Thanks for this inout, Bob :-) I hear what you say, and it's a very interesting point. I believe you are right. What's so incredibly difficult IMO, is to _not_ use fixed categories to describe what we do, because it will lock us into a position we may not want to have. We try very hard to avoid this.

Say we describe what we do as “affiliate marketing”, then we lock ourselves into a particular set of ideas, where some people feel comfortable and others definitely not. We may also lock ourselves into a blind spot, where we won't pick up on other ideas which are meaningful, and therefore prevent us from understanding the real problems we aim to understand. Same thing when we say this is for “filmmakers” or if we say we make a new way to “search” or “find information”…

So, our strategy from the beginning has been to throw this blog out here and try to make it sufficiently diverse and interesting in it's themes and capablitiies to attract readers from very different input bases, who share or somehow have an interest in our problem – and further build upon this in our wiki. We're trying to build community from the bottom up, and do that without having a product yet, to build it around. What we have is a problem and a vision, and both will take form as we unfold our online activities. The tough part is connecting and energizing our local networks, at the same time as we create a global network.

We don't know yet precisely where all this will lead, although we do have good ideas about what we want to build. We just can't build this without a broader input base. The old “build, launch and they will come” doesn't work for us.

Fixed categories provide a way to enter a community or culture. Groups share a common culture by holding some set of ideas in common. Therefore, starting with a known, fixed set of categories would help people self-select into or out of a given culture. Fluid tagging allows for increased specialization in forming bonds among people.

Thanks and have fun! – Bob

I meet a lot of scepticism, ignorance and thickheadedness generally aimed at (digital) technology, and specifically at open architectures such as wikis.

Somehow though, during the last year or so, Facebook seems to have broken down some of these reservations (at least over here), so that people, who otherwise wouldn't use internet services, have now begun to do so. I hope they will also begin to ask questions and think about what the architectures they use entail. In this sense, popular services such as Facebook can be forerunners for involving users in more dedicated environments, such as wikis. And that's also why it's essential, that we are on Facebook and other such services.

Btw, Clay Shirky has a great talk on ontology and the clashes between fixed categories and worldviews, and the emerging world of tagging and fluid filtering methods : http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detai...

Ditto. Going back to your science fiction writer, if there was an article about him on a wiki and he wanted to offer better category options, it becomes really easy to do. He can simply add say [[Category:Retired science fiction writers]] to the article. Then he can look at the category structure, see where that would fit in to that and add say [[Category:Science fiction writers]] or [[Category:People who have retired]] or [[Category:Professional authors]] to link it back into the categorization tree. If it doesn't look obvious, he can always use a number of talk pages or contact an admin to see how to do to better integrate that category in to the wiki.

Wikis can be amazingly flexible in that regard and there is very little overhead from a development stance for making changes such as those. The cost is at the community level and having people who have the job of interacting with people be the ones who can make that change helps to foster relationships. There aren't as many complex levels which can make communication across levels more arduous.