Sam Ruby has put the slides from his etcon talk on the Atom wiki online. Like all talk slides put up on the net, they make me wish I'd been there to hear what was said between the bullet-points, but Sam does a pretty good job of making the slides say something useful as well.

The main thrust of the talk isn't Atom itself, but the Wiki on which the discussions were first hosted: its strengths and weaknesses, and its appropriateness for the task it was put up to perform.

I've got a lot of thoughts about this that have been brewing ever since I saw the Atom wiki take off: they relate to a taxonomy of online communities that I was developing once upon a time, and should work on some more.

The defining nature of a Wiki is consensus. Every participant in a public wiki has the same power to create or destroy, and the resulting content is the consensus of the group. Where there is no consensus, the content remains self-contradictory. The natural mode of a disagreement on a Wiki is to start off with one page going back and forth in thread-mode, that is later rewritten as two pages stating each side of the disagreement, linked to each other.

The defining nature of a mailing-list is exhaustion. Debates continue well beyond their usefulness. On a chronological mailing-list, as opposed to the frozen-in-time wiki, there is a definitive "last word". Participants in a debate will continue not until all sides of the debate have been expressed, or until a consensus is reached, but until every participant but one has grown tired of the discussion.

Sadly, the only good community model we have for making decisions is one with a formal decision-making process. You need a point at which someone, or some procedure can come into force and say "Enough debate, this is how we decide which of the suggested options we will take." Communities without an explicit decision-making process will either never make a decision on any of the difficult subjects, or (more likely) develop some informal "back-room" process.

In the case of Atom, for example, the real choice of what Atom is going to be lies with content producers like Google/Blogger and SixApart. Whatever the various XML-nerds decide about ontology this and sixteen-ways-of-defining-a-link that, Atom will ultimately be what those few large implementors decide is worth their while implementing.

And it's interesting to note how rarely one sees any of those major parties getting involved in any of the interminable mailing-list debates.