Today my friend Slava tweeted the following at me:

“I'm thinking for a long time how to turn all SLOPI communication channels into #knowledgebase with some NLP pipelines and archive it in @dataverseorg. Probably another crazy idea for Hackathon in June during community meeting.”

In my reply, I tried to explain that yes, I definitely want a knowledge base, but from a recent conversation with a friend, I'm wondering if it should be build on Blacklight.

But what are we even talking about? See, SLOPI is a communication style, especially for open source projects, where the messages are public and each post has a permalink. The next logical step is to index all these messages into a search engine or what a friend calls a “discovery layer”. That way, it doesn't matter where the conversation happens. As long as it's indexed, you can find it again, hopefully. I'm somewhat surprised no open source projects do this currently so I suspect it's difficult.

SMACKI is a half baked acronym. Even when I uttered it out loud for the first time in a talk I gave last year, I couldn't even remember what the letters stand for:

"Right. I have an idea for that too and it's called “SMACKI” but I can't remember all of it. Searchable Knowledge Index. It's so nascent that I don't have it all written down. But it's coming. Next year, we'll talk about SMACKI.”

Of course, I'm not sure if I'll be ready or not.