The Internet has given birth to many new forms of cooperation. Worldwide accessibility of data has become synonymous with the Internet. Hypertext links that allow easy references to external sources have long since transformed the process of reading from its former, linear manner to a branching and backtracking scheme, diverging and reconverging. But the Internet does not reach its culmination in the passive representation of the data. Collaborative authorship efforts change the way the content is created. Collaborative authoring has become a necessity in those cases where the data compounded is too vast to be compiled centrally or in those cases where the data itself is of a diverse nature and consists of many small, disjoint and sometime contradictory articles and opinions. The collaborative effort of writing, when undertaken by the same community that consumes the data, creates what may be seen as a self-organizing structure, where the content undergoes perpetual evolution, and in doing so, more tightly defines the community around that structure.

This document describes a novel open-source software project that tackles the problem of creating an open collaboration tool for the common authoring and organizing of data. The heart of this project is a graphical, browsable concept-map that depicts mutual relations in the ensemble of authors and topics.

This project was born out of a continuing effort of the diverse complexity-science community to map itself and the field it operates in. The lack of consensus in that community as to what is covered within the scope of complexity-science, has ruled out possibility that the desired map could emerge of the combined views of several scientists. A different approach was taken. Let all interested parties declare themselves and describe their research, literally placing themselves on the map of concepts and research fields, linking topics that they deem to be close, and relating themselves to those areas where they work. The living map, changing daily, edited by all users will form the true-to-life picture of the current community. The map would also show the proliferation or fading out of research topics. The community will define the field in which it exists, and in so doing a clearer picture of the community itself will be created.

The Discourse District is open-source, open-content, Wiki -inspired community software for the Internet, in which all members may view, add, edit and link all data. The relations in the data (the links) may be either explicitly defined by the users or implicitly deduced according to certain rules (such as linking articles based on common contributors, or linking two authors editing the same article). The content is organized as a part web site, part graph, where each data entity is embodied on the one hand as a page of hypertext, and on the other as a node in the graph. The data entities may represent general concepts, discourses and users. In the graphical view of the network, the concepts form the backbone of the data, and the majority of links (as defined by the users) connect related concepts. The discourses related to those concepts are the manifestation of content within each concept.

The users, each of whom is an author, an editor and a reader, are also depicted in the data set, thus allowing certain relations such as joint contributions to change the topology of the graph.

The neighborhood of a certain node in the graph consists of nodes that are related to it either directly (first neighbors) or through intermediate nodes. The topology of the graph is determined by the links between topics, general subjects and users. The graph is browsed by shifting the node in focus and so revealing the new neighborhood surrounding that node and hiding nodes that are further away. This allows a clear view of specific neighborhood in an otherwise giant graph. This view is configurable to show or hide certain entities or link types.

The Wiki paradigm, in which all visitors to a site are given freedom to add/edit data, has, surprisingly proved to be an effective model for a process to organize large amounts of information in a decentralized manner. The success was registered in domain-specific fields such as, for example C++ programming, (where the first Wiki was published) as well as in areas spanning wider scopes, such as, for example wikipedia, (the joint effort free encyclopedia.) The content entered by the user is regular text, the user need not write, or even be familiar with the HTML in which web pages are written. Internal references to other pages in the Wiki as well as references to other sites are automatically rendered as active hypertext links. This may seem like a tedious technical detail, but it is not. This property of the Wiki is pivotal in its success. The Wiki's capability to recognize by context the reference to another topic (within the wiki) and to automatically create the hyperlink from the title to the proper page allows the unencumbered writing and linking of pages. This feature makes it possible for the entire reading audience of a site to take active part in editing and expanding that site and keeps a balance between ease of editing and future navigability.

The Discourse District follows the wiki paradigm, but requires logging in, in order to make changes. This does not violate the "Open Content" philosophy, since anyone may register and log in. Logging in is necessary because besides being a repository for open content written by a community, the Discourse District serves as a dynamic map of the community that is doing the writing. If two users are "linked" to the same subject, the graph would show them to be at a distance of at most 2 steps from each other. So, for example, mapping the contributions of users to subjects results in a topology of a graph that brings closer together users that contributed to close topics as well as topics that were edited by a common author.

The software is exhibited at the complexity site