papers. Wybo Wiersma .net

Social software needs an active user community before it becomes attractive to new visitors.

This paper analyzes and describes an attempt at attaining such critical mass for LogiLogi.org, an innovative philosophical discussion platform (described in this paper).

The paper examines the limited literature on critical mass, and reports on two usability studies that were done on LogiLogi. LogiLogi was then improved in ways that would maximize its chances of attaining critical mass (which did not succeed).

The literature review, as well as some of our conclusions may be useful to other web-applications.

This paper sets out to show that philosophy has much to gain from the web, and argues that it will inexorably go beyond on-line journals, and the distribution of .pdf files.

The failure of historical attempts at making the web work for philosophy are investigated and explained. LogiLogi, a prototype of a philosophical discussion platform, is then introduced. It is different from forums and wikis and tries to overcome their limitations by aiming for an informal middle-road between good conversations and journal-papers and by providing a form of quick, informal publication, peer-review, and annotation of short philosophical texts.

The paper concludes with a tentative analysis of what philosophy on the web should be like, and how LogiLogi is tailored to such a conception of philosophy.