Conception Project
The vision of the Conception Project is to create an open source, Web-enabled platform for real-time collaboration in the social construction of shared conceptualisations. The focus of Conception is on enabling the cultivation and curation of semi-formal information structures in an intuitive yet robust way.
Conception aims to embrace the highly collaborative and dynamic nature of knowledge management, and to provide a virtual environment to support the natural, social process of sharing meaning.
The goal of Conception is to design and implement a virtual platform for real-time collaboration via the Web. This platform, the Conception Collaboration Platform, will consist of a set of pluggable, loosely-coupled components, supporting different types of collaborative activity.
Collaboration Games
The Conception vision is no small undertaking, and it's going to take time to turn that vision into a coherent architecture and design. However, in the spirit of agility, and to gain some first-hand knowledge of the kinds of hacking needed to support real-time collaboration via the Web, the first components we hope to build are ultra-simple, Web-based collaboration games.
The idea is that, these games will give us some basic experience, but will also give us the basic building blocks for tying a set of activities together into a coherent work flow - all loosely coupled via the Web, of course.
For each game, an API will be defined, with bindings to REST and JSON or XML as a minimum. Client and server implementations can then be constructed and tested independently.
See the Conception Games Host page for more information.
AKRS - Adaptive Knowledge-based Retrieval System
More info soon ...
See also the Conception AKRS page.
Utilities
Various utilities written as part of this project may be useful on their own, and are released individually.
Gardens of Meaning
The vision of the Conception Collaboration Platform is inspired by the Gardens of Meaning metaphor. This metaphor provides an dynamic model of data, work flow and change, upon which we intend to explore and layer many different types of collaborative activity and political system.
