Posted by Offray on Feb 14, 2012; 4:20pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/Vision-for-Aida-tp4376327p4387549.html

Hi All,

Is nice to see this new year activity with the new year and is nice to
see this focus in documentation. Making the connection with the
greetings message from Janko apropos of the last year, 2011 was the year
I discover Aida and made the decision of learning web development. I
like a lot Aida, but because of the lack of comprehensive newbie
oriented documentation and my lack of knowledge to help filling the gaps
on this matter, my choice was to learn Seaside (which I like also, by
the way). Now I want to comment on the documentation matter a little
more, and if this mail gets too long (and is probable), I will try to
publish parts as supporting material in other places.

First a little of context: I'm a teacher of Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT) seminars on a postgraduate studies in
Science Didactics, in Bogotá - Colombia, South America. My students are
mostly school teachers without prior knowledge of programming and the
more we deal with the social aspects of digital culture, the more I see
the need of learning programming properly, despite of not being a
developer myself (I made some cognitive models using algorithms, but
that's not developing). So I'm in a context where I teach adult science
teachers about digital technology and I think that we all need to
program, specially in the context of web related technologies, because
that's a place where of political struggle is more evident (power
dynamics always related with technology since the mastering of the fire).

As Paulo Freire said, the problem teaching adults is that the usual
teaching for younger people is not enough related with "real life" for
them, and mostly they need get out of illiteracy for "real life"
reasons. Me and my students want to get out of our ICT illiteracy for
reasons like that and most of the examples in tutorials, including the
To Do example, are too artificial for us (ruby tutorial is a remarkable
exception, but we don't want recreate twitter). We want to create
something like a personal site, but connected with social networks.
Some, like Tantek Celik[1] have pioneered the idea and have call it DiSo
(for Distributed Social) making emphasis on microformats, but I want to
emphasize infrastructure and programming environments and that's where
Smalltalk environments excels others easily with its integration and
portability. We call the idea a "Digital Identity Router" (napkin first
draft here [2]). The idea is to build a kind of p2p social network where
you can connect with other people, using also monopoly privative ones
(Twitter, Facebook, etc) or the federates free open source ones
(Identica, Diaspora, etc), without depending _only_ on them for being
connected. They're kind of a second option. This is how it works:

You have a personal place where you put your data _first_, and then you
route the info where you want it to be _replicated_ (Twitter/identica,
facebook/Diaspora, flickr, and so on). The router can bring back the
interaction on that places (comments, stars, favs, and so on), so your
information _and_ the infrastructure behind it is at your control. If
you and your peers use the same model, you can be connected directly to
them by connecting the routers, without keep tracking on every contact
on the next new social network. Sensitive information can be available
only to your peers using the router and your site, so it never became
part of the Big Brother's data.


With this idea we're trying to get out of the sick merchandising
tendency of Web <Next ordinal number> dot "Ohhh", and instead of asking
ourselves about the next big thing in the next big "version" of the web,
we're trying to get an answer about how small can be the web?, can it
fit in your pocket? may be in a USB thumb drive, where you have (vía
Smalltalk/web2py) a multi-platform on-click server/IDE for a p2p social
architecture? May be it can work on/off-line, synchronizing this thumb
drives with some servers on the web and with other peers.

This is the project I would like to do with my students, using Aida or
Seaside. For the moment I have opted by the last because of the
extensive documentation and libraries, like JQuery Mobile, but we're
going to start small. First by some bookmarking site (like p2p delicious
in your pocket) then, connecting this with microblogging, like
identica/twitter, then a personal url shorter, a blog/wiki engine and
finally with some bigger media, like photo, audio and video. The
documentation will be primary done in Spanish first, but if this idea is
worth about how to remake/refocus the current documentation I would be
glad of sharing inquiries and experiences.

Cheers,

Offray

Notes:
======

[1] http://tantek.com/
[2] http://hackbo.co/home/webframeworks/ubakye/ubakyeZacatecas.png/

On 10/02/12 13:15, Janko Mivšek wrote:
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