Daily pages - February 09, 2022

As I was researching how to set up GitLab Pages, I realized that using he main domain (myopenartifacts.com) wasn’t going to work. You need either a separate domain or both the gitlab and pages using subdomains.

So the question is whether I use openartifacts.com (i.e. gitlab.openatifacts.com and pages.openartifacts.com) or whether I use the myopenartifacts.com (i.e. gitlab.myopenartifacts.com and pages.myopenartifacts.com). Either way, the www subdomain could be used to build a support website for building open artifacts projects.

So should that be under the openartifacts.com domain? I’ve always thought of it as a database site that helps people find open artifacts projects to contribute to or use. Myopenartifacts.com feels more like a site for creators wanting to start open artifacts projects. So I’m leaning pretty heavily toward using myopenartifacts.com as the base domain, just adding subdomains for gitlab and pages.

So we have three open artifacts sites in the ecosystem:

• OpenArtifacts.org is the home of the Open Artifacts Initiative which is there to promote the creation of open artifacts projects.
• OpenArtifacts.com is a search database that should help people find existing open artifacts projects. - MyOpenArtifacts.com is the place where you can create and host open artifacts projects.
• JimApplegate.com is still part of the ecosystem, but it encourages open artifacts projects in the context of a creative practice.

Listening to the radio this morning, I was struck again at how radio shows like the1a.org bring in experts and talk about real issues. In those conversations, I feel like I often hear calls for action, but with little information about how to follow up. Or in the case of this morning, my mind was thinking through possible solutions to the housing crisis, looking for work that needs doing and something that is mine to do.

Made me think that a valid form of open artifacts project is the research/education website. A place where we can gather together information and ideas around a topic and look for possible solutions. I think about how Fuller talked about his structures in the context of housing in general. He did large inventories, for example, of what made up the housing industry.

I’ve struggled with that in that if you’re building a geodesic dome open artifacts project, do you really need to recreate all that context? It seems like there is a need to look at industries from the lens of the Great Turning and look at how we can move things. Individual OA projects could then just reference back to that larger research to show how their idea supports the goals.

These kinds of projects would look at the history of solving a particular problem. What worked? What didn’t? Where did racism get institutionalized? All those bigger questions. It seems like it would be a perspective that isn’t necessarily the standard approach.

I’d want it to be as approachable as possible, and as useful as possible, so I’m not sure what it would look like. I could see geothermalliving.com as an example of this, though it may be different in that it is really an advocacy site for a particular technology. Yet, it’s larger than a specific implementation of the technology.