Sardines

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

<p>Imagine research that takes place in a lab and is recorded and documented on an electronic platform such as a blog or wiki.  It&#8217;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 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">open</a>.</p>


<p>This being said, it would be nice if the data, before being released publicly, <em>were</em> available within the entire research lab or institution.  It&#8217;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 &#8220;downstream&#8221; (i.e. in the lab) should automatically get updates when changes are made available &#8220;upstream.&#8221;</p>


<h2>Example</h2>


<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="http://jayunit.net/assets/2007/12/27/sardines-distributed-versio_1.gif" alt="" /></p>


<p style="text-align:center;"><em>Distributed document versioning</em></p>


<p>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&#8217;s server.  Lab Beta has private research which it has not yet released.</p>


<h2>Notes</h2>


<p>It may very well be the case that this idea constitutes &#8220;too much software,&#8221; and a simple published-state property on a central wiki would suffice.</p>