Pyrite wrote:

It's an interesting question exactly what the Solarchives are. Massive system-wide wiki project? That would be nice, but as it stands many of the polities in the inner system seem to practice too much information control to allow that. Who maintains it? The Argonauts? That's really the only option that makes sense.

The description in Gatecrashing suggests that they are reference libraries, probably a combination of high quality information collected by hand by experts and everything meshspiders could download in addition, to make a comprehensive overview of a domain. I suspect there are plenty of wiki-descendants, but probably they are rather splintered by now. I suspect there are many sources, but the Argonauts are likely very active here. My adventure idea is essentially that I want to make the Eclipse Phase take on Umberto Eco's "Name of the Rose". Set at an Argonaut habitat devoted to building a proper library of the information of transhumanity, with researchers making solarchives as a profitable side activity (somebody has to pay for those server upgrades!) The fun thing about this is that in many ways this would be an inversion of Eco's monastery. There the monks were preserving the information, hiding it from the outside world and each other. Here open access rules: everything is supposed to be transparent and available to all. But I suspect interesting things can happen inside the perfectly transparent library too. Should forks be included into the collection? Is it acceptable to accept payment for services - or pay for data? Just think of Wikipedia politics, ubiquitous surveillance and information hazards.

Yes, the trope of poisonous or forbidden knowledge being unearthed at the Argonaut research is an obvious and useful adventure seed. The only problem in my opinion is that it has been done several times. Information hazards might be an obvious element (and might be why Firewall is involved). But I think it would be interesting to have an adventure that is not just about stopping xrisk of the week, unearthed by naive researchers/corrupt corps/crazy singularity seekers. The same is true for having the station separating itself from communications periodically: great for creating a locked room setting, but it has been done. As you can see, I am making things hard for myself by trying to avoid the obvious tropes. In Eco's book much of the story revolves about *limiting* access to information, whether by walls, prejudice, ignorance, intrigue, ideology or the physical limitations of medieval society. I want to make a story that deals with the opposite end of the spectrum: what bad things can happen in a community devoted to openness and the spread of knowledge, where it is hard to hide information. Think of it as a murder mystery set on Wikipedia. As I envision the station it has a core library of carefully vetted and curated information, accessible to all and inscribed on read-only long-lasting hardware with remote backups. Surrounding this is the research front: taking data from out there and organizing it so that it can be included. This means cross-checking it, adding the right metadata, combing through it for forgeries, spam and viruses, all the menial and deep tasks of archival science. This might also be where the big conflicts are: what to include? how to frame controversial information? what standards to use? My take on the process of making solarchives is that many groups do it, but a few do it well. So these groups are in high demand to make portable compendia of everything a gatecrasher team, new polity or hypercorp research outpost might need. Similarly other products from the library are useful: education programs, simspaces and indices. Another aspect - and this is where I really think there is something to work on - is making simulations of the past. If you have a lot of data you can infer things not in the data. What if there is something in this process that sets the action in motion?