About MoinMoinAsPIM

In this document Personal Wiki or PIM is understood as a place/tool to create, manage, use and maybe share personal (at least in the beginning) information. Even if the same term is also used as the integration of calendar, address book and e-mail, that is not the focus of this document (for this last sense, see PersonalInformationManager).

So, PIM and PersonalWiki are almost synonyms here although, strictly speaking, the first includes the latter.

What kind of services could Moin provide/integrate in this role? Which ones would be desirable? And feasible?

What can we provide today

• Personal documents management (creation, edit, search, print, etc.), maybe even taking some wordprocessing here inside Moin.
• Bookmarks, explicitable thoughts linking and notes taking.

What can we expect to provide in a -relatively- short timespan

• Photo galleries (see MoinMoinGallery for an implementation)?

• Access and search of external repositories like calendars, address books and email? Connection with LDAP directories?

In the long run

• Better integration with other repositories (almost surely read only at first).

• Visualization and visual interaction (WikiVisualization and VisualSiteMap).

• Support for knowledge management activities and processes, with external tools like bayesian analysis and the like.

Questions

• What about sharing some information with other people? What issues could arise from this?
• Publishing selected parts to the Web from the same source?
• External replication (to have it available local and remote): how to control it? Can we make it automatic?
• How to balance integration and replacement with other tools? We don't want to convert Moin in some gigantic monster, we want it to collaborate with other tools so we can use the better of each one.

• In the long run, how to make personal wikis cooperate with each other (like the initiatives in InterWiki and SisterSites and AdoptedPages, but on a personal level). Even with agents coming and going, it could be a dream come true.

References

• http://www.spack.org/wiki/PersonalDataRepository

• Ed Taekema - Road Warrior Collaboration 27.10.2003 / Personal Wiki PIM - Update I:

http://www.pycs.net/users/0000177/2003/10/27.html#P54

• In the original wiki: DifferencesBetweenAnInternetWikiAndaPimWiki and WikiAsPim

• In Meatball: WikiAsPim

• DigitalPalace

• http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/WikiAsPim and http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/PIM

• Rod Waldhoff's Weblog; Wiki + Blog = PIM: http://radio.weblogs.com/0122027/2003/10/22.html#a92

• http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/ProjectIdeas/Wiki+Weblog+PIM

• http://tavi.sourceforge.net/WikiAsPim

• Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars Wiki as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool: http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/apr03/mattison.shtml (long and general but interesting)

• Complex and difficult, but very interesting: http://ourpla.net/john/wikiweblogpim.html

Experiences

EduardoMercovich

I'm using MoinMoinAsPim since almost 2 months now and I'm more than happy with it.

I manage there:

• all the information about projects, including it's documentation (some of it I've even write it directly in Moin and the print.css helps me to send it directly to PDF),
• the rest of my professional information (papers, ideas, notes, people, etc.), and
• other personal issues.

To have an easier and faster access to people information, I've used the CSV processor (see HelpOnProcessors) to display in MoinMoin the export from Kadressbook. To do this, I had only to search and replace or delete a couple of chars (, to ; and " to nothing) and specify which columns I don't want to see (in my case, "#!CSV -1 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -10 -11 -12 -13 -14 -16 -17 -18 -19 -20 -24 -25 -26 -27 -30 -32 -35". This is not meant as a replacement for the addressbook, but as a very simple and quick query for general info and addresses.

To help organize info, I use categories in a slightly modified way, as we talked in FacetedClassificationInMoin. Basically, I took the most important facets for me, type and state, and used them in tandem.

Some examples are TypeProject/InCourse, TypeClient/InSeed, etc.

This allows me to group by type, by state, or both, to get a quick glance to the things that are going on, displayed in the FrontPage.

My platform is Apache2 (with FastCGI) in Linux, with Firefox as browser because it's keyboard operations make everything very fast and I don't have to move my hand to the mouse. I created a customized theme to maximize performance and focus on the information. In this theme, I'd like to add keyboard shortcuts to frequent operations (like F3 to search, F1 for help, Alt-H for home, Alt-E for edit, Alt-D for diff, etc.)¹, but this will be in the near future since version 1.3 is almost here and it doesn't make sense to change it now.

Although I don't believe the solution is usable for Joe Windows, it's really great for information intensive professionals.

In the near future, I'll experiment with exporting or replicating my personal Moin to a public server with restricted access, so as to be able to access my information from any place. More in the future, both servers can remain in sync, so as to access and edit too it's contents.

I'll keep you posted.

See PersonalMoinMoin.