Re: Syndicate: sharing a good IDEA

[Pit Schultz <pit@icf.de>]

hi, 

without a doubt IDEA is a great and honorable work, but i didn't
know for quite a while that it was accessible online. 

my question is how such personal data is organized. (another question
would be who pays for the work) an extended membership
data base gives certain options for contextualizing data, and regulating 
the access between public, and semi-public (only for subscribers), this
gives the data a certain locality. 

but it would be useless if this locality would get again a central one
without standing in relation to other local data-bases. imo, it's a good
moment to define a exchange standarda and build up such project
databases of "trans-european media culture" from different sites (cities, 
institutions, mailinglists, individuals) sharing a basic set of field which
are exchangeable.  maybe to build up a something like a "mini-yahoo"
in a later phase.  

so called  "balkanisation" and "babylonization" are well known effects
of proprietary data base formats. maybe there shouldn't be no 'owner'
of such a collection of personal data. maybe there shouldn't be a
commercial use of it. (see what is happening with telephone books..
vs. the spam data bases of direct marketing, there is a whole online
business which is exploiting collections of personal/collective user
profiles)

the vienna base project "mediacult" which is collecting similar cultural
adresses for an euro research reported that they will put the material
online (=public) as soon as the study is ready, including the adress
data base of some hundred projects. 

especially in a moment when Peter Weibel plans to build up a (mega)
virtual museum in Karlsruhe, which is perfect for all the net.art
ghost sites disappearing forever and maybe containing brilliant 
art which is yet not understood.. but with such centralisation
it's time to begin to activly think about models which provide better
access and navigation for outsiders (of the general public) 
as well as keeping "our" heterogenous networked environment vital. 

i think it is a good idea to provide a certain community with 
information about each other, but it is also a good idea if this
information is (as far as it is made public) reusable and
exchangeable with other communities / users. 

the standards for shared adress data bases are out yet, they are easy
to use and install. (LDAP for which is used at www.whowhere.com
et al for example)

"the public should have free access to the storages and data bases"
(J.F. Lyotard)

greetings from berlin 
/pit