Sardines is an experiment in organizing a tiered, distributed wiki that is motivated by Open Science.

Imagine research that takes place in a lab and is recorded and documented on an electronic platform such as a blog or wiki. It’s reasonable to conceive that the researcher may want to keep a closer hold on their findings for a short time in order to polish and confirm, before releasing it into the open.

This being said, it would be nice if the data, before being released publicly, were available within the entire research lab or institution. It’d also be great if the publication process seemed relatively seamless and that the interfaces for local private edits and global public edits be similar. To cap it all off, people “downstream” (i.e. in the lab) should automatically get updates when changes are made available “upstream.”

Example

Distributed document versioning

In this example, there is one public server and two private servers; labs Alpha and Beta each have a private instance of the server running so that they are assured of privacy. Lab Alpha has published version 3 of its research, although they have an internal copy which is more recently updated. The published version is available on the public server and is made known to Lab Beta’s server. Lab Beta has private research which it has not yet released.

Notes

It may very well be the case that this idea constitutes “too much software,” and a simple published-state property on a central wiki would suffice.