December 30, 2003
Cat In the Box
Sabrina took some fine pictures of the cat hanging out in a box: (2EG)
For more, see CatInBoxContents. (2EI)
I think my cat is at least as cool as Danny's. (2EJ)
December 18, 2003
Snow Pictures
I took some pictures where there was snow but I had lost my camera dongle whoosit. I've remedied that situation: (29E)
The back yard at night. (29H)
My snow angel. (29J)
December 14, 2003
Snow
The snow has finally come. And with it that silence and slowness. And my snow angel. A wish or a prayer for it to stay. And today's deer, posing in the snow, waiting for Santa. And me, butt and belly flops, sliding down the hill, flannel lined pants to the rescue. Now home. Hot chocolate. 1:30am. It's still snowing. (27X)
December 12, 2003
Community and Collaboratory Tools
Over in BlueOxen land EugeneEricKim, to inspire discussion, has inquired why we think we need better collaboration. I went off to think about this, and ended up with an answer that is a bit tangential but relevant. It's about what I might like to do with Community and Collaboration oriented tools. The needs they might satisfy. We'll see where this goes. (267)
(This, intentionally, is not a description of reality in all its lovable muddiness, but rather an abstract description of how things could be. There is no clear line between what is a community and what is a collaboratory and the containment of a collaboratory in a community will often not be the case, with collaborators spanning multiple communities and roles frequently changing.) (268)
A recent survey to the members of the BlueOxenCollaboratory and surrounding conversation suggests that there is a significant difference between a community and a collaboratory. (269)
A community might be defined as a group of people who have some kind of shared large activity, ethic or mission that connects them at some level. The participants get together in some fashion to talk, to ramble, to tell stories--to communicate. (26A)
All this communication helps to build understanding among the participants, make and strengthen connections between the people, attract new participants and flesh out the shared thing that connects them. (26B)
The BlueOxenCollaboratory is a community of people who share the belief and mission that collaboration can and should be improved. (26C)
When a group within a community crystallizes a set of goals (from all that communicating they've been doing) on which they wish to make progress and to which they commit, that group is collaborating. (26D)
Collaboration is an event in time that is bounded in time. A collaborative event has actionable goals whose completion indicates an end to that phase of the collaboration. (It is often the case, however, that goals are added to an effectively collaborating group, extending the life of the group.) (26E)
Participants may come and go from a collaborating group, while still remaining in the community that contains the group. Participation in the collaborating group, though, is dependent on an active commitment to the group's goals. (26F)
Goals at the community level are general and loose and may be better labeled as missions: improving collaboration, ridding the world of poverty, that sort of thing. (26G)
Goals at the collaboratory level are more specific and actionable: creating a wiki that supports PurpleNumbers, raising N million dollars to create political ads for a particular campaign. These goals can be decomposed to tasks that can be assigned and to which someone can commit. (26H)
The communication activity of a progressive community is sometimes devoted to discerning the issues which inform the creation of goals on which members of the community can collaborate. Because the issues are often not clear a lot of time may be spent trying to figure out what is being talked about. (26I)
Community oriented tools help the community do what it does: communicate; build networks of people; and build and inform a shared ontology, understanding or mission. Therefore, the primary goal of community oriented tools is to facilitate the exploratory and discursive communication that answers questions such as: (26J)
- Who are we? (26K)
- What do we think? (26L)
- What makes us a group? (26M)
- How did we get here? (26N)
- What does the world look like to us? (26O)
- What do we want the world to look like? (26P)
A conscientious community knows that the communication they create is full of good stuff and wishes to reuse it. Therefore the tools which help transport this communication should provide: (26Q)
- GranularAddressability (26R)
- Identification (who said what as well as who is who) (26S)
- Multiple modes of organization (26T)
- Annotation (26Y)
(It occurs to me that I'm recapitulating some of the goals of the HeliumProject and the UvizProject. I hadn't originally thought of that.) (271)
Once a community has crystallized a goal or goals and some participants have made a commitment, the new collaborating subgroup needs a suite of tools that operate within and provide access to the existing communication space of the community. The tools create a space within the larger community space with highly permeable boundaries and provide for the following activities: (272)
The primary goals of these tools are to allow a participant to know, with little question: (27E)
The tools act as a directing roadmap while providing as much on demand context as possible. Cognitive stress about what's to be done is offloaded into the tool environment so effort can be focused on the task at hand. (27I)
Many tool siutes attempt to address most of these needs but seem to fall down in the provision and importance of context. Being able to access the context of a community or a collaborating group is crucial to having a high-resolution picture of what's going on. Tools and processes (such as setting up a PurpleNetwork) help but there is always the hard work of simply keeping up. That hard work has to be acknowledged as a valid (and time consuming) portion of anyone's responsibilities. (27J)
December 10, 2003
Change
Today: (25X)
- I got my first ever filling from the dentist. (25Y)
- My mother asked "Do you by chance have a paypal account?" (25Z)
Seemed noteworthy, somehow. (260)
When Does the Door Get Kicked In?
Some Republicans want to put Reagan on the dime, replacing FDR. It's hard to tell how serious they are, they are responding to the TV mini-series of recent infamy. (25G)
The last paragraph in the article, though, raised some thoughts: (25H)
And Souder said, "It is particularly fitting to honor the freedom president on this particular piece of coinage" because he was "wounded under the left arm by a bullet that had ricocheted and flattened to the size of a dime." (25I)
When Reagan was shot, I was in sixth grade. By that time I was already a committed non-Republican. I didn't know what I was but I knew I was not a Republican. I still don't know what I am but I'm still not a Republican. (25J)
When John Lennon was shot and killed a few months prior (twenty-three years ago, Monday) one of the few people I've ever thought a hero was removed before I had a chance to be old enough to appreciate him. I was horrified, I despaired, I lost faith. (25K)
When Reagan was shot, and there I was in the sixth grade, I hoped desperately for his death. I thought if there was any justice in the world a man like that would be taken away. There's always been, for me, something especially chilling about a person, supposedly good--marketed as good, acting in the name of good, volunteering for and elected to a position to do good--that is not good. More chilling than the obviously and/or marketed as evil: the megalomaniacs like Saddam and Kim Jong Il. Perhaps I'm overcompensating somehow. (25L)
I wanted Reagan dead and I was not ashamed of it. If he had died I would have said good riddance. (25M)
But Reagan survived, I lost more faith, and he went on to gain the number one spot in my list of hated, supposedly good, western politicians. Until I spent some time in Thatcher's Britain. (25N)
Thatcher roosted comfortably at the number one position until George W Bush. He strut upon on the stage with his big mouth, big pointing fingers and giant stroking brush, painting things whatever color was convenient. It was clear from very early on that here, in this puppet that didn't even bother to attempt to conceal the strings--while still trumpeting about his righteousness--was the new winner. (25O)
And so I'm left with some confusing questions: if, hypothetically speaking(tm) of course, I feel about Bush as I did about Reagan does that make me a terrorist(tm) and a threat to national security(tm)? Will I, at any minute, be extradited back across the pond to take tea with Maggie T? (25P)
Is it still safe to make and wear a t-shirt that says something like "Help Kill The President"? How about a baseball cap that says "Terrorist"? Is it still safe to talk about it? Is it still safe to joke about it? When won't it be? How will we know? (25Q)
I will go to Antarctica
TheGuardian is running diaries of a Craig Vear, visting Antarctica. He, a composer, won a fellowship to record sounds from Antarctica for the creation of a sound collage. (258)
I stumbled across week's five and six today, the editors of the paper had chosen to include it in the RSS feed. (259)
This week's entry has the title Emotional Extremes. It describes two sides of crying: loneliness and exultation. The desolate, lonely places call out as kin to a certain breed of lonely people. Why? (25A)
How is it possible, by any means, to describe the sonic, visual and emotional sensory overload of smashing through ice packs on a day with 24 hours of sun, millpond seas and 150-mile visibility to a crisp horizon as seals, penguins and whales play around the ship? (25C)
and its neighbors remind me of my comments on Mountains of the Mind: (25D)
The mountains, the desert, the oceans, the other, the alien; that which is not in the backyard has the power to halt, if only briefly, our thinking, our power to compare, our only real power. We are left with pure sensing. This is the ecstasy of erasure; the knowing it's all really very big out there. And we, tiny and mortal, are able to see it and see it as new. T (25E)
I want to go Antarctica. (25F)
December 08, 2003
Purple Computer As Tool
I didn't realize this until I started working on making the following so but: Today is the two year anniversary of the due date of my Computer as Tool paper. (23P)
In subconscious honor of the occasion I've translated the document to WikiText and given it PurpleNumbers to grant it GranularAddressability so that I might use TransClusion to pull in some thoughts such as: (23Q)
Barring data transport problems, the reasons for the computer's inability to interact effectively can be traced back to a fundamental difference in the way humans and computers utilize information. There are many high level reasons but they can all be traced back to this: computers must classify information whereas humans may categorize. T (23R)
and (23S)
When the computer is viewed as having intention "the personification of the machine is reinforced" (Suchman). The interaction between the user and the computer is the locus of negotiation for performing the task. The computer takes a privileged stance, above the task. When in that stance we expect the computer to truly have, given the intention we have granted it, the intelligence, inferential power and adaptability that Suchman says we expect in social interaction. This is unfortunate because the computer is not intelligent; it cannot compare arbitrary and dynamic categories. It has no true and general inferential power; it cannot create links between categories. It is not truly adaptable; it can only create new classes of distinction according to a limited rule set. The expectation of intelligence sets up a poor mental model of the real situation. Such a model cannot be run to "predict the output which would result from some kind of input" (Eberts, 1994). T (23T)
Paradoxically, the intention that grants the high expectation of intelligence creates lower expectations of effective performance. We perceive an obscure purpose in the computer that we must decode and any difficulty in doing so must be our fault. When our interaction with the computer fails we think it is because we are unable to communicate as it does. As Norman (1988) says, when we should be blaming the design we are blaming ourselves. T (23U)
What's odd, for me, is that there is little I've said (in the psuedo-professional arena) in the last two years that can't be traced back to the insights I had at the time I wrote this paper. That says two things to me: (23V)
- It was a productive time during which I ate a lot of good information and was able, through that information, to establish some beliefs that have stuck with me. (23W)
- I need to discern what it was about that time, and make it go again, someday, or I'm going to be a one trick pony. (23X)
I hope to move some other documents from the same time period into my PurpleNetwork. (23Y)
December 06, 2003
More Purple Noodling
There's been discussion at the BlueOxenCollaboratory about making a ChurchOfPurple logo to go along with the hymns being bantied about. (21D)
I fiddled about in Illustrator some, first making this: (21E)
but quickly became dissatisfied, so made this, which might be better: (21G)
Meanwhile, Matt Schneider countered my grumpiness with being able to understand PurpleNumbers with a good example from conversation with his grandfather. (21I)
Update: Matt has corrected me: The gentleman in question is his father not grandfather. I'm not sure how I got that. It says father right there in the referenced bit. With server independent purple numbers, I could have just transcluded, and not had to worry about it. (2PN)
December 05, 2003
Purple Hymn
PeterJones has composed a hymn for the church of purple (20U)
Church of Purple Hymn: (20V)
"Purple links all around my text, Lately things just don't seem so vexed, Acting happy and I now know why, 'Scuse me, while I transclude the sky." # by Jimmy Hotlinx. # (20W)
This is perfect. (20X)
Unfortunately like so many things in the PurpleNumbers universe, if you get it already this gives you a comfortable feeling of understanding. If you don't already get it, I bet this just makes you go "huh?". (20Y)
How to fix that? (20Z)
| bl
| Categories:
collaboration
,
geek-glaxon
,
purple
Out and In
I have to admit that I am extremely disappointed that today's Winter Storm advisory was cancelled. How's a guy supposed to enjoy the snow if it doesn't come? (20N)
Today's deer (they're quotidian) probably prefers the lack of snow. Better for the munching: (20O)
The deer is out in the yard. There's snow falling, but it melts when it lands. Just inside the window a tiny flower tries to get out: (20Q)
It's a about a half inch wide, maybe a bit less. Here it is from some distance: (20S)
December 02, 2003
Warp and Wiki
Joe recently asked: (1Y9)
How does Warp compare and contrast with Wiki? Do you consider it a successful experiment? (1YB)
and I thought the answer would be good blog fodder, so here it is. (1YC)
Warp is a system I wrote to provide the backend for my Hypertext and Knowledge Enhancement project. From the History section: (1YD)
The first version of Warp was written on a few cold winter nights to experiment with creating unexpected links between dynamic documents. It was inspired, in part, by systems such as Wiki and Everything2 but is intentionally much simpler. Those systems are cumbersome because they were designed to do something. Warp was never designed to do anything other than screw around. It turns out, however, to make a nice glossary engine for a project that has something to with hypertext, authorship, thought augmentation, etc. (1YE)
Now, with a few years of information science, philosophizing, collaboration work and PurpleWiki coding under my belt, I view Warp as something of an experiment in unintentional emergence or context development. (1YF)
Wikis encourage emergent understanding: people make their edits, create their WikiWords. With time, meaning bubbles to the surface. When someone uses a WikiWord there is intentional naming of a concept, the making of a Word: (1YG)
This is where WikiWords come in as a helpful tool. In asynchronous modes of communication the eyebrow raise, hand waving, tone of voice or trenchant gaze that indicate an important concept are not present. Something else is needed to indicate a sense of "this is important" and perhaps more importantly "I think this might be important". For a group that has trained into the behavior WikiWords do this very well. The smashed camel case says: there's something here and it is more than a simple hypertextual link: it is a Word, a Name, a Label, an Identifier of something that matters or will matter soon. T (1YH)
Warp's linking occurs, in the way I've used it, with words that already exist. There is no creating of a new word, just the assignment of a somewhat arbitrary value as the definition of a word. When that word is used in the warpspace, anywhere it is used it is linked back to the definition, where all the BackLinks are exposed. (1YI)
That linking is functionally similar to Wiki linking, but because it is "normal" words that are being linked, the linking is a bit more fecund and the connections between word use and definition less clear. (1YJ)
What I wanted to see happen was that when using Warp I would leap nimbly across short links in Warp that were representative of long traverses in my brain. Folding the space of the brain. Thus the name. (1YK)
You might try the following traverse in warp (go to the first link, read, click the word of the next link that you will find on the page): (1YL)
You may see something different, but I see a search for meaning and expression combined with ways to manage that expression out in the world in a maximally flexible fashion. (1YS)
From the discovery perspective Warp is somewhat successful. Digging up that traverse just now made me very pleased with it. It was an enlightening experience. (1YT)
On the other hand Warp is not actively productive, it is sort of like wanking. Good for you and pleasant if you have the time but if you need to get something done, lacking in directive structure. (1YU)
My switch over to Wikis and a PurpleNumber oriented universe is an acknowledgment that there needs to be, at least some of the time, some guidance and structure if there is to be progress. That is, if there is a known goal, we can make headway if we are able to (somewhat) reliably point to it and its constituent parts. In the absence of a known goal, systems like Warp that stir the pot do good. (1YV)
I have to admit that I'm a little let down by this realization. I'd like to exist in a universe where semi-random noodling is more available as a legitimate pursuit. I had a teacher who called genius the ability to draw connections between apparently distant ideas. Genius is often a luxury when immediate needs press but don't we need genius to solve those immediate needs? To climb up out of the darkness, into the beauty and good, where there are structures that support and sustain us in learning and growth. (1YW)
