The Manta Experiment

LogiLogi Manta is mainly an experiment at creating something that is less than publishing journal papers, but more than forum, or newsgroup- chat. It tries to allow more, instead of less specialization through integration. It attemts this by allowing articles that can be rated differently from different peer- groups, that are shorter (1-3 page-range) that are easily linked to and from other articles (to prevent duplication of work), and are organized around sets of concepts (tagged). The central idea is to allow the seemingly impossible marriage between true open-ness (anyone can add content, anyone can start a new peergroup) and quality (most people will recognize good peergroups, and thus be shown the content favored by those).

Instead of starting with convincing the routined, LogiLogi Manta will try to be usefull for ambitious students, and people without easy publishing access to Journals who are familliar with the web. Besides this, Manta might also make sense to people who think - like me - that the six months to more than two years from submission to publication of Journals is just longer than necessary in many instances.

Instead of jumping in to offer a solution for all disciplines, LogiLogi Manta will attemt to be a bit of digital pavement on the road for the humanities, and within those, for (continental) philosophy especially. This because it is there that the biggest proliferation of paradigms exists, and the commenting on texts and ideas is the central activity.

We hope it works, and hope to show in practice that it works.

(we think it will be usefull for us at least, in the sense of scratching our own itch of not seeing our ideas lost in the never-ending cycle of threads with the same arguments over and over again)...

We welcome you and others who might consider this project to be potentially interesting. Manta is Open Source, already [has more than half of it's code-base completed], and will be functioning around the end of december.