Such as the fact that many are called something such as “EteRNA Guide”. EteRNA University is somewhat the same thing. Still, I asked, of course.
True, but watercolor paintings and colored pencils are different media and can be at any scale, but nobody says one isn’t art. Shoot me a PM if you respond/need to contact me; I have to get off for today.
But when dealing with, say, Mojang (Minecraft’s parent company), they might be OK with you making a little sketch, but not a mural that you’d begetting paid 15m for. Different situation, I know, but when dealing with intellectual property, if it’s not explicit, you shouldn’t make the assumption. And also, the content would be slightly different too.
That’s really as far as we can get with this conversation, I think…
eli thank you so much for getting the transcript preserved, i appreciate it!
I really like the condensed lesson, which is exactly what we need to pull from chats to build a curriculum that can be read and taught easily by fellow community members. So logging chat transcript, summarizing lesson steps, pulling code snippets… whatever refinement we can do to the material will make it stronger. The user experience should be
- log onto platform
- find info to take live class
- find classes to study at any time
- load class, immediately have steps / walkthrough / condensed lesson, without distraction or confusion of live chat log.
- have access to live class transcripts, additional resources / links
We need a rapid repository for content, and I think wiki and google docs are solving the immediate problem. and if weebly or the main site works out, we can port the content at that time.
I agree the forum is not an appropriate platform.
eterna is a crowdsourced platform. the community endeavors are implicitly understood to be an official part of eterna. if you remove community efforts from eterna all you have is a flash game with an empty database. so by your logic are the puzzles we design “unofficial”? how about the groups we create? where do you draw the line? why draw one at all? i am still baffled why we are having this conversation when we could be using this effort to develop curriculum.
but i am coming at it from a development perspective and you are coming at it from a user perspective. users feel entitled to ask for features and bug fixes never caring where the money or energy comes from, they just want more for free! users act like software came from thin air, like business ideas just magically appeared, but the name eterna, the existing platform and community are all here because of real work, real time, real effort that the devs put in. and acting like it is no big deal to just take their name and create a separate entity is confusing to me.
and as for lego and gaming wikis, i can tell you that even if you aren’t making money off their name, they will still send a cease & desist for making something as harmless as a free iPhone app wiki reference to their content. this is a real world example, from a ceo i advised to not use the gaming company’s name & to not publish the app, who did it anyway, and then got hit with repeated and increasingly angry takedown notices, regardless of the fact that legally they could have probably gotten away with it.
now sure, the gaming company would have to go to court and fight against fair use, and then everyone has a bad day. who wants that? why take their work in the first place? my opinion is, be creative enough to make your own thing, or cooperate with the existing project. never take someone else’s project and act like it is your own.
now eterna devs aren’t likely to care, in fact they’ll probably give their blessing to do whatever you want! but that doesn’t change the fact of what is and is not respectful behavior, that doesn’t change the fact that it weakens the eterna central community to make a separate effort, and it doesn’t change the fact that i won’t be participating in an unofficial offshoot.
and yet still, i repeatedly say do what you want, you don’t have to agree with me! i am starting to feel like it is *you* who expect me to agree with you. that won’t be happening. so don’t worry about my opinion, it is just one opinion. listen to me, don’t listen to me. your choice.
I understand your thirst to learn and i truly wish i could somehow impart my 10 years of experience to you in a nanosecond. but i can’t. so there’s going to be a limit how long i can argue about something before i get tired and have to get back to work.
i’m sure this is my own failing, but consider that i am only human, and have a limited amount of time to spend. therefore, i will probably not be a good person to explain in great detail every opinion i have. i don’t have time to teach everything i have learned that led up to my judgement every time i make a comment or answer a question.
if you are curious, i encourage you to talk to others and learn, and just try things out! i was not kidding when i said go ahead and build a weebly site, it will be good practice! start your own university! aim for the stars! But just as i don’t expect you to change your mind, you can’t expect me to change my mind either. I don’t need you to think like me, to understand me, or to agree with me. so take a deep breath and know that it is okay that we have different opinions!
I truly believe the community and individuals in it are entitled to different opinions, and I appreciate and respect you for thinking critically and trying to contribute and stand up for your vision.
I am sorry I don’t have more time to explain more, I have a few hours a week for eterna, and there are still other tasks i have to get to this week.
good luck! 
The puzzles and groups all originate on the website. On the other hand, the approved website I am creating has not originated on the website. I draw the line at where the website content ends. Reading your post, I understand how the user-generated content in the chat could be considered “official”. Thank you for helping me reach that conclusion.
The wikia.com platform has its own app that you can view any [domain].wikia.com website on, including lego.wikia.com, minecraft.wikia.com, etc. The app is free, and I’d assume it’s pretty well known.
In no way does the EteRNA University site weaken the central community, as I will not be adding any sort of forums or chatbox. Rather, I will most likely be taking in content and cataloging it, instead of creating everything from scratch. Of course, that’s all to be determined.
Jee has given me the go-ahead on the project.
And, thanks! I look forward to this experience. Even if it fails, it won’t be a failure. Nothing truly fails, as one can always learn from the experience.
Agreed on all counts there.
Wikia being open does not grant your permission to make a wiki about privately owned content, so i don’t understand what you are saying there…
Congrats, and Good luck!
Oh! Machine, I think I finally unstandard where you’re coming from and where we’re miscommunicating.
It is the definition of official/unofficial. You think unofficial means marketing it as perhaps, and not giving the original owner any say, or something to this effect. But where do I draw the line at official? Similar to Drake.
Official is originally what the actual content owners (devs) create. We are given leeway to make stuff on the site, which I will sub UGC (user generated content). This is neither official or unofficial. For it to be unofficial, it would have to be further than just content. It would be a new channel of content (or content ptesented as a channel). Content made by users (not owners, who may be users of thr mother site) of the other channel would be considered UGC. The devs could then make either UGC or the new channe official. This is saying “it it’s as good as if we made it”.
So what am I getting at? What makes the two things different? With the different forms of UGC, the author is in the role of a user. However in a new channel, the author is in the role of an admin in a setting that is not just users, but a full resource that is official to itself.
Furthermore, the channel could still have permission to run without being official. It is simply.that the original content owner isn’t providing the channel and what the channel deems as official.
And now that I understand more, I don’t see an issue with it being official, aside from the fact that it is user generated, so quality would really need to be above par. I wouldn’t worry as much about a guide as it is UGC, but this is a full blown user generated channel, in which anything posted would be deemed official, from how I see it, as we are providing course material, not having players upload in a manner similar to a forum or puzzle maker.
What needs to happen now is a PM to Jee asking the following things:
Is this idea ok? (Drakes PM apparently said yes)
Would this be official and/or advertised on your site?
Would you prefer this to be on you’re site, on something like the wiki, on our own site, or do you not care?
Do you want your team to have am active hand in or the choice to have a large hand in the development of this?
Drake, this idea is only a couple days old. We’re still devising what we want. We need Jee’s full input above all else, as your PM only asked if we could do the site, not providing options. As Machine said, go nuts. Building a prototype is great! But if you want this to be the actual thing, the whole community needs to agree, as this is not any one of our projects, though we may have influence. This is meant for the community, and to be developed by the community.
By the way, I believe Machine had been addressing me. And Machine, the site was really just to show my idea, not to necessarily be the final product.
If anyone needs clarification, please tell me. I know some of this probably won’t make sense. The later on you go, the more accurate and relevant I think (as that’s where there’s further thought development on my behalf). Machine, if I missed the mark, hopefully I can continue to get closer, but for now, how about we go with my thought about asking Jee those questions? Seems to me that you would support that, as you want to make sure that the content owners have the necessary say (which I never disagreed with, just bad choice of words!).
Personally I wouldn’t bother Jee with an email, I would wait until dev chat. I try to use email only for time sensitive matters, and matters requiring privacy. However I do think it is a good idea to use the time between now and next dev chat to compose the community’s thoughts on this so that we can direct the devs to specific questions or mockups.
As for “unofficial” / “official” I think indeed we are using these words differently.
I think when you say it you mean:
Official: Dev content
Limbo?: Onsite player content
Unofficial: Offsite player content / “new channel…”
I cannot speak to promoting official or unofficial according to your definitions of these words because that is not the definition I was using. There is a lot more to “officiality” than who wrote which code where. EteRNA is *specifically a crowdsourced platform* and the player and dev efforts are both operating under what I would call the “official” EteRNA channel regardless of on or offsite activity. In my opinion you are giving the words “official/unofficial” incomplete definitions. But maybe we just have different opinions.
So for clarification, here is what it says to me when you use these words:
Official: Accessible directly or indirectly through main site, sanctioned by devs, devs retain admin access to all platforms, community retains strength of unity & reliability of association with EteRNA, and uses the name.
Unofficial: May or may not be accessible through main site, may or may not be sanctioned by devs, community seems fractured and without reliability, and should not use the name EteRNA.
Here is why I prefer “official” according to the definitions I meant:
- Devs should retain admin access of all platforms.
Why?
- Access & Liability. Things change, players get busy or move on. What happens to community access if you go on vacation or get sick? Are you even legally allowed to run a website like this as a minor in the US? Devs need control & admin access.
- Security. You say you’re a kid just interested in science, but you’re so smart, how do I know you are who you say you are?
Furthermore, devs are in a better position to hear when xyz tech needs a security update or has a vulnerability, therefore they should be involved in any player accessed platform administration. - Respect. This platform is community driven, but it wouldn’t exist without the devs either.
Furthermore, devs are in a better position to hear when xyz tech needs a security update or has a vulnerability, therefore they should be involved in any player accessed platform administration.- Unity of effort is more cohesive and strong than splintered efforts.
Why?
- Attention. We have limited attention, time, and effort. The more clicks it takes the less likely people are to participate, simply a fact. EteRNA is already splintered into at least 4 different domains: main, forums, github, and wiki. As you said these are still 4 tabs one might have open, but the UI/UX difference is that you do not have the same navigation menu or layout at each site. Therefore it is disruptive to switch from tab to tab, and you can’t smoothly and easily navigate with say a hover-hover-click in the main menu instead of say a click-reorient-click-click from one tab to another.
- Reliability. In my opinion, a splinter offshoot effort from eterna that is unofficial will seem amateur. Whereas an effort in official cooperation signifies that the community is still consulting with dev oversight to ensure standards of quality are met. If I saw ‘random internet weebly university’ posted on reddit i would laugh, skip it and not even click the link because I don’t want a virus and I don’t have time for yet another interwebz amateur hour. But hey, that’s just me. Some people won’t care! But some people like me are looking for a professional quality experience. To me, a free blogspace or weebly or wordpress - especially one calling itself “unofficial” - is just a huge red flag for either viruses or low quality content. And I want our effort to be more professional than that. Let’s raise the bar, not lower it.
Personally I am actually more concerned with calling this “unofficial” than I am with using weebly as a rapid protoyper.
…
So what would I say to devs?
Hi! jnicol, mat, and Eli came up with the idea to host classes at EteRNA, and jnicol has already hosted the first class on JavaScript. The class went great, and the community is very excited about having more classes.
We have started an archive to preserve the curriculum we develop into an EteRNA University. In order to not make more work for devs we posted the latest class transcript to the wiki, but we are curious what you would think of adding a low priority GitHub ticket for making an EteRNA University page internal to the main site, accessible as an option from the Community drop-down menu?
I think there should be a wait period of a couple months to let devs focus on NOVA and Lab UI, and give the community time to hold a few more classes and develop the desired structure of the page, and build up some curriculum.
In the meantime, Weebly can be used to mockup the page / site structure, though admin access should be immediately given to devs even if devs do not have time to work on it directly.
Currently we are using Google doc links from the wiki.
If you want, you can even use Weebly long term, though I think that the EteRNA user experience is already too fragmented between the 4 sites we currently use to manage content. ( main, wiki, github, forums )
lol make that 5 sites counting google docs…
I mean that LEGO is privately owned, but I doubt that lego.wikia.com is official or endorsed. That’s what I mean…
Again, thanks
if lego wiki is not endorsed it could easily receive a takedown notice. fair use is for excerpts, not building bodies of work
Now we’re starting to get somewhere!
First, I think you misinterpret what I’m aiming to do. I don’t necessarily care about making the site. I just made a prototype to show my concept, what could happen, and to draw up an idea for the framework. Btw, Weebly’s Terms of Use say you have to be at last 13, which I am. They run through the US. It’s possible there may still be restrictions, but I don’t think so, and I’m not planning on owning it unless you all especially want me to.
So, I don’t care about making/owning the website myself.
Now, in my mind, when something is considered official, this means that the original owners are dubbing it something they provide. So in creating a new channel, anything the officials of it say (not content generated by user I’d the channel) is considered official and endorsed by the mother organization. So here’s the issue. This was originally thought of as player run. This could be changed to be more dev-inclusive, but do they want to take on that role, and do they have the time or resources? If they don’t and we’re official, the content on the channel is still official and the devs may not even approve! If they’re willing to take on the role, I AM OK WITH THIS BEING OFFICIAL. However I’m not sure of they can full the role.
So whenever we contact Jee (next dev chat is fine), we need to ask what he is willing to give us (including permission) and what he can and would like to be involved in.
Being unofficial in my mind just means that the devs let us run, but do not support us in the fact that they don’t provide the surface, and that the content isn’t necessarily supported or endorsed by them.
Anyways, I don’t think further discussion on this is needed. We’ll wait for Jee to see how much he’ll do/provide, as his thoughts really set up for what we do. I say we get working on making/perfecting any materials, frameworks, processes, etc.
And I do say, I holey agree that Eterna is too spread out. Forums and issue tracking should go in-house IMO, though personally, the wiki should stay (I have never seen full integration of that anywhere). It would definitely be a great idea to provide a good, place to put player papers, guides, concepts, etc. The wiki may work, and I may come up with some thought for that at some point, as I believe the wiki could use some organizational work.
And of you’re curious, Lego let’s fans make any fan sites or whatnot as long as it resides in their fair use/legal policy (don’t use the logo, don’t make money, use Lego only as a noun (not an adjective), and a couple other minor things).
with all due respect you just don’t have the experience to understand what i am saying. that’s not your fault, you’re still learning! but if you want to learn instead of continuing to repeat incorrect definitions, try to understand that “official” is not necessarily related to whether devs or players do the work, especially on a crowdsourced project.
it weakens the vision and effort of EteRNA University to call it unofficial. there’s only so many ways from sunday i can say this.
considering the devs are sure to be behind an effort like this, it doesn’t make any sense to even say the word unofficial until and unless the devs themselves say ‘hey! we don’t want to advocate this! if you do it, don’t say it is official!’
this is a question of vision, of professionalism, and of future potential. plain and simple, it is a weak path to call it unofficial, regardless of your own personal definition. if at this point you can’t take my word on it, and my pages of explanation, we can agree to disagree.
best UX is to have as much resources in house as possible. even the wiki platform is a poor man’s CMS… but for rapid prototyping and dev, these tools are acceptable. when eterna is all grown up, as you say ideally everything possible would be coded in main site.
all my efforts at eterna have been to elevate it to world class standards, so if you ask my opinion i am going to architect the most solid path possible. if you don’t want to benefit from my opinion & experience, why keep asking me about it? it makes me feel like i wasted my many hours at this point explaining all this…
unofficial |ˌənəˈfiSHəl|
adjective
not officially authorized or confirmed: unofficial reports that dozens of people were injured.
official |əˈfiSHəl|
adjective
relating to an authority or public body and its duties, actions, and responsibilities: the governor’s official engagements.
• having the approval or authorization of an authority or public body: French is the official language of Quebec.
• employed by an authority or public body in a position of authority or trust: an official spokesman.
• emanating from or attributable to a person in office; properly authorized: official statistics.
To be honest, I had forgotten that crosshatching may have am affect. I am baying what I’m saying I’d off other projects I’ve seen that are not. I think for now, well just have to disagree on some points.
As I said, I am completely fine (now that I understand) with this being official, I just think that unofficial just means unadvocated, not unallowed, and personally think that credibility wouldn’t matter, as it’s just classes by players for payers. Again, let’s not discuss that any farther, as it doesn’t really matter at this point, and it’s a dreadful waste I’d our time. I think at least understanding each other’s thoughts somewhat is good enough.
So let’s put all that behind us, all right? What do you think about my next steps:
Ask Jee what his opinion is on what he will let us do, what he wants the ability to do, and if he wishes, what he would be doing for us (again, only if he wishes to).
Until we get the answer, we work on processes, frameworks, and material (platform independent).
i truly admire your earnest interest in understanding, and as i said i only regret i don’t have more time to get into the deeper details. i agree, we just have to draw the line somewhere and close that thread.
as for the dev chat with Jee, yes, we need to
- introduce them to the concept of EteRNA University
- ask them what they think about short & long term visions of hosting platforms
- ask them what they think about dev involvement in anything from administration of platform, to UI / UX / IA of interface, to curriculum itself.
and in the meantime, community can comment on platform ideas, pros, and cons.
i wouldn’t worry about specific curriculum at this meta level, since the content is going to be developed regardless of platform implementation, and categories will reveal themselves as we build content. though we should consider the types of content that will need to be plugged into the hosting platform. ( i.e. transcripts, code snippets, screenshots, etc… )
the process will depend on the framework / platform, so if i am understanding what you mean, this is moot until we determine the platform.
therefore we come back to the original question: what are the pros and cons of specific platforms?
thanks for the clarification the weebly is free; i thought i saw someone say you have to pay a fee to have certain admin features, but i haven’t looked into it myself
agreed that initial lessons should focus on eterna topics; agreed that future classes can be open to wider topics
I’ll do some research into that.