that forum is Lloyd. In 2017 I started working with Bruce Nappi at
John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society Forums to help develop a process for doing scientific collaboration. Bruce let me direct
a project there which I decided would be on the subject of
Geology. It involved asking scientists, mostly members of CNPS, some of the basic claims of their own models, having discussions and then rating each model on completeness and plausibility. I kept track of the discussions etc at a separate forum that I started separately from the official CNPS forum. Mine is at
Geology | Cnps and the conclusion of the project is posted in the thread there titled "CNPS Special Project #2 SUMMARY". That project ended a year ago after going on for about 6 months.
In 2012 I organized Electric Sun Discussions and posted them at
Thunderbolts Forum • View topic - Electric Sun Discussions . We had the discussions on Google Documents (those are etherpads, which worked rather well as the four of us were able to write on the same page at the same time. Google has some advantages, but it has trouble reloading the page sometimes. This site may be better in that case:
Etherpad ). I mostly asked the other guys questions, as they were very knowledgeable, while I was not, and they asked each other questions as well and answered. Then I edited them and copied each discussion to that thread. I decided that I favored Charles Chandler's model after previously favoring the Thunderbolts model. Charles' model is at
Electric Astrophysics .
I sometimes call myself a liberal libertarian (most libertarians seem to be fairly conservative at least economically). The Free State Project in New Hampshire had a forum that I joined in 2007 or so. There used to be a lot of discussion there, but for the past couple years I'm the only one who still posts there regularly. I only do so because my posts get a couple hundred views each week and I like to have somewhere convenient to store a lot of good info. This is where I post:
The Friendly Forum . My username there is Luck. Since I needed at least 5 letters for my username here, I added an R (which I hope doesn't change my luck for the worse). Anyway, I mostly post links there to good articles I find online each week or two. I copy the tech & sci blog links to a similar thread at
Thunderbolts Forum • View forum - Electric Universe - Resources
Collaboration & Documentation.
Forums, chat rooms and etherpads all work well for collaboration. The latter two are good for live discussion. Forums and Wikis etc are good for documentation. At least forums that allow members to edit their posts work well for that. That's because the OP (opening post) of each thread can be used for documentation with the later posts used for discussion. Then info from discussion can be copied to the documentation in the OP. I don't think I've actually tried that yet, but it would obviously work pretty well, if there's plenty of space in the OPs. And once the OP is at least temporarily fairly complete, it could be copied to a wiki together with all other OP documentation from other threads. There could actually be documentation in other posts after the OP if any other member wanted to do independent documentation. There should probably be a team of people to rate the completeness and plausibility of each OP summary and only copy to the wiki those rated fairly complete and highly plausible or probable.
So that's a general idea for a procedure that might make us all feel like we're accomplishing something a little more significant. I discussed this idea very briefly in another thread where Korben encouraged me to try it out. So this is an introduction to it. And next, maybe after some discussion, I'll think about starting a thread on a topic I like that I can try this procedure on. So, any comments?
P.S. (Surveys).
On some of the threads in this forum where you call for members' views or input, I think it would be a big help to write up a survey on Google Forms and ask members to answer the questions in it. Then the answers could be posted in the OP. Si? It's easy to use the Forms template to make up questionnaires. I enjoy doing that occasionally.