title: Recent Developments tags: [news, developments] byline: Sam Kleinman date: 2009-10-01

layout: post

I suspect that this will become something of a regular feature, but I've realized that given how I tend to concentrate my blogging energies on the tychoish.com project, even for subjects that would be relevant to the Cyborg Institute blog1, that it would be useful to create a semi-regular Cyborg Institute feature to keep you all up to date on what's going on beyond the scenes.

On the Wiki

• First, I've been doing some revisions with the wiki, and the good news is that everything works. I though everything worked when I started out, but it turns out OpenID was a bit buggy, and I had some problems with the git interface, but everything seems to be in order now. My general move has been to de-clutter some pages--the index primarily--split up things that went on too long in a given page (i.e. the current work on Sygn).

• I've been working on consolidating, clarifying, and tweaking the Sygn System pages to be a bit more organized and descriptive.

  If you didn't notice, Sygn is a project to create a federated social networking data standard. This sounds really geeky and more "technological," than "cyborg," but in point of fact the "geeky" parts are (relatively) simple, and the implications and applications Sygn are very "cyborg." Ongoing work on the wiki and the sygn chat room and we hope to begin work on a test implementation soon.

• I started working on some exploration for a wiki project hosted under the umbrella of Critical Futures, to explore the ways to do fiction and creative work using wiki as a tool. This is Cyborg if ever there was one.

• I've moved the Content Incubator off of the main page, and done a little bit of work to consolidate the initial footprint of the wiki and make the whole thing a bit more approachable.

General Site Things

• I've enabled a couple of sub-domains to work a little bit better for people who might be interested in various Cyborg Institute related projects therefore (.net and .org domains, at the moment are all identical to the .com):

  • The Cyborg Institute Planet: http://planet.cyborginstitute.com

  • The Cyborg Institute Wiki: http://wiki.cyborginstitute.com

• I'm thinking about giving up the pretense of the blog, as a first class publication of the Cyborg Institute and trying to fold the content into the wiki, and do more posts along the lines of this post.

  In pursuit of this I've imported the backlog of posts that were really just sketches of one sort or another into a personal sketchpad in the wiki. You can find that here.

  Thoughts?

Do be in touch, and thanks for reading.