Crowd Documenting Canadian Performance.

Last Saturday I got to do something and potentially groundbreaking for the performing arts in Canada. Earlier this week Adrienne Wong asked me if I could help out with the SpiderWebShow Hackathon. What is a hackathon, those of you who don't click links may ask? Well, a hackathon, as the Facebook event put it, is people doing the same thing for a period of time. More specifically than that, this was performance artists, producers, creators, directors (etc.) taking a few hours out of their Saturday (morning on the west coast) to collectively document what they know about the Canadian performing arts scene through a wiki.

I'm going to take a leap and say that anyone reading this has heard of Wikipedia. Theatrewiki.ca works the exactly same way; a person who wants to contribute to the general knowledge of the community signs up for an account and begins posting and editing. Democratized information based on collective wisdom. What isn't there to love. What was especially interesting to me was not only the democratization of a communities wisdom, but the democratization of technological wisdom. By design the project necessitated the breaking down of the technological barrier of the wiki, often left in the realm of the l33t in many peoples eyes. It struck me how similar approaching working within the world of the web can be similar to learning a new culture.

Breaking down barriers in a matter of hours is not easy. I applaud the crew at SpiderWebShow for the great work on both the site and their drive to take on such a massive project. The wiki is designed to be very user friendly, but also has access to some of the coding pieces that people who may have more knowledge on wiki writing than a person who is approaching it for the first time. 

And therein lies the difficulty: most of the people who were called upon to write a wiki for the first time are not necessarily educated on this piece of culture. And that's not a bad thing, nor should it be taken as a shortfall of the project or anyone who chooses to involve themselves. It is simply now a necessary piece of awareness that will need to come as technology (thankfully) becomes more easily accessible, usable and maybe most importantly, cool for people to use and make use of. Similarly to anyone who goes to another country, the expectations of that person is to become aware of the  traditions and standards of the area. The same goes for writing a wiki. Wiki writing has standards around citation and non-biased writing that some people new to the medium may not be aware of.

Though this isn't a reason to not do something, this is going to be something that society becomes more deeply entrenched in the online world and use some of the online standards as cultural tools it will behove everyone to become aware of all the the social standards of the computer world in the same way that we become aware of cultural customs when we travel to another customs. That will be very exciting