The LogiLogi Foundation

This week we released 3 ruby-gems. They were extracted from LogiLogi. As the site is mostly working now, it seemed time to do all those little cleanups and todo’s that were still left. And thus, during Christmas I sat with my laptop on my lap in the livingroom (what else are laptops laptops for ? :), cleaning things up, and preparing the release of some re-usable parts of LogiLogi as gems.

The first gem is Diff Longest Common Substring, our diff algoritm that can not just find additions and removals of text, but also text that has moved around. The second is Position Range, a helper-gem for DiffLCS, which models a Range to which random attributes can be assigned, and which can easily be manipulated in PositionRange::Lists using standard set operations. And the last is Text Weaver a library to weave html-tags into texts. This one is used by LogiLogi to add the separately stored links and remarks back into the logis for display.

All of them are under the Affero GPL, which means they will remain free, and can only be used in sites that are also under the Affero GPL, and thus whose source can be downloaded and is Free Software. They are all hosted on Rubyforge.

Around the 3rd week of January we will also be releasing some really nifty Rails-plugins with tutorials on how to use them. But for now we wish you all a Happy and Free new Year.

Last monday we heard that we will receive a small grant from OFSET for the develoment and hosting of LogiLogi. Ofset is an international foundation, mostly based in France, that promotes Free Software for schools and uni’s. We are very happy with it, and will use it well!

Also yesterday our first paper on LogiLogi (presented at the Digital Humanities 2008 conference) appeared in the journal of the student association of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen; the Qualia. The newest edition is not yet online, but will be soon.

And last but not least, with the addition of invites for peergroups, and a welcoming e-mail for new users (and the fixing of some bad IE bugs ;-) LogiLogi is now finally ready for more general use. So while we have been hesitant with spreading the word before, as of now, please tell your friends about LogiLogi, and spread the word!

LogiLogi in one paragraph:

LogiLogi tries to find an informal middle-road between good conversations and journal-papers by providing a form of quick, informal publication and annotation of short texts. It does not make use of forum-threads (avoiding their many problems), but of tags and links that can also be added to texts by others than the original author. It is intended for all those ideas that you’re unable to turn into a full sized paper, but that you deem too interesting to leave to the winds.

LogiLogi Manta is as of today also working in Internet Explorer Seven (keeping fingers crossed). Supporting IE7, together with Firefox 3, which was already supported, means that about 70% of web-surfers can now use LogiLogi without problems. Which is, well, not that bad percentage for an interesting app like this one.

We will improve the usability of LogiLogi a bit more with things like simple (non-OpenID) accounts and invites to peergroups over the coming days / weeks. Then we will do a bit more PR so you and others can actually find and enjoy it :)

In the meantime, please let us know if anything is not working as expected.

After weeks of thinking, tinkering, designing, discussion and development it’s finally there; LogiLogi Manta with a new UI. For the first time – we hope – it’s now possible to call Manta usable. At least somewhat :)

It’s still a very basic UI, and there’s more functionality to come, but at least the basics work, and seem to be working well from an usability perspective. Currently the only supported browser is Firefox, but in some weeks we will add support for IE 7 too.

Also we will be improving things and adding some new features (like RSS feeds and simple stats), so if you encounter bugs, things fit for improvement, or have ideas on features, please let us know.

Big thanks to all who have contributed to LogiLogi, and special thanks to Bruno Sarlo, Miguel Lezama and Wybo Wiersma for much of the design & integration work…

Below is a screenshot, and you can view it in full size, working & interactive and all, here (you have Firefox, don’t you ?).

Awaited for days, weeks, and months. Expectations, set-backs, choices, questions, good fun, and now there it is, towards it: LogiLogi Manta, the new version of the software behind LogiLogi.org is live and running, it is in public beta!

LogiLogi is a platform for philosophical and other in-depth, collaborative discussions, that combines openness with self- organizing quality-control. It achieves this through the maximization of easy intertextuality, and a Web 2.0 style system modeled after the useful social processes surrounding academic journals.

In other words, editing, linking, and organizing texts have been made as easy as possible in LogiLogi, and rating and ranking- communities are also part of the game. We hope that this is something that will allow for much better discussions than those on fora and mailing-lists. See this paper for a more in-depth description, or view this (bit old) presentation, if you enjoy video.

The software, LogiLogi Manta, is Libre/Open Source software, worked on for over 2 years, recently with as many as 10 people at the same time, and representing about 4 person-years of work.

It’s there!, almost… LogiLogi Manta will go live as public beta in just 4 days; on the 6th of May, 2008 AD.

The last two and a half week – since we planned the release – we have done a lot of heavy coding and radical refactoring. And we still have four days ahead of – quite intense – preparations, but it’s now really getting there…! We are now mainly tweaking the layout, writing some prelimary help-documentation, and testdriving our installation- scripts… :)

And as the good news just keeps coming, we just received confirmation that we will be presenting LogiLogi Manta also at the RMML conference. From the 1st till the 5th of July we will be there in Mont-de-Marssan, France!

Our presentation there will be especially going into the Free Software side of LogiLogi, and how we try to bring the spirit of Free Software to philosophical and humanities-related discussions. Besides it will also be the most technical of all our talks of this summer.