As I was coming home from college this afternoon, I walked past a van from a gas company and some workmen who had dug a big hole in the road. One side of the workings smelled strongly of sewage, and the other side smelled of gas. I hurried past, but somehow the incident set me thinking about the history of providing services to urban buildings.

This side of town has been in constant habitation since the mid-1800s. In Victorian times it was popular to be proud of each completed job, and many of the houses have names and dates carved into a lintel or large stone brick at the front. Most of the houses in my street were built between about 1880 and 1910 - nearer the centre of town they are older. As part of a planned urban development, certain infrastructure services were provided as a matter of course.

Although I have never seen documentation, I'm pretty sure that all these houses were built with piped fresh water coming in, and sewage/waste water going out. I suggest that this sort of provision might be considered a first level of service provision. The service being provided is identical to the material being provided. Water from a tap is consumed directly by people living in the house.

I'm less sure about how many of these houses were built with piped gas for heating and lighting. I know that around this time (the end of the 19th century) gas lighting and heating was increasingly common, so I will assume that some at least of these houses were fitted for piped gas. I suggest that this sort of provision might be considered as a second level of service provision. The service provided is a secondary property of the material being provided. Gas from the pipes can't be consumed directly, but is instead burned to provide light and heat.

Later, in the 20th century, pretty much all of these houses were fitted with electrical wiring. In a lot of cases the old gas pipework can still be found in the walls, where the fitments were just plastered over during the conversion to electric light. The provision of electricity might be considered a third level of service provision. The material in the "pipe" is copper; it's not used directly by the consumer, or even converted to form something directly useful. Instead it merely serves as a conduit for an even more intangible service: electric power.

Levels beyond this third level seem harder to pin down. A good example of a fourth level service might be telephone or cable television. Athough the cables carry electricity, it's not used directly for power. Instead, fluctuations in it are used to carry information. It might also be feasible to consider some sorts of digital information services as a fifth level. I don't really pay my internet provider for the signals on a cable, but for derived properties of those signals, such as bandwidth, quality of service, web space, email addresses and so on.

As time has progressed, urban infrastructure has become increasingly complex, with each new level of service provision eventually becoming accepted as a basic requirement. Would you consider buying a house without connections for water, heat, light, power, and telephone/TV? I don't know of many new housing developments being built with included broadband internet access, but it seems inevitable. And I'm drawn to wonder what might be the next level of service that we will learn to depend on and demand from our builders ... piped learning? banking? employment?

I've been silently following the progress of the NMC 2004 Wiki/blog/presentation/project (What it actually is, defies description). As a long-time Wiki fan, blogger, and educator I have been intrigued to see how it has been getting on. Alan at "cogdogblog" seems to think it's not going too well

In response to his call to action I've added a few comments to the Wiki, and I shall probably go in there and stir things a bit more. Over here in my blog, however, I'll try and add some analysis (or at least observation and opinion) about why and how I think things are not quite what was hoped for.

Alan writes:

It's like a fresh coat of paint on the walls of a large building in tough urban neighborhood, at the intersection of 3 rival gangs' territory. A hardware supply truck takes the corner too fast, the back flies open, and a few cases of free spray paint land at the base of the walls! Why would the walls stay blank???

Except that it isn't.

How about this alternative simile:

It's like a municipal-sponsored "graffiti wall" in a back lot behind a community center. The community center is in a nice part of town because, well, the sponsors and their wives are not really comfortable with going into a rough neighborhood for their photo-ops and sanitised thanksgiving donations. Meanwhile, the worthy people at the graffiti-wall sub-committee couldn't agree on what to put on this "blank" wall, so they divided it into three areas based on what they could remember of gang turfs from when they were teenagers themselves. And they thought it important to put pretty borders round the sections and carefully write an introductory paragraph to make it clear who should paint in each section (just in case of any misunderstandings.) Beside each section of wall is a laminated map of the community center and a list of sponsors. If you think to lift up the map, there are a set of spray cans in a box underneath. Of course the cans are chained to the box - it just wouldn't do to have anyone steal them and go spray anywhere else. On the side of the community center, mounted high to avoid tampering, are a bank of cameras pointing at the graffiti wall providing a live feed to a local cable station that people have long given up on watching. From time to time, one of the community center staff will go and (somewhat self-consciously) scrawl something on the wall, in the hope that it might look more lively.

Inside the community center there is a suggestion box, to put ideas for the graffiti wall project and its associated newsletter. Unfortunately, it seems you have to be a community-center member to submit anything. These days, on the rare occasions that a newsletter is published, it mostly consists of puzzled desperation from the project organizers wondering why this grand and empowering vision seems to have fallen so flat.

Does that sound harsh? Maybe. But I hope that it goes a little way to show how different things can appear to outsiders.

When I first read of this project, I recall a mention that "all" you need to do to get blog comments aggregated into the SmallPieces hairball was to sign your blog feed up to edu_RSS, and tag posts with some keyword. I tried to sign up as suggested about a week ago, but so far have not seen any of my posts appear on the edu_RSS feed. There seems no obvious way of tracking the progress of an application, so I don't know if I have been missed, ignored, rejected, or just not reached the top of the queue. I've also lost the link to the article with the magic keyword, and can't find instructions on the wiki.

All of this pales in comparison with the strange way the Wiki has been set up, though. Seeding it with carefully-crafted prose and pretty pictures, imposing a nonsense process "to get things started", hiding the edit button among a bunch of navigation links, and reminding people that they are being watched all contribute to raising the barriers to entry. And what's with the wierd '/' on the page names? Did you choose an ovecomplicated wiki implementation deliberately to confuse even hardened Wiki users?

Trust me, if you want people to contribute on a Wiki, give them a real blank page and actively encourage posting by making it as simple, obvious and unambiguous as possible. Look at c2.com. Look at my demo installation of my own Wiki software. Wiki is about freedom and simplicity. With the the possible exception of the formatting markup, Wiki technology nestles in a "sweet spot" of approachability, usability and power. Move away from that sweet spot in any direction, however well-intentioned, and you begin to lose or dilute the things that make it work.