Share First Profess Later

eek has a nice post about the concept of profession and collaboration. It's interesting: while collaboration is often very much about the creation of shared artifacts that help a group do something; a self-conscious profession, a professional society, often exists or is created to be the artifact that lets a group know they are attempting to do something.    (Q3X)

Especially when they aren't doing anything. The existence of the society defends against the existential dread of who are we and what do we do.    (Q3Y)

Professions and disciplines make me nervous, in a similar way to Eugene. What one does when collaborating is always more important than collaboration itself.    (Q3Z)

In the ideal situation, collaboration disappears into the background. If you find yourself enmeshed in the details of how your group should interact, you've missed a step. Take a pause, and work on your Shared Language.    (Q40)

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Next Great P2P Application

I'm at work, where most of us telecommute and never see one another, and devised the following application to enhance productivity and shareholder value. Maybe you can use it in your distributed workplace too.    (Q3A)

Because, as myth has it, I hate everything and everyone, I tend to be quick on the anger draw. So in an effort to create a less hostile work environment I implore you to help me build the next great p2p application. Everyone in a team runs it on their workspace. You turn it on when you start work, it finds your peers.    (Q3B)

The system is based on a therapy that some Obsessive Compulsive Disorder people may use: They wear a rubber band on their wrist and snap it when they are doing "the bad thing".    (Q3C)

When a member of the team starts doing a "bad thing" someone else on the team, may, at their option, snap the offending teammate. The offender will see on their screen a big rubber band come in from the back of the screen and arrive at the front of the screen with an audible snap.    (Q3D)

With this we can snap each other when we aren't helping to increase shareholder value. When I'm getting angry too easily or being overly sensitive to some bizarre concept of justice, when Bob is talking too much, when Joe is yelling, when Ned storms out, when Barb doesn't read or write, when Norman is being "too mean", when Francine gets her math wrong, when Susan is too slow, when Barry is too indirect, everyone will be able to move on and get shit done.    (Q3E)

Or collapse under a hail of thunderous snapping.    (Q3F)

Clearly this thing needs a name.    (Q3G)

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Feedback is Leadership?

Morning rambling. Take with drugs. Your milage may vary.    (Q2Z)

Feedback, in some fundamental way, is at the core of a successfully collaborating system. This was the fundamental insight of Wiener and his cybernetics. Whatever else we may think about what it has to say about life, the statement that information dispersal and feedback go hand in hand is one of the major intellectual contributions of the 20th century.    (Q30)

A collaborating system of any kind--ants, people, network services--is made of individual entities producing and consuming information. Individuals are the core contributors to the system. The sum of their amassed contributions may be greater than the parts, and often is, but at base it is the individual pieces and parts that are creating and contributing: having inspiration.    (Q31)

What those pieces and parts create and contribute is shaped, refined and eventually defined by feedback from the rest of the system.    (Q32)

No person is an island.    (Q33)

In an activity group, initial contributions are themselves feedback to some thing in the system: a catalyst. A meme or goal that becomes a leader, or is installed by a leader (which itself could be meme, goal or person). Activity (information) crystallizes around the catalyst, accretes around the growing mass of the signal which is the product (some fun, a paper, a tool, a house, a brand new idea) of the group.    (Q34)

If the growing product is not headed in the right direction how do we know? Feedback. How do we know where to go get headed in the right direction? Feedback. From the system itself.    (Q35)

If the system is insufficiently mature or the initial catalyst insufficiently clear (thus not really a catalyst) the meme, goal or person must be clarified, buttressed, tuned to be a true catalyst. That tuning is feedback, observation from outside the confines of the system, and is leadership.    (Q36)

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Effective Reading

This is adapted from discussion at Socialtext where, because we are a distributed or virtual workforce, we move a huge amount of information around as text. It's been noted lately that the quantity of my blogging has slacked of late. This is mostly because I'm writing inside the walls of work, so here's something from the inside.    (PZ1)

Socialtext wikis are called workspaces. Individuals are members of some number of workspaces. These are usually divided up by topic, group or project. (Knowing this matters below.)    (PZ2)

I frequently find myself at the intersection of two events    (PZ3)

• some people wondering how I get so much read    (PZ4)
• some people complaining about not being able to keep up with the stuff to read; me becoming somewhat bewildered by that    (PZ5)

So mayhaps I should write down what I do and other folk can farm that for useful techniques or rationale to ignore me. This writing was somewhat inspired by discussion of how to maintain focus.    (PZ6)

In case you find this not to your liking, that's okay. This is what I do. It works for me. It may not work for you, but then again it may.    (PZ7)

First, there's no doubt that I read very quickly and skim at a very high level of presumed comprehension (that is, I'm able to convince myself that I got the bits that mattered; whether this is true or not is unknown). That's been true since I started reading. Second, I've become practiced with using tools that augment my ability to read (email filters, mail and rss reader settings, etc). Most of that practice happened when I was a sysadmin and my colleagues and I managed to get in the habit of feeling really nervous if our mail didn't get a response within a minute or so.    (PZ8)

I proceed from the assumption that as knowledge workers our primary job is to communicate. Communication is not overhead, it's the work. Things like writing code are reifications of previous communication. The quality of the code mirrors the quality of the communication and comprehension that precedes the generation of the code.    (PZ9)

So, starting from that assumption I have some general rules of thumb about what I should be doing:    (PZA)

• before writing or acting read everything in your circle of concern    (PZB)
  • all your email    (PZC)
  • all the new and updated content in workspaces you care about    (PZD)
• When it is time to write or act, do that until you are done, then read again.    (PZE)

Reading email and workspaces deserves more more explanation. First, turn off email notify in all workspace and get a good rss aggregator that can show diffs (this is perhaps the single most useful thing to do to enable "staying abreast"). Only subscribe to those workspaces that are germane, rely on others to let you know when something important is happening in some other workspace that is not in your immediate circle of concern. Second, use filters with your email: send email to different folders depending on topic or list. If possible get a mail program that lets you start it with a different set of folders available depending on the activity you are engaged in (for me this is work and not work). Use one that lets you hit the same key to just keep on reading.    (PZF)

For email:    (PZG)

1. as your read, delete everything that doesn't matter    (PZH)
2. if an incoming folder (other than annoying non-work mailing lists which have your non-continious always-partial attention) is above a certain size, say 20 messages or so, something is wrong. There either aren't enough incoming folders, or you aren't deleting and responding with alacrity.    (PZI)
3. read again    (PZJ)
4. respond to anything that needs a response and delete the responded-to message (if you can't trust your emailer to send your mail correctly, or keep copies of your sent mail, or otherwise make you feel confident in deleting messages, fix that!)    (PZK)
5. do whatever getting things done work-alike thing it takes for you to deal with messages you can't respond to but think are important signifiers in your life, but remember #2 above (I leave them in the folder and let #2 keep me in check)    (PZL)

For feeds:    (PZM)

1. when you are reading, anything that seems important, send to a tab in your browser    (PZN)
2. read everything    (PZO)
3. configure your aggregator so it updates itself differently for different kinds of feeds. I update Socialtext related feeds once an hour (or by hand whenever I'm in a break) but other feeds only update every six hours or so    (PZP)
4. when done reading go to your browser and review the tabs and deal with as appropriate (garden, comment, post to delicious, whatever), if it's been a while since the page was loaded in your browser, you may wish to reload    (PZQ)

Do these things without paying attention to IRC.    (PZR)

The trick here, for me, is that whether I'm in email or NetNewsWire I just sort of idly hit a key, soaking it all in. I generate a gestalt of the state of things I care about. Only after I've made it all the way through do I react because it is the whole state of the little work universe that matters when responding, not just the one atom of information that's currently under the cursor.    (PZS)

The snobby/arrogant part of me often feels like saying, "Have you read everything?" before having a conversation with people. I suspect this is annoying for those people. It is similarly annoying for me to have to come down to the limited MTU of speech...    (PZT)

I feel speech is best at two stages of the ShareLanguage? spectrum: when there is very little (and reading is not much help in developing understanding, either because there are no SharedGoals? to jumpstart understanding or there's just too much ignorance for a foundation to exist) and when there is a great deal (when so much SharedLanguage is present that MTU and bandwidth are high and speech has been transcended in favor of something like SharedBrain?). In the middle, reading can be a good tool because it situates wait states in the reader. Work colleagues are generally (or perhaps should be) in the middle, except for some occasions when pairing, face to face, or starting a new thing.    (PZU)

Clearly this is a self-serving attitude on my part, and I temper myself (at least a little) accordingly, at least when I remember to do so. But now you know. Feel free to comment, but please don't try to tell me I'm wrong for me or anyone else other than you. You're the only person you can be sure about. And even that's not clear.    (PZV)

There's an important corollary to the above rules:    (PZW)

• When possible, always send your email to a relevant group list that is archived    (PZX)

This helps insure the opportunities for people to know the gestalt of the environment. It also helps maintain artifacts.    (PZY)

Update: Eric Sinclair has some observations (of me and his own experiences).    (Q03)

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Affinity for Categories

I went to IdeaDay last night to listen to MattMay and AlexWilliams talk about podcasting. I've not become a podcasting fan, perhaps because I don't use my ipod (headphone issues) or perhaps because I'm too nervous to go around with environmental noises blocked out, but none of that matters because I was primarily there to meet the BlueFlavor guys, see who else goes to these things and participate in Sabrina's forays into the Seattle social network of folks what do things like what she do.    (PX9)

The presentation was interesting but a little disjointed. Matt and Alex clearly know their stuff and could have talked for ages but I think they needed an agenda. An initial query to the audience of what they wanted to hear about threw things in the direction of how to make money podcasting. I think they should have started with a gentle introduction. It may have been a review for many of the people there, but would have established some baseline understanding and SharedLanguage.    (PXA)

The most relevant discussion was a tangent in response to a "how do I find stuff, it's hard to index audio" question from the audience. Matt mentioned discovering community and making use of affinity groups to find stuff.    (PXB)

This made some things related to tagging click. I've harped for a long time about the importance of SharedLanguage in collaboration and used naming as an ax to grind against the insidious evil of FreeLinks. Tags, WikiWords, nicknames are all ways of establishing affinity: If you have developed the SharedLanguage to understand the name, it's like having an invitation to a group. If you have affinity for the name, you may have affinity for the group using it; it's time to seek that invitation.    (PXC)

All these things--tags, nicknames, WikiWords--are markers for conceptual categories. They are _not_ labels for classes.    (PXD)

(An aside into my defintions of class and category may be necessary:    (PXE)

• a class is a defined grouping of entities in which the members fulfill the definition of the class and can be listed.  T    (PXF)
• a category is a cognitive label applied to a non-enumerable grouping of entities wherein membership is determined by typicality amongst the members and not some overarching definition.  T    (PXG)

)    (PXH)

Markers assume a measure of doubt, treasure it and get value out of connotation and suggestion. In other words, affinity.    (PXI)

Affinity based systems assume a measure of tolerance for the happy accident of discovery: "This isn't exactly what I was looking for, but, damn, it's cool!" It's not about information retrieval, but discovery and enhancement.    (PXJ)

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Wiener, Grammar, Action and Me

I've been reading a biography of Norbert Wiener. The title is the ominous Dark Hero of the Information Age. I'm not that far in but it's been quite interesting thus far, despite the sometimes stilted writing.    (PV9)

When he was ten (c. 1904) he wrote his first philosophical paper, described in the book as "a treatise on the incompleteness of all knowledge". His conclusion: "In fact all human knowledge is based on an approximation."    (PVA)

Wiener went on to lay most of the foundations for information theory, stochastic processes, dealing with feedback in electronic systems; all based on probabilistic statistics. He rejected Bertrand Russell--one of his tutors and one of the authors of The Principia Mathematica--within a few months of meeting. Russell said there could be internal completeness, Wiener said there could not, and Gödel eventually proved Wiener correct.    (PVB)

Wiener also happened to be a wildly depressed guy. When there was noise in his own personal information system or he was not getting good feedback, he was unable to produce his usually good work or generally interact well with his life. He experienced self doubt and confusion within that mirrored his belief that nothing was certain, anywhere or anywhen.    (PVC)

To what extent did one pattern lead the other? Where was the balance in the symbiosis between the perception of self and perception of the outer world. Wiener's later work informs views of "it's all one big system".    (PVD)

I resonate with some of what's going on here. My drive to create information resources that are accessible, referenceable and reusable is driven by a personal need to externalize noise in my own system so I can do (occasionally) good work and interact well with my life. I want to make stigmergic structures out in the environment that I and others can use as what amount to optimized external decision makers and information chunks.    (PVE)

Simply tossing information out into the ether doesn't cut it. For the chunks to be useful they need to be transparent, transportable, composable and authentic (in the Heidegger sense). Transparent means you can see what the information is for or about. Transportable means that the information survives being moved out of its initial context (carries, creates or refers to its own context). Composable means that the information can be effectively reused inline with other information.    (PVF)

To put it another way, the information is like Lego: it is a building block in a system whose grammar can be perceived. This block can go on this block in these numerous but constrained ways.    (PVG)

Information, here, is one word for many things: exchanges of knowledge, perceptions, tools and processes.    (PVH)

In many cases the perception of a grammar relies on expertise. In order for more than one actor to collaborate in an information system, they must share some level of experience in the domain and have shared language. If they do not already have or first build shared language they will waste their time arguing the grammar of the available blocks with little composition. Until there is shared language very little will get done.    (PVI)

(See also Collaboration Requires Goals for related discussion.)    (PVJ)

So if found in a situation where shared language is too incomplete (as it always must be somewhat incomplete, see above) what are the tools to make more?    (PVK)

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Dimensions in Group Communication Media

Anyone who has ever used a combination of email, phone, meetings and other media to communicate in a small group has experienced at least one moment where they've thought, "this would be going much better if we were having this conversation using X".    (PTD)

While the choice of X is often driven by personal preference and comfort levels (as someone who spent a few years being a sysadmin, my X is email), I believe there are several scales along which the various media can be measured. The resulting values (which are very much dependent on the context of the medium's use) can be used to choose a medium depending on the goals of the group or the individual initiating the conversation.    (PTE)

The three scales that are usually most relevant for me (I'm primarily concerned with enabling action and reflection) are:    (PTF)

Degree of Synchrony    (PTG)

Does the medium provide for synchronous or asynchronous responses. This depends not so much on the quickness with which a participant responds but rather whether the communication to which a response will eventually be made is stored for review. On the phone you can wait for a long time to make a response, but eventually you may forget what the other person said. This isn't the case with email.    (PTH)

Desired result of communication    (PTI)

Action versus Reflection. Should the participants be inspired to perform some action or to continue thinking at the end of the conversation? How does the medium encourage one or the other?    (PTJ)

Degree of Ambiguity    (PTK)

How clearly does the medium transmit already clear concepts? How effectively does it indicate there is doubt? What degree of doubt or noise does the medium inject into the conversational space?    (PTL)

These scales can be used to make three axes defining a three dimensional space. Each medium fits somewhere in the space. Each scale impacts the others.    (PTM)

• synchronous ... asynchronous    (PTN)
• action ... reflection    (PTO)
• ambiguity ... clarity    (PTP)

Neither end of any scale is bad. Each is good in some ways: effectively expressing doubt is a way of showing that there is room for reflection or a need for more information. However, using a medium that introduces or enhances ambiguity in a setting where quick action is required is a bad idea.    (PTQ)

Wikis, Weblogs and Email are all asynchronous media (the content is stored for later use) but they work more effectively in different areas. Email, because it is pushed to the reader, is often more effective at causing action. RSS feeds from wikis and weblogs could inspire action, but thus far there is not much of a tradition of use along these lines. They are more effective at reflection, especially wikis, which allow in place refactoring of content.    (PTR)

IRC, phone calls and face to face meetings are synchronous. IRC can introduce a great deal of noise where processes of use have not emerged. It can be a place for causing action, but leadership is required. It is often good for dipping into a shared pool of understanding for a bit of reflection. An unexpected phone call can inspire action while a pre-arranged conference call or face to face meeting is only effective with the help of processes and structures that facilitate the use and construction of information artifacts that will live on after the call.    (PTS)

Where would you map the various media? What dimension matters most to you? Someone could make a graph.    (PTT)

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Old Stuff: Classification v Categorization

When I was in school I took an Information Architecture class that required a readings journal. Some of those entries deserve revision.    (PPB)

I was, at the time, especially in the difference, similarities and interrelationships between classification and categorization. What follows began life as Studer: Classification v. Categorization. The first version was written November, 2001.    (PPC)

The Studer article suggests there is a lack of consistency in the literature in the use of the terms classification and categorization. Studer uses the terms carelessly, especially when quoting: while he uses the term classification in his own text the quoted text uses category.    (PPE)

Studer makes it sound like the process of creating classifications is a step following the creation or identification of categories. This conflicts with my interpretations.    (PPF)

In my view classification is an artificial (synthetic, non-fundamental) process by which we organize things for presentation or later access. It involves the arbitrary creation of a group of classes which have explicit definitions and may be arranged in a hierarchy. In other words a class is strictly defined and once inhabited the inhabitants can be enumerated.    (PPG)

Categorization, on the other hand is a natural process in the sense that humans do it as part of their cognitive fundament. It is, like Studer reports, an act of simplification to make apprehension and comprehension of the environment more efficient. Categories spring up out of necessity and because they are designed to replace the details of definition are themselves resistant to definition. When provided with a list of stuff we are able to categorize the stuff, but when asked to list the full contents of a category we cannot.    (PPH)

So to put it more succinctly:    (PPI)

• a class is a defined grouping of entities in which the members fulfill the definition of the class and can be listed.    (PPJ)
• a category is a cognitive label applied to a non-enumerable grouping of entities wherein membership is determined by typicality amongst the members and not some overarching definition.    (PPK)

This is important to me, in part, because I'm playing around with trying to determine if computers can ever be actually intelligent or must always fake it. I vote for the latter because computers, thus far, cannot categorize.    (PPL)

The ability to categorize may be the basis for intelligence (On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins, presents some data to support this, as well as some assertions that may blow my "thus far" out of the water, given time). On the fly categorization allows us to place data in an informational context. Once in that matrix we can do what amounts to an endless recursive dialectic wherein each new synthesis becomes thesis.    (PPM)

Computers can presumably replicate this process but if they do, it is imitation. Their distinctions must be made by definition, by classification, not categorization. They can be made to appear to do categorization but the alternate representations they provide are rules (definition) based. Until recently the most promising research in creating seemingly intelligent machines has used what can be called a brute force approach: supply the computer with as much information as possible, related in as many ways as possible. This is the method that IBM used to get Deep Blue to become a chess champion and is one of the keys to the Semantic Web.    (PPN)

If we want to create truly intelligent machines we must determine how categorization works. I wonder, though, why we want intelligent machines. What do we gain from that? Don't we instead want machines that are tools to augment our own intelligence? If that's the case, then we are already have the understandings to make progress: we simply need to improve on what we have.    (PPO)

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Queues and Stacks and Creepy Crawlies

In separate conversations with an old coworker and a new coworker I've stumbled upon a new word that I rather like.    (POV)

It seems to me that the most effective way to manage a collection of tasks is to model them as a queue: first in, first out. Real life requires that we be able to reorder the queue in response to changes in the world, but the general principle of FIFO applies.    (POW)

A queue can be lengthened or shortened as needed, but provides a fairly robust cognitive aid in the face of additional requests that happen when the queue is already full: "There's no room in here, what would you like me to take out to make room?" or "You can get in here, but you have to go on the end."    (POX)

Very often organizations or people that are too busy or unfocused lose the discipline to maintain a queue of tasks and switch to using a stack: first in, last out. I know I do this. A lot of forces influence this: It's important not to say no to someone or something; A mess of dependencies makes it difficult to choose which tasks to sacrifice in the queue ; When there is a perception that stack or queue overrun will cause an organizational crash of some kind, a stack absorbs tasks into its dark confines more easily.    (POY)

It's in these dark confines where the new word lurks. Those tasks which are in the depths of the stack, pushed in a long time ago, warped and sickly from lack of attention, are filobytes.    (POZ)

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Genius Social Networks

Back in my junior year of high school, my physics teacher, who had a penchant for pausing class to say something pithy, etched the following phrase into my brain: Genius is the ability to find the connections between seemingly disparate things.    (POG)

That idea has driven much of my thinking since then.    (POH)

Phil Jones (with whom I'd been having a lively chat about purple numbers) recently found my Why Wiki? posting. He responds with some comments on his own aspirations:    (POI)

I've convinced myself recently that if there were a universe where it were possible for statements like "there are two kinds of people" to be true then it would be true that there are two kinds of people interested in developing collaboration tools. Neither better nor worse, just different. Both are necessary and useful.    (POK)

One type is interested in enabling or augmenting the subtle interplay of people found in synchronous encounters, in synchronous settings as well as extended into asynchronous settings. These extroverts are the true and hopeful believers in collaborative action.    (POL)

The other type is more interested in augmenting the individual to allow them to manipulate information so it can be found, created and then distributed in a way that it can be manipulated by others. Introverts in an augmented dialectic.    (POM)

My own predilections, fears and interests place me in the second camp. For a long time I thought the main reason was because I didn't much like people and couldn't stand the dreadful noise, small packet size and high overhead of synchronous interaction.    (PON)

There's truth to that, but my experience with Phil suggests more: The internet as a whole and personal information tools that operate with it allow us to leap great spaces between disparate places and topics to draw and discover inferences that are like sparks of genius in a giant shared mind.    (POO)

Only a diversity of tools and a diversity of people can create the complexity in the technological and social network to both enable and ensure the distant leaps between hubs and echo chambers that signal the big ideas. Tools that are focused on the individual and their tasks and interests and publish to the universe simultaneously break down hegemony and synthesize the new groups and ideas that will be built from and broken down soon thereafter.    (POP)

Thanks Mr. Riehle.    (POQ)

Update: Phil has some additional comments.    (POR)

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Blogs: Moving the Bait

SB received her copy the SLIS Network alumni magazine today. I suspect they've lost me somehow (off the hook for now, but see below).    (PIF)

It opens with a note from the Dean, Blaise Cronin, lovingly entitled: BLOG: see also Bathetically Ludicrous Online Gossip.    (PIG)

Blaise has a strong reputation as someone who loves to stir controversy. It helps him support his persistent belief that citation is a greater indicator of academic importance than content. Blaise is a brilliant strategist on a fishing trip so I find myself reluctant to write in response, but his last paragraph compels:    (PIH)

Under some circumstances, I might be willing to agree with Blaise. Ross reports back from Les Blogs:    (PIJ)

thoughts I've had myself on a rainy day.    (PIL)

But there are two things:    (PIM)

Blaise is the dean of a major site for information science education and research. He's showing a, um, bias here that's inappropriate for a place that should be pushing the boundaries of communication and knowledge enhancement forward, not holding them back. He's also playing political games with his own faculty that are too ridiculous to mention further.    (PIN)

And that bit about Wikipedia certainly brushes up against my chosen lines of work. Blaise speaks there as if he is the voice for all librarians. The librarians I know and cherish, of course, know better than Blaise.    (PIO)

Where I am in life today has a great deal to do with what I was able to milk out of my SLIS education. It came from my own assiduous exploration and the support of some very special people. It had very little to do with the policies and programs overseen by Blaise, and if he continues with these blinders the school will be unable to produce the sort of graduates the world needs.    (PIP)

Update: Blaise has posted a response to all the static he's received.    (PMH)

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Why Wiki?

A regular unanswered question (for myself and others) of "what do you do?", some conversations with Lee LeFever about social design and community, and recent updates at work have given me a chance to think a bit about the question and stir some ideas.    (PG6)

At work I'm primarily a developer, but I tend to think of my vocation as a builder of augmenting, computer-based tools for personal and collaborative work. I go to the trouble of making that mouthful of a statement to distinguish between types of activities that computers do and types of activities that people do.    (PG7)

Computers have two types of applications, those that automate and those that augment (21Q, 22J). An augmenting application assists a person in performing some activity which cannot or is not automated. Only activities which can be formally described in theory can be automated. As such there are many tasks, especially those related to human discourse, which cannot be automated; they can, however, be augmented.    (PG8)

At a fundamental level computers are tools for creating representations (22L). An augmenting application supporting discourse is engaged in representing and transmitting information. The application is used as tool to evaluate, craft and remodel information (22K).    (PG9)

   (PGA)

Most of my development effort in the last few years has been with wikis (first PurpleWiki, and now Kwiki and Socialtext) and purple numbers. Purple numbers may eventually change the universe of information handling, but that's a discussion for another day.    (PGB)

Wikis are a type of augmenting discourse tool optimized for a particular set of behaviors. Under ideal(tm) conditions they provide an easy path to participation in evolving communication. They do this by being straightforward to learn, quick to respond, and accessible in a distributed fashion. They support changing content and provide an easy way to create and explore connections between things. How something fits in to the larger picture is a large part of how we infer meaning.    (PGC)

I think there are three primary audiences for wikis: the individual who hopes to use the wiki as an outboard brain or memory; the nascent group that hopes to discover and solidify the community that lies as potential in their loose connections; and the existing community that hopes to support a shared goal or perform some action.    (PGD)

Those three categories could be used to describe any set of people, but a wiki is not the perfect tool for every task. There are multiple types of discourse and multiple tools to support them. Some are better at certain aspects than others, none are really good enough (we have a long long way to go, but each day and in every way we are becoming better and better).    (PGE)

Blogs have become a central tool in the distribution of narrative discourse. With a blog there is usually a single author or small group expressing outwardly in a gesture that leads, over time, to the distribution of language and understanding outside the immediate clan. Very often the initial discourse is not fully refined but is rather some author's speculation: a seed that may lead to more knowledge later, as a separate piece of content. As has been said many times, the connections in the network of blogs is often loose and distributed.    (PGF)

Email continues to be a primary tool for discussion within a clan. The members of an email group have already discovered some bit of shared language or understanding that has brought them together. Email discussion can reinforce and solidify language, providing stability from which action can be performed.    (PGG)

With both blogs and email, content tends to be relatively static. Typos may be corrected in a blog entry and email threads may carry on forever but there is little in the way of refinement of the content. This is where wikis step in: they are good tools for summarizing, annotating and connecting information. These are the actions of a knowledge enhancement system.    (PGH)

Wikis do not match all the requirements for a knowledge enhancement system, but experience has demonstrated that this is good. Wikis are here now, today, helping people to do good work generating and supporting communities, developing and creating shared language, and refining information into new knowledge. Their simplicity makes them available.    (PGI)

   (PGJ)

When I chose to join up with Socialtext back in September, it was an attractive choice because the people there believe in two things: people matter more than tools; and tools should help people do what they want to do, not get in the way.    (PGK)

Socialtext, in its various incarnations, is based on wiki but integrates concepts from email and blogs to allow the action and narration those systems support. The latest release is a fine improvement: it enhances email integration, adds support for backlinks (placing information in context, leading to deeper understanding) and for PC Forum 2005 we've created a special prototype of Eventspace, running under mod perl for improved response time.    (PGL)

Architecting these sorts of tools may not solve poverty and hunger, or alleviate suffering in the aftermath of a ? disaster, but the tools can augment people actively doing that work. I happen to be good at making the tools go, so that's where I look to fit myself into the puzzle.    (PGM)

Related writings:    (PGN)

• The Computer As Tool    (PGO)
• Hypertext and Knowledge Enhancement    (PGP)
• Collaboration Requires Goals    (PGQ)
• Blue Oxen Vision    (PGR)
• Anarchic Emergent Collaboration    (PGS)
• A Web for Augmentation, not Automation    (PGT)
• Community and Collaboratory Tools    (PGU)

Posted by cdent at 05:12 PM | Trackback This | | bl

outboard info design goals

From a memorable conversation with Sunir, so I'm memorializing it here:    (PFJ)

Norman "feels" (rubs me funny) as if he thinks of learning as a process that is finite. That filling the cache should be quick and complete, and that the cache should be internal.    (PFK)

A well groomed wiki is an external cache, personally and organizationally.    (PFL)

One way to optimize understanding of the universe is not to cache the understanding of particular bits, but instead to cache references to the (internal or external) compressed or summarized learning event. Or, in other words, to communicate effectively it makes sense to make signs, symbols, words, language that point to concepts at increasingly larger levels of granularity (while never forgetting the importance of small pieces of lego).    (PFM)

By shoving some of the cached learning out to externalities there's more room for compare and contrast and new sign discovery.    (PFN)

That's very similar to how you describe Norman: speed up access. And that's nice, but it's not how Norman writes. Norman writes with too weak a dissatisfaction with the state of the world and too mundane a criticism of how people think and create. I guess that's why I don't like him: he presents little hope for large change. His most memorable discussions are about the burners on a stove. There's just so much more fun that can be had with discussion of interaction.    (PFO)

I don't believe in outboard brains, and I have no expectation that the AI dream will ever succeed, but I do know that if I have memories of handles to larger pieces that exist elsewhere, I can keep the allegories in motion in my head and know a _lot_ of stuff with a fairly high degree of confidence without needing to fully know it.    (PFP)

To bring this around to somewhere that might relate to what you're after: I've found that in order for outboard processing to work there's several design and process guidelines that have to be reached. Here are some: interaction must be highly responsive, noise in the interface must be minimized, structural mechanics and metaphors in content need to be consisent, names must have value, it must be there when you want it, when there is a shared brain its context is shared as well (e.g when some members of the company have a discussion about design it it is done in an archivable fashion).    (PFQ)

Posted by cdent at 09:57 AM | Trackback This | | bl

At Least Two Pieces of Good News about Views: Mountains and Purple

Two nice things have happened today:    (PEG)

On the walk back from the grocery I found a good place from which to get my eyes on Mt. Rainier. This has been a long running problem for me. First the weather is usually cloudy, so none of the mountains (Cascades or Olympics) are in view. Second, in the neighborhood, views to the east are fairly plentiful, but narrow. Rainier is to the Southeast, usually outside the angle of view while tromping around the streets.    (PEH)

Today things are different. Very clear day. And I found a good spot for a view. Somewhere I walk past often, but usually with my back facing the view. At the northwest corner of a nearby playfield if I site across the center line of the soccer field and look a bit right there's the mountain. And when I say there, I mean THERE. On a day like today it is stunningly huge. Nails me to the spot in some kind of religious ecstasy.    (PEI)

Meanwhile, back inside, where my view is the brick wall of next door, I've finally cut a usable version of Kwiki::Purple with support for good linking and internal to the wiki TransClusion. See it: http://www.burningchrome.com/pwiki/    (PEJ)

This is the culmination of a huge amount of work and experimentation, and I'm sure there will be much more to come. Thanks again to Brian Ingerson, Matthew O'Connor and Eugene Eric Kim.    (PEK)

I hope to get it to CPAN asap.    (PEL)

Posted by cdent at 10:27 PM | Trackback This | | bl

A Web for Augmentation, not Automation

Earl Mardle comments on Russell Beale's How the Web is Changing:    (8QZ)

I was going to write this as a comment on his blog and then decided to move it here.    (8R1)

In his posting and some others from around the same time, Earl seems to be bouncing around the difference between tools that augment and tools that automate.    (8R2)

Tools that augment extend a human's ability while still leaving the human in control. They are often small things (like purple number stuff) that provide a way to grab or manipulate stuff of all sorts.    (8R3)

Tools that automate "do it for you", often operate in large swaths, and are based on performing tasks that can be formally described.    (8R4)

There's an ethical or world view difference between the two. Some people prefer the latter, some people the former. I'm deep in the augmentation style, I hope. The Semantic Web, as imagined by the W3C, strikes me as in alignment with the latter.    (8R5)

Being in one camp or the other doesn't make someone wrong, but it does make conversation across the boundaries of the camps a little confusing and disorienting.    (8R6)

I first came upon the augmentation/automation split while writing my Computer as Tool paper:    (8R7)

Landauer's book:    (8R9)

is a good read.    (8RB)

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Less Rules and Less People

Two things I wanted to remember from Acts of Volition:    (84M)

Following rules makes you stupid:    (84N)

There's something there about the difference between structures that constrain and those that support.    (84P)

The rules posting points to Garrity's Law of Inverse Congregational Intelligence:    (84Q)

I suppose that runs a bit contrary to the collaboration ethic I've claimed to buy at various times, but there is a great deal of evidence in both social and personal history to support Garrity's Law. I suspect the strength of ties is another variable as well as the strength of goals.    (84S)

Posted by cdent at 03:43 PM | Trackback This | | bl

PurpleWiki 0.9.2 Released

PurpleWiki version 0.9.2 has been released. See the ChangeLog for details on the changes. You can get the release either from CPAN or from the distribution page.    (4M8)

The parts that I like about this release are that it has:    (4M9)

• Much improved view drivers (the parts that take a parsed wiki page and turn into HTML or some other format) that make some forms of transclusion faster and more reliable.    (4MA)
• Support for remote NID and TransClusion handling. That is, if you configure things correctly, you can create content on one machine, and with some ease, transclude it on another.    (4MB)

Now I need to find some people who want play with remote TransClusion. Anyone?    (4MC)

Posted by cdent at 03:53 AM | Trackback This | | bl

My Patterns of Collaboration

EugeneEricKim, the other cofounder and remaining director of BlueOxen, has spent the last few days hosting a workshop on patterns of collaboration. I was unable to attend, but, along with several other people, watched from the sides through a wiki and email list.    (41H)

On the first day of the workshop, the participants developed a definition of collaboration (at Collab:Collaboration). Members of the email list were asked to introduce themselves and comment on the proceedings. I combined an introduction and a response to the definition in one mail message that I include here for the record. This version is edited to add some WikiWords. The original message is archived.    (41I)

This will be review for some of you, but it was a nice review for me.    (41J)

Hello, I'm ChrisDent. Sorry for this late message and sorry for missing the gathering. I had some timing conflicts and more importantly a distinct lack of funds.    (41K)

I'll begin with a bit of intro and then move on to some comments on the discovered definition of Collaboration (which I like). I've discovered this messasge is quite long. I seem to be using it for a bit of mental cleanout. Thanks for the opportunity and sorry for the length.    (41L)

I've been interacting (sometimes collaborating) with Eugene off and on in various capacities for about 3 years. We encountered one another in mailing list communities associated with Doug Engelbart's Bootstrap organization (sometimes known as Alliance, sometimes known as Institute).    (41M)

Around then, I had started a masters program in Information Science at IndianaUniversity. I had left a technical leadership role at a mid-sized ISP to fill up some of the holes in my brain. In my first class I was introduced to Engelbart, attracted to his ideas of augmentation, co-evolution and the necessity of collaborative effort to solve wicked problems. I started scrounging around for ways to know more.    (41N)

My first project of note in the IS program[1] laid the groundwork for a continuing sense that the foundation of a good collaborative toolset is the ability to access and reuse existing information. By access I don't mean find; I mean having a graspable handle and being aware of how things are being grasped.    (41O)

My second project[2] was based on some of Engelbart's ideas but explored them through the writings of other authors. I was trying to describe a productive "using" rather than "partnering" or "communicating" interaction with computers. I didn't quite hit it, and I've since discovered much more fodder in the notions of embodied and situated cognition combined with a bit of phenomenology[3] that await a book or PhD? thesis if I can find the steam.    (41P)

I came to the Bootstrap mailing lists with these things in my head. Eugene and I noticed each other as people who thought interesting things and often backed up our noodling with experiments or tools. Around the time Eugene was thinking about creating Blue Oxen, I was looking for a way to get some credits to finish up my degree without taking yet another boring class. We concocted an internship that turned me, with time, into a cofounder of the organization. Eugene and I had met in person only once.    (41Q)

Eugene and I spent several months fleshing out what's since become TheBlueOxenWay. The same semester I did the internship I was taking an extremely hard core practical class in software design patterns[4]. I suspect that class had some impact on the direction we chose. The class, as described in the referenced document, is one of the most significant collaborative events of my life. Another is the interactions I had with the team I worked with before going back to school.    (41R)

Both cases strongly support the idea that a shared goal is a very important part of successful collaboration.    (41S)

I never gained the traction with BlueOxen that I needed to feel successful. In part this was because I was spread too thin, with too many other obligations. I part this was because Eugene and I demonstrated another important aspect of collaboration: while we had a fairly robust shared language and to some degree a quite robust shared understanding, the details of our shared goals were not as well understood as they could have been. I, at least, found it difficult to get the necessary food out of the shared system.    (41T)

So I've since moved on to other things. I think this has been positive for us both. I hope Eugene agrees. We are exploring more diverse areas now than we might have been otherwise.    (41U)

I continue to work in Blue Oxen related areas: I've been one of the primary authors of PurpleWiki, where I've been able to put some of my hopes for good accessibility, backlinking and transclusion into practice; I regularly contribute to the Collaboration Collaboratory; I hang out on the fringes of events like these and step in when I am able.    (41V)

By day I work as a software developer and communications lubricant for a development team working at Indiana University. There I try to implement the things I've learned and continue to learn about collaboration. The most significant observation there, thus far, is continued proof that transparency in communication combined with diligent archiving and refactoring is big magic in making things better along many dimensions but they are still not enough without a shared commitment to a shared goal.    (41W)

I'm playing a waiting game for something to crystallize in my brain so I can make a succinct statement of my interests and thus determine a course of doctoral study or career. In the meantime I go to work and do a lot of rock climbing in TheRed.    (41X)

Which leaves me at the definition:    (41Y)

I think this hits it very nicely, the key words being "shared" and "bounded". The people involved all need to know the goal, and there needs to be an understanding that there is an endpoint to the work involved; a point when the participants can say "we're done, we did it."    (420)

This mirrors many of the things I said in a blog entry back in September called "Collaboration Requires Goals"[5]. The conversations (both in person and in email, much of it related to an as yet unreleased Blue Oxen paper) surrounding that document discussed the difference between community building and collaboration. Both are valuable, but they are different.    (421)

An interesting aspect of this definition is how it might impact thoughts about Engelbart's A, B, and C activities[6]. This line:    (422)

Interacting to get smarter might be called a C-activity (improving the improvement process) while interacting in order to prepare for an exam could be called B (improving your capability, making yourself better at calculus tests) or A (doing calculus) depending on your point of view.    (424)

The last 3 years have demonstrated that it is difficult to collaborate on things Engelbartian and feel any sense of motion. Perhaps it's the nature of the beast? I've often said that things were not properly bounded. Perhaps it is a question of framing: smaller pieces and their associated smaller expectations required.    (425)

Finally, I'm extremely pleased to see that individual intention and commitment has been included in the definition.    (426)

I think it might be an interesting exercise to create names and stories for those styles of interaction that are like collaboration but are missing one or some of the key pieces:    (427)

• shared bounded goal    (428)
• intention    (429)
• commitment    (42A)

The stories might acts as foils that engender more clarity to the definition of collaboration.    (42B)

Another aspect perhaps worth investigating: understanding whether a group is collaborating has much to with the distance from which the activity is viewed and the boundaries of the language used in the activity. Since Eugene likes sports stories so much, I'll use one of those to demonstrate:    (42C)

I went climbing recently with someone I had not climbed with before. I did not know him well, but I had interacted with him somewhat in the climbing gym. From the beginning of our trip, our climbing was successful. We had a good grasp of the language of climbing, both in the literal sense of the words we used to communicate and the movements our bodies used to get up the wall, and we were able to cooperate in the effort of getting someone safely where they want to go. Our time, though, was not immediately comfortably fun.    (42D)

As time passed, we built up a better understanding of one another (there was the mild magic of the small unfolding of test conversation topics to see what avenues of discussion are or are not taboo). We broadened and deepened our shared language away from just climbing into other scenarios. As time passed we became more comfortable with one another, had more fun, and climbed better. The resolution of our shared understanding of our shared goal(s) and its context increased. We were not there just to get up the wall, we were there to have a complete experience.    (42E)

I hope the workshop was valuable for the participants and I hope the discussions continue.    (42F)

[1] Hypertext and Knowledge Enhancement Explores some the history, design goals and failings of hypertext in the context of knowledge as something built from information.    (42G)

[2] The Computer as Tool: From Interaction to Augmentation Eugene cites this paper in his recent A Manifesto For Collaborative Tools.    (42H)

[3] Augury A review of my contributions to a reading group looking for connections between augmentation and embodied cognition.    (42I)

[4] Helium Performance A review of a software design patterns class.    (42J)

[5] Collaboration Requires Goals, an explanation of why WikiWords are good for collaboration.    (42K)

[6] http://www.bootstrap.org/#2B http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/engelbart/glossary/capability_infrastruct.html Some information on A, B and C activities.    (42L)

Posted by cdent at 04:11 AM | Trackback This | | bl

Adaptive Knowledge Base Development

At the day job we are finally beginning to make plans for developing the next iteration of IndianaUniversity's KnowledgeBase. To gather my thoughts I wrote a little document that brings together some of the thoughts about situated software and software development that have been bouncing around over the last several days.    (3UZ)

Here's the beginning:    (3V0)

and the end:    (3V2)

Whole text.    (3V4)

Update: Thanks to Seb for catching my misattribution of the preface of ''Small Pieces Loosely Joined".    (41G)

Posted by cdent at 06:37 AM | Trackback This | | bl

Conferences?

I've been asked by my employer to suggest a few conferences I might like to attend between now and August. I've not been following this year's conference opportunities so I'm not as aware of the opportunities as I could be.    (3AF)

Does anyone have any suggestions? The following topical areas are probably relevant:    (3AG)

• Collaboration    (3AH)
• Knowledge Management    (3AI)
• Knowledge representation, especially classification or categorization of documents in knowledge repositories    (3AJ)
• Agile Methods (programmming, databases, management)    (3AK)
• Perl or Java Programming    (3AL)
• Web Services    (3AM)

Given the budget that's probably being considered here, within the US or perhaps Canada is a constraint.    (3AN)

Suggestions involving locations near stunning natural beauty get bonus points.    (3AO)

Thanks.    (3AP)

Posted by cdent at 05:15 PM | Trackback This | | bl

How I Handle Email

The mailing lists associated with the BlueOxenCollaboratory have lately received a lot of mail. Participants have complained about the volume and their inability to cope in a productive fashion. This prompted JackPark to describe how he filters his mail. Others, including me, followed up with their own strategies. What follows is a revision of what I posted to the mailing list.    (2KH)

I'm posting this to the blog because I'm sick of people whining about email volume when it is clear they've made no investment in managing their email. While it may be true they shouldn't have to, the flip side of that argument is that I feel like I shouldn't have to clean my house, but I do it anyway because I want to live there.    (2KI)

My strategies for dealing with email are dependent on a luxury of resources. I have a fast connection, my own mail server and (for the most part) the skills to manage it. Someday I may distill my thoughts on why I think everyone should be in charge of their own presence on the internet and why it should not be mobile (the interfaces should be).    (2KJ)

I like to think of myself as an email handling expert. I don't know if this is warranted or not, but as a former sysadmin I used to handle upwards of 10,000 messages a day in some form or other, most of it automatically, while still handling several hundred to my face, per day, and generating about 2000 outgoing messages per month.    (2KK)

I don't do that sort of thing anymore, so the quantity of email is way down, but the skills learned then make life better now.    (2KL)

First off, information handling is not an arena where the poor craftsperson may blame their tools and be scorned. Most, if not all, email clients suck. Some just suck less than others. Many are good for email browsing (I generally use Apple Mail for casual browsing these days), few are good for email processing (replying, deleting, searching, filtering, moving). I've yet to meet a GUI mail client that is good for email processing.    (2KM)

My environment:    (2KN)

• An IMAP server with essentially unlimited space (I can add disk if I want to)    (2KO)
• shell access on that server where I can maintain procmail, Spam::Assassin and filters of my own design.    (2KP)
• Pine, on multiple machines, accessing a remote configuration (over IMAP) (including addressbook) stored on the server, configured to allow URLs to open in my browser, and images and other attachments to open in the correct application.    (2KQ)

Pine provides a feature that allows you to have multiple INBOXes. This is different from having multiple folders to which mail is delivered. In the latter, I have to remember, think about and act upon selecting these special folders. In the former, when I get to the end of one INBOX, I may, at my option, continue to the next one with a single keypress.    (2KR)

Incoming mail is filtered at many stages before it sees me:    (2KS)

1. Every message is copied and stored in a backup folder for that day. I keep 4 days of backups.    (2KT)
2. Spam::Assassin scores the original message as spam. If the score is high, the message is deleted. If the score is middlin' the message is stored in a trash folder (which is an INBOX, because I'm curious about spam, it entertains me and gives me an eye on the zeitgeist).    (2KU)
3. Automated messages to root and other service accounts are filtered to an INBOX for such things.    (2KV)
4. Email to lists in which I participate are filtered to INBOXes associated with that group. Some busy lists, associated with groups in which I do not have immediate cares or responsibilities, are not filtered to an INBOX, but rather a standard folder, so they are not in my face all the time.    (2KW)
5. Anything left after all this is sorted as follows:    (2KX)
   1. It is checked against a personal blacklist filter and trashed if it is from an address in that blacklist. (predates spam assassin and still catches some other things)    (2KY)
   2. If it is not addressed to me (I'm identified by one of several email addresses) it goes to an INBOX called filtered    (2KZ)
   3. It is checked against a personal "do I know you" filter. If I know you, the mail goes to my primary INBOX (the first in the list of INBOXes). If I don't know you, the message goes into my secondary INBOX.    (2L0)

My process of reading email is designed to avoid gaffes such as providing an answer to an email that has already been answered or that landed in a different INBOX for some reason.    (2L1)

Rules for reading email    (2L2)

1. Read everything (all INBOXes) before responding to anything, deleting irrelevant or redundant messages as possible. If I delete something incorrectly I always have the backup and any mailing list that isn't broken has an archive (this should be emblazoned on high somewhere).    (2L3)
2. Check for new mail in all INBOXes again, still, before responding. This is easy to do because I can simply hit <tab> and that will take me to the next new message in any INBOX.    (2L4)
3. Respond or otherwise process stuff in my primary INBOX. This assumes that if it is in there it is from somebody I think is special in some form and the message needs primary care.    (2L5)
4. Check for new mail (press tab).    (2L6)
5. Go to the INBOXes associated with work or projects and process stuff there. This assumes that any work or project related email should go to a group mailing list, or to put it more brashly: any work or project team without a group mailing list (that is archived) does not exist, is fundamentally broken.    (2L7)
6. press tab (all day long)    (2L8)

For those few folders which receive new mail but are not INBOXes, visit them as time allows, read everything (or at least skim for relevancy), delete as much as possible. What's left is stuff worth dealing with. Deal with it. Delete once dealt with: there's an archive out there somewhere. If not, and it's important, refile.    (2L9)

Any folder that has incoming mail that has more than 20 messages in it is a problem that needs to be dealt with, soon.    (2LA)

I have pine configured to use roles. That means that I can have it automatically use the blueoxen.org address when I respond to mail to a blueoxen list. Or indiana.edu for work stuff. I get different sigs and other fun things like that.    (2LB)

I use vi as my editor, rather than the built in pico. This is because pico sucks most of all. I use vi because I am faster with it than I am with emacs.    (2LC)

I'm, these days, generally using Pine in an xterm under X11 on Panther. Sometimes I'm using Pine directly on the mail server through an ssh client. Those times that I use Apple Mail are generally in the morning when I'm feeling a little blearly and I have no intention of responding to anything, I just want to see what's there. If I discover something to which I need to respond, I quit Mail and start Pine so I can be back in the fast realm of the keyboard. The mouse is handicap unless you also happen to have a chording keyboard (thought about it, too much money).    (2LD)

What do you do?    (2LE)

Posted by cdent at 11:53 PM | Trackback This | | bl

Orkustras in the Kiddie Pool

Is your posse on OrKut your orkutstra?    (2JJ)

Although of late it has become rather trendy to trash OrKut, and many of the criticism are valid, I think folks may be missing the point.    (2JK)

Many people joined the fray, had a frenzy of friend inviting, and then in the pause after the storm wondered: "what now?" The question hangs, "what can I do with an orkut?", as if the thing done already is not important.    (2JL)

The value of an OrKut or FriendSter system, as currently configured, is not in what you can do with it once you are set up, but in the signifying you do as you are setting up. You have to take a moment to concern yourself with your public persona. You have to scan your memory and your environment ("real" and "virtual") for the people to whom you want to say, "you matter, at least some, to me, today". A minor refactoring of the soul, a plough, perhaps of only superficial depth, through your heart and mind. And you get the experience of being selected by the others that are there.    (2JM)

Because of the limitations (as described, in this case by DanahBoyd) of OrKut, this potentially pretty good experience has the taint of high school upon it. Oh boy, look who is popular; what is the trick so I can be popular too?    (2JN)

danah's second criticism    (2JO)

points out an instance of the general problem with these systems: They are flat or close to, totally lacking in the complex multi-dimensionality necessary to adequately express the relationships one has with an individual and communities. An OrKut friends network is a graph of nodes and untyped links. Graphs where the links may be typed are better, more flexible graphs. Better still are graphs where the links are first class describable entities.    (2JQ)

Social networking tools are in their infancy, utilizing only the bare minimum of the potential present in hypertextuality. We may as well play in the kiddie pools and help bring the future about.    (2JR)

Posted by cdent at 11:13 PM | Trackback This | | bl

Comments Feed

I've added a comments RSS feed based on the information found at Reverend Jim's.    (2GC)

It would make me happy if everyone to whom I subscribed had one of these. It makes tracking conversations far easier and it's the conversation that this blogging stuff is all about, yeah? It may creep along slowly, but it is a dialogue of many parties, expanding what we know.    (2GD)

The URL for the feed is    (2GE)

  http://www.burningchrome.com:8000/~cdent/mt/comments.xml    (2GF)

and you can also find it down in the bottom of the sidebar with the other feeds.    (2GG)

Posted by cdent at 11:49 PM | Trackback This | | bl

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)
  • Indexing    (26U)
  • Searching    (26V)
  • Browsing along multiple dimensions    (26W)
  • Categories    (26X)
• Annotation    (26Y)
  • Notes and comments    (26Z)
  • Dynamic categories    (270)

(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)

• Answering:    (273)
  • What is our goal or goals (for the group).    (274)
  • What are my tasks (for the individual).    (275)
• Showing:    (276)
  • Documents relevant to the goal(s).    (277)
• Allowing:    (278)
  • The specification and evaluation of:    (279)
    • Requirements    (27A)
    • Tasks    (27B)
  • Tracking of task milestones    (27C)
  • The assignment of relevancy to documents.    (27D)

The primary goals of these tools are to allow a participant to know, with little question:    (27E)

• Where they are    (27F)
• Where they've been    (27G)
• Where they need to go    (27H)

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)

Posted by cdent at 01:05 AM | Trackback This | | bl

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)

Posted by cdent at 11:12 PM | Trackback This | | bl

Warp and Wiki

Joe recently asked:    (1Y9)

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)

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)

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)

• climb    (1YM)
• darkness    (1YN)
• beauty    (1YO)
• good    (1YP)
• structure    (1YQ)
• learn    (1YR)

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)

Posted by cdent at 09:53 PM | Trackback This | | bl

Collaboration Requires Goals

A coworker asked why I think FreeLinks are a bad idea on Wikis. The following is what I created in response. Most of it is something I need to get off my chest about the nature of collaboration that I felt was important context for my thoughts on SharedLanguage.    (ME)

Responding to a query from Joe about why I don't like FreeLinks: To explain that I first need to cover SharedLanguage. This is a rough draft of some stuff I've been thinking about for a while. It could be much better. I use the first three quarters to grind an axe.    (MF)

There is, to me, on ongoing misconception amongst some of the collaborative scholars with whom I've interacted. It's centered around the question of whether a SharedGoal? is a prerequisite of collaborative action (SharedAction?) or a SharedGoal? might emerge from collaborative activity.    (MG)

From another perspective this is a question asking whether collaboration occurs to accomplish something (a something which is a pre-existing condition of some kind), thus is emergent from known need or can happen by fiat or construction.    (MH)

In my opinion, successful collaboration occurs when there is a SharedGoal? that exists and is known by at least some major portion of a group that gathers in some space to work on it (use of the term work is not meant to suggest lack of fun: people do work (spend energy) when having fun together). Effective collaboration does not emerge from people getting together to do unspecified stuff because they think it might be nice.    (MI)

A SharedGoal? can be something straightforward like painting a fence, or start from an abstract (but articulated) idea such as a wish for sustainable lifestyles.    (MJ)

The SharedGoal? provides focus (or gravity to use CollaborationPhysics) for a group, an answer to the questions "Why are we here?" and "What are we supposed to be doing?" The answers may be concrete or abstract, but they exist, at least in the sense that anything exists.    (MK)

Abstract shared goals are hard to act upon until they have been clarified to one or more concrete goals. In some situations concrete goals may crystallize into individual goals, in other situations a concrete SharedGoal? is created ("We are going to make a low cost solar generator for homes.").    (ML)

Crystallization of goals occurs through discussion, through the evolution of understanding and knowledge. Awareness of concrete goals can, in good circumstances, lead to action. SharedAction? is created out of SharedUnderstanding?.    (MM)

For SharedUnderstanding? to exist amongst a group of people, they must have or develop SharedLanguage. SharedLanguage is the collection of concepts and terms used to encapsulate the information shared between members of a group. Jargon exists in many disciplines to encapsulate large concepts in shortened form to ease the flow of ideas that lead to SharedUnderstanding? and eventually SharedAction?.    (MN)

A common thought (at least I've heard it a lot) about collaboration is that when people get together they may develop SharedLanguage, and thus the SharedUnderstanding? that leads to SharedAction?. That is, the simple act of getting together is the crucial catalyst. I do not think this is true: the crucial catalyst is the SharedGoal? that is brought to the space and has some existence in the minds of the participants prior to gathering. If the SharedGoal? does not exist, or is not held in common trust, then the activity in which the group engages is not collaboration but is instead a game of "who can I convince to think in tandem with me" played by whichever participants are most fluent in the fledgling language of the group.    (MO)

It is possible for a group to transform from people who need to be convinced to a collaborating group. This usually happens through leadership: someone or something takes the lead and converts the participants to belief in a goal that is now a SharedGoal? and was once a (lowercase) goal brought to the group.    (MP)

SharedGoals?, once they are acknowledge to exist, need to be clarified. SharedLanguage, therefore, needs to emerge. As many of the concepts under discussion are incomplete or complex, shorthand is helpful.    (MQ)

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.    (MR)

FreeLinks and other styles of wiki linking which obscure the canonical page name muddy the conceptual waters: both the waters that contain wiki words and also the significance of WikiWords themselves. When using the WikiWords we want them to be special identifiers that have the robust sureness of reference and power that a name provides.    (MS)

When we use the nicknames that FreeLinks and similar methods provide we lose the power of naming and the sureness of reference. It may be convenient to call something by another name, but then we loosen our possibilities of learning. Searches become harder, backlinks are lost, the chance for informative collisions amongst WikiWords is lessened.    (MT)

[To be tuned at another time.]    (MU)

Update: Eric has pointed out that I had left FreeLinks rather undefined. I've since added a page to the wiki to explain it.    (N4)

Posted by cdent at 11:55 PM | Trackback This | | bl

PurpleBlog

I'm going to try a little experiment.    (JK)

Now that PurpleWiki has reached some degree of stability, it makes sense to create a demonstration site for the PurplePlugin that allows people to experiment with what I've been enjoying for a few months.    (JL)

So...I've created a MovableType / PurpleWiki combo that can be used by other people in two ways:    (JM)

1. There is a test blog where people can create entries that use the plugin.    (JN)
2. I can host blogs, if it doesn't use up too many resources, on this server that can use the plugin.    (JO)

Both options are linked to a shared purplewiki (not much there yet, you can change that, it's a wiki after all).    (JP)

What's most interesting, to me, about the second option is that the content that is generated in all the hosted blogs and the associated Wiki is available for TransClusion because they will all be using the same PurpleNumber sequence generator (assuming the blogs opt to use the PurplePlugin).    (JQ)

Let me know if you want to give either of these options a try.    (JR)

Posted by cdent at 01:26 AM | Trackback This | | bl

PurpleWiki 0.9 Released

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the long awaited PurpleWiki version 0.9.    (0001HW)

PurpleWiki is a WikiWikiWeb? implementation derived from UseModWiki that adds several features and modularizes the code for easier development. Some of the features include:    (0001HX)

• Purple numbers, a system that allows fine-grained linking to content elements in a web page.    (0001HY)
• A flexible parser that supports pluggable output formats and use by other tools. Plugins for use with the MovableType and Bloxsom weblog tools are included.    (0001HZ)
• RSS feeds of recent changes.    (0001I0)
• TransClusion of content between pages managed by the parser (within and without the wiki).    (0001I1)

The release includes extensive code cleanup, refactoring and documentation.    (0001I2)

Access to the release, documentation, and development information can be found at http://www.blueoxen.org/tools/purplewiki/    (0001I3)

The distribution package itself: http://www.blueoxen.org/tools/purplewiki/purplewiki-0.9.tar.gz    (0001I4)

The fun usefulness that is PurpleWiki is better experienced than explained. Follow the links below for some samples:    (0001I5)

• The PurpleWiki home wiki: http://purplewiki.blueoxen.net/    (0001I6)

• This blog, using the PurpleWiki MovableType plugin, including a collection of entries on the PurpleWiki development process and many things purple.    (0001I7)

EugeneEricKim's blog, using the PurpleWiki Bloxsom plugin:    (0001I8)

  http://www.eekim.com/blog/    (0001I9)

There are announce, user and developer mailing lists for PurpleWiki. Find more information about these at:    (0001IA)

  http://purplewiki.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?MailingLists    (0001IB)

Posted by cdent at 08:31 PM | Trackback This | | bl

Rolodexes of Doom

Taking a dip into the Augmented Social Network mailing list I came across the following from Brad DeGraf?.    (0001HR)

Re: Monetising Social Capital (Distributed Capitalism):    (0001HS)

I read this and the veil lifted. Here is the reason why the social capital, social networking parade raises my hackles: The whole model reeks with the stench of salepeople, fresh out of bed with their motivational speakers, top ten tips for making connections, and associated drivel all bent on moving more information and product for the final end goal of acquisition of stuff.    (0001HU)

Posted by cdent at 06:37 PM | Trackback This | | bl

Serendipitous Epiphytal Being

Traditionally, when reading a book, if I encounter a word for which I don't have a full grasp of its connotative spectrum I take a best guess and move on.    (0001DF)

I'm in the midst of reading Edward Wilson's The Future of Life. At times Wilson writes with such grace that I've been driven to the dictionary (OED) when I've stumbled. I don't want to be a bad dance partner.    (0001DG)

• Disguised briefly with the voice of an optimistic economist, Wilson speaks of humanity's evolution to a more "irenic international culture".    (0001DH)

• Further in, the end of the battle between market and natural economies is a "Cadmean victory" unless changes are made.    (0001DI)

• "Epiphytes" in chunks of Amazonian forests separated by clear cutting and burning suffer from the drying effects of winds once buffered by the trees. They themselves help manage moisture, locally.    (0001DJ)

I looked these up as they happened.    (0001DK)

irenic    (0001DL)

aiming or aimed at peace.    (0001DM)

Cadmean victory    (0001DO)

a prryhic victory (won at too great a cost to be of use to the victor).    (0001DP)

epiphyte    (0001DR)

a plant growing but not parasitic on another.    (0001DS)

To avoid the Cadmean victory and reach a greater good, to be irenic in our doings and our beings we can remember that we all can be epiphytes: growing on one another, present but not parasitic. Epiphytes the whole way down, but also the whole way up. I'm on you and you're on me. Somewhere in the cycle we connect with one another and we connect with everything else.    (0001DU)

I've trackbacked this posting to Eric quoting me because this everybody's an epiphyte world view is the source of statements such as the one he quotes:    (0001DV)

Knowledge is the result of a collaborative dialectic dance. Sometimes we collaborate directly with others, sometimes we do it apparently alone, but always we do it in a network of many things: each thing presenting its own thesis, our many reactions a multitude of antitheses.    (0001DX)

Just as we go to parks to see the epiphytes and other wonders of nature to be informed and enlivened, so too we go to people and their artifacts. And we protect, preserve and make accessible.    (0001DY)

Posted by cdent at 04:26 AM | Trackback This | | bl

Being Curious

George Por states some good reasons for thinking out loud and collaborating when he asks Are we curious enough?    (00014C)

See Collab:ThinkOutLoud for another way of saying a similar thing.    (00014D)

It's odd, sometimes, how we often restate things throughout history, over and over again, with new words, with perhaps slightly different connotations. Thinking out loud is like a friendly (but not necessarily friendly) Hegelian dialectic. So is exploration with persistance.    (00014E)

To persistance we must add persistence. George worries of things that do not "leave any trace in the collective consciousness". If we record our ruminations, they are available in our personal and shared ConceptualNetwork. Once recorded, if they are accessible for easy reference they are then available to an ongoing process of evolution.    (00014F)

Posted by cdent at 05:57 AM | Trackback This | | bl

Tool Literacy

This is the tale of a wiki, some mailing lists, purple numbers, a microwave, DougEngelbart and a whale. Unfinished.    (00012L)

The online side of the PlaNetwork Conference involved a wiki and some mailing lists. They both had PurpleNumbers, in part to help link resources from different media. Both the lists and the wiki got a lot of use, but there was not a lot of literate interlinking, either between the lists and the wiki nor between wiki page. In fact, in some cases entire mail messages were copied into wiki pages.    (00012M)

The conference included a group of rotating volunteers called the Assembler Team. These people were responsible for expediting the distribution and refactoring of knowledge learned throughout the various conference sessions. At one, someone said:    (00012N)

The someone might have been Doug Engelbart, but it is hard to tell because the person who was transcribing into the wiki page was not used to the environment.    (00012P)

That statement is classic Doug: Where's the stuff that helps me move forward, that provides the structure and the direction to get me to whatever is next? What is it that is out there in the process and the communication in the environment that is augmenting my thinking?    (00012Q)

Over the weekend I helped my sister and her family move into a new house. On the way out to dinner my brother-in-law, girlfriend and nephew stood around the new (to us) microwave. Jeff had it in his head that he wanted to set the timer for the night light. We couldn't figure out how. I suggested the Help button (RtFm). Sabrina suggested a thing like a microwave shouldn't need a manual.    (00012R)

We figured it out. The help-speak required a little interpretation. All together now, we got it.    (00012S)

What's the common thread? New stuff requires learning and learning can take time (obvious, no?). People like me, with my BlueOxen hat on, can't expect to drop a new thing like PurpleNumbers or Wikis on folk and have it work. Something in the environment, in the process and the communication that surrounds the use, must provide the structure and direction to get things started. ContextIsEverything.    (00012T)

Even when a tool is very simple, its use is never quiet clear without an available task. Do we know what a screwdriver is for without a screw and a place to screw it? Do we know without looking at it? At what's nearby?    (00012U)

The literacy part is left as an exercise for the reader, because this is very good and I'm distracted.    (00012V)

Happy Happy, Joy Joy.    (00012W)

Posted by cdent at 03:44 AM | Trackback This | | bl

Purple Number Identity

I sat down tonight to write something about PurpleNumbers, as I have several things I need to write for the 0.2 release of PurpleWiki. This is what came out. It fills a different, but similar, purpose to the coolness draft.    (000103)

What is a purple number?    (000104)

A purple number is an identifier unique to a document or set of documents used to indicate and provide direct access to segments of content in a document.    (000105)

In practice a purple number identifies structural elements in a document such as headers, list items and paragraphs. When a new document is created or content is added to an existing document, the document is parsed to add identifiers where they are not already present. When a document is processed for presentation (usually, but not always, to HTML) these identifiers are used to create anchors and links in the document that can be used for later reference.    (000106)

Purple number identifiers are known, for reasons of history, as node identifiers, or 'NIDs' for short.    (000107)

In simple implementations NIDs are unique per document and may be generated per page, perhaps as a series of integers. More complex implementations create NIDs that are unique across a domain of documents. These NIDs are generated from a central sequencing source or service that provides the next available NID. If NIDs are paired with document identifiers (usually URLs) to create an index, references may be made by NID alone (some uses for this are described below).    (000108)

When a document that has been processed to add NIDs is presented as HTML, the NIDs are shown as links (<a href>) to named anchors (<a name>) within a stable URL for the current document. In some current implementations these links are shown in a purple color (thus the name).    (000109)

If the identifiers used are human readable (short, sensible), there are benefits to displaying the identifier as the text of the link: reference can be made to the identified segment of content in speech. When the identifiers are more complex a single character, such as the '#' popularized as a permanent link in some weblogs, has proven to work well.    (00010A)

Current purple number implementations process text, wiki formatted text, or HTML to either specially formatted wiki text or HTML. The resulting wiki text or HTML embeds text containing the NIDs for each segment of the document. When HTML or wiki text that contains NIDs is reprocessed that text which has already been assigned a NID keeps it's existing NID and that text which is new gets the next NIDs provided by the sequencing service. If content is deleted, NIDs must not be reused as references to NIDs must be allowed to go stale when content is removed.    (00010B)

HTML presentations of content with purple numbers adjusts the content in two ways to provide two different functions: the href provides the text of the URL that can be copied to make reference from other environments; the named anchor provides the location to which that reference points. The value of the name attribute of the anchor is the NID.    (00010C)

When NIDs for a set of documents are created from the same central source and the NIDs are paired with the URLs of the document in which they are to be presented the resulting index can be used to remotely make reference to content by NID alone. This has several benefits:    (00010D)

• Simplified URLs can be used to refer to content.    (00010E)
• By updating the index, content addressed by NID can remain addressable even when moved to a new URL.    (00010F)
• Content can be referenced and retrieved by NID and then easily parsed out of its context by NID. This allows for transclusion (include by reference rather than copy) of content from one document in another.    (00010G)

There are several existing implementations of purple numbers. Some examples are:    (00010H)

PurpleWiki    (00010I)

A descendant of UseModWiki that supports purple numbers. Version 0.1 with support for document based NIDs has been released. Version 0.2 with multi-document NIDs, document authoring features (metadata management), more modular code and transclusion support is being developed. Update 2003/06/02: PurpleWiki 0.9.2, faster, better stronger, has been released to CPAN.    (00010J)

PurplePlugin    (00010K)

A MovableType plugin that uses PurpleWiki 0.2 to format entries with purple numbers, to support transclusions and to provide WikiBlog functionality to MovableType.    (00010L)

Mhonarc purple plugin    (00010M)

An addition to the mhonarc mail archiving system that provides purple numbers on mail messages. source, demo.    (00010N)

Purple ZWiki    (00010O)

Modifications to ZWiki to support purple numbers. demo.    (00010P)

PurpleSlurple    (000111)

A proxy system that adds purple numbers to existing HTML documents anywhere on the net.    (000112)

Purple    (000113)

A processing system for creating documents with purple numbers. source    (000114)

See also: PurpleNumbers, PurpleWiki, PurplePlugin, TransClusion and the rest of the geek-glaxon category.    (00010Q)

Posted by cdent at 08:26 AM | Trackback This | | bl

Identity and Trust

Eric has some things to say about identity and trust in You are number 6.    (0000ZU)

Eric finds reason to disagree with the assertion "that the name is the identifier":    (0000ZV)

In a comment someone says:    (0000ZZ)

To which I want to say this:    (000101)

Why do people get so uptight about on line identities and trust? Sure when you encounter somone's writings on line, it is only a part of a whole. This is also true in other settings. When you encounter someone at work you are encountering their work persona. When you read something in an academic journal you are reading someone's academic persona. Trust develops in these settings without the addition of complicated automated authentication systems despite the fact that there is just as much chance the co-worker or the academic have unknown habits like the bloggger who unbeknownst to his adoring readers goes home at night and eats babies.    (000102)

Posted by cdent at 05:57 AM | Trackback This | | bl

Automation, Augmentation and Discipline

StuartHenshall and I have been talking in email about PurpleNumbers in relation to collaborative intelligence building, wikis and blogs. Parts of a recent email I want in my PurpleNet for later reference so I'm sticking it in here, with some edits because I'm an undisciplined writer.    (0000YI)

Stuart had asked for some thoughts on the differences and similarities between NexistWiki and PurpleWiki:    (0000YJ)

Posted by cdent at 06:44 PM | Trackback This | | bl

Becoming Tool

In a draft accepted for the 8th International Working Conference on the Language-Action Perspective on Communication Modelling AldoDeMoor and Mark Aakhus present a useful definition of tool:    (0000TG)

This model helps to emphasize the particular task needs of a community instead of a technological prescription that may or may not help. On the flip side it also helps to show that some technological efforts while inadequate in some environments may be helpful in others.    (0000TI)

A PDF of the paper is available.    (0000TJ)

Aldo pointed out the paper during some philosophical mumbo jumbo about Wikis working in some groups and not others.    (0000TK)

Posted by cdent at 09:49 PM | Trackback This | | bl

Purple Number Coolness Draft

Draft, Work In Progress, Usual Disclaimers Apply, Help a Brother Out.    (0000SO)

(Explaining the value of PurpleNumbers without a show and tell has proven challenging. Suggestions for improving this document are encouraged: I'm convinced PurpleNumbers are a good thing and I'd like to convince other people but I'm so deep in kool-aid now that I have trouble seeing.)    (0000SP)

PurpleNumbers are a system for enabling granular addressability in networked documents. While in essence this is a pretty simple concept, the way it works and how it is used deserves some explanation.    (0000SQ)

One of the many benefits of the internet is the way in which it makes a vast quantity of information available. News, research and the drama of human life are available at the click of a link. Access to this information allows us to participate in many aspects of human communication over distances.    (0000SR)

Making use of this information (using it again), though, is somewhat constrained. Consider the following example:    (0000SS)

In either case you have to do some searching around in the document to find the original text. With granular addressability I could point you directly to the beautiful paragraph in one link and you can browse there and read Snoopy's extraordinary prose, in context. Here are three more examples:    (0000SU)

Granular addressability is a small, simple tool to help with these situations. It is not a new idea: The Bible provides easy access to Book, Chapter and Verse. Many works of classic literature are published with line numbers. It is also not an idea without a future: the Xpointer standard is specifically designed to provide (when browsers support it) granular addressability in valid XML documents (when they become more common) such as XHTML.    (0000SY)

PurpleNumbers fit in between printed line numbers and Xpointer as a tool for making reference to existing documents as well as creating documents that enable easy reference. PurpleNumbers provide handles to sections of documents that can be used as links in electronic documents that refer to the sections or used as labels in conversation about the sections. PurpleNumbers can address each of the scenarios above. In the first three cases PurpleNumbers allow the discovery and use of a direct URL pointing to the content being discussed. In the latter case, PurpleNumbers can provide a human readable label that points to the text and can be used in speech: "It's at purple number 52".    (0000SZ)

The PurpleNumbers systems that exist today are based on the addressing features of DougEngelbart's Augment system. The systems come in two forms:    (0000T0)

Document Processors    (0000T1)

These systems take new or existing content and process it to create a new document that has PurpleNumber identifiers and links in the text. Such systems are good for applications where filters can be used at the moment of storage such as mailing list archives, wikis and document transformation. Because of the way documents are processed, even in the event of changes the PurpleNumbers stay with the text they are originally associated with.    (0000T2)

Document Proxies    (0000T3)

These systems take existing documents and dynamically present them with PurpleNumbers attached. This works well with documents that are not expected to change and for which creating new documents may not be useful.    (0000T4)

See PurpleWiki and PurpleSlurple for links to more information on the tools used to create PurpleNumbers.    (0000T5)

Most graphical web browsers have a feature to copy the URL of a link to the clipboard. In some operating systems when using Internet Explorer and Mozilla you can right click on a link and "Copy Shortcut" or "Copy Link Location". When a document has PurpleNumbers there is a link, represented as a numeral or a '#' associated with each paragraph, list element and header in the document. Right click the PurpleNumber and, copy the shortcut and paste it into another document. The result? An instant granular reference, in context and with less navigational confusion.    (0000T6)

This may not seem like much, but with use the value of granular addressability increases until its absence feels quite the hindrance and an itch grows to add purple numbers wherever possible. They've been used on traditional web pages, mail archives, wikis, blogs, dialog maps, chat logs and many other places.    (0000T7)

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Social Software As Tool

The people at HeadShift have released a paper called Smarter, Simpler Social that's being discussed here and there. It's an overview of SocialSoftware that reviews what's different in that arena and what must be done. It starts with a review of the current state of affairs and points out some future directions.    (0000RR)

I was happy to see that it cited my ComputersAsTools paper, referring to the way in which future computing applications will need to augment human communication rather than automate processes. I agree with this and for the most part I think the paper is quite good, but I think their analysis of how we got where we are today misses some important points.    (0000RS)

The paper argues that it is the failure of existing software to adequately model human process that created the need for software that is more social. While this is certainly true in part, it misplaces the emphasis and repeats the common error of overemphasizing the technology over its users.    (0000RT)

There is an enormous mass of existing software automating many processes of data-transport and repeatable computation. That software is performing so well that, for the most part, we don't notice. Content (transported as raw data) makes its way from server to client and between peers in such a reliable fashion that when in the rare chance it doesn't work, it is a real disruption.    (0000RU)

Automation software has provided an infrastructure that lubricates communication. As communication becomes easier, we desire to improve that communication: make it work better and be more fulfilling. Now that we have automated the process of getting the data that represents communication from one place to another we need to augment how we are able to manipulate the communication.    (0000RV)

SocialSoftware is a new name on an existing concept. From ComputersAsTools:    (0000RW)

Phase one applications are close to ubiquitous and are fading into the background. We now have the infrastructure to work on phase two applications. Or, if you prefer, SocialSoftware: applications humans use to manipulate language, to communicate. Communication is not a process that can be fully captured in theories.    (0000RY)

Personal computing devices, especially devices that are highly available in both time and space (laptops, wireless PDAs, cell-phones, etc.), are promising tools to help achieve the view of computers as language representation manipulators provided by Winograd and Flores in Computers and Cognition. It is only very recently that the network and networked communication tools have become pervasive, reliable and cheap enough to enable social software. The communication tools run on top of a network that is automatic and transparent: it has faded into the background and for the most just works. It is stupid.    (0000RZ)

The HeadShift suggestion that social software be adaptable is appropriate but it is important to distinguish between human adaptability and software adaptability. Too often people want computers to act like people but they are not the same and it does us no good to hope for such a thing. Computers are tools and something to be utilized, worked and taken advantage of (lot's people seem to feel the same about humans; they can rot).    (0000S0)

If we think of computers as acting like people, and having intelligence like people, we grant it intention (from ComputersAsTools again):    (0000S1)

Humans, on the other hand, are very adept at comparison and linking. SocialSoftware should augment this behavior by providing tools that ease search, discovery, browsing and linking.    (0000S3)

Human adaptability comes from our ability to work with the truly unexpected and do something smart with it. Computers need a little more guidance. Therefore an adaptable piece of software is not one that is smarter as HeadShift suggests, but is simpler in the sense that it makes clear what it can do. Adaptable software is software that can be adapted by someone or a group, not that adapts itself. It is software that people may use in unintended ways. These adaptations are allowed by at least two factors:    (0000S4)

Clear and simple affordances    (0000S5)

Adaptable software makes it clear what it can do, what inputs it can accept, what outputs it can produce and provides handles to doing more.    (0000S6)

Replacability and loose coupling    (0000S7)

Adaptable software is a replaceable link in a chain of tools. Replacing the link can change the function or enable trials of different tools. Replacing a link does not break the rest of the chain. Loose coupling at the application level is good for the same reasons that loose coupling is good in programming: it encourages and enables the flexibility necessary to benefit from inevitable change; it allows unintended uses.    (0000S8)

These factors allow interoperability, which is a complicated word meaning talking.    (0000S9)

Social software is about talking. Two characteristics make adaptable software social software:    (0000SA)

People    (0000SB)

people, in groups loose or tight, use social software. It's as simple as that. It's not the computers that are being social.    (0000SC)

Reference, reuse and notification    (0000SD)

Social software allows people to talk about what people are talking about, reuse what people are talking about and tell people that people are talking about what they are talking about.    (0000SE)

Blogging and the tools it uses, especially those that allow RSS syndication and TrackBack, are good examples of social software. They help to create groups without a visible system of central arbitration and control. Groups are created by the participants rather than something they join that mediates their participation. Participants exist in the group with a sense of identity and ownership over their content while still allowing reuse and reference of what they have created.    (0000SF)

There's no doubt that the SocialSoftware phenomenon is an important development. It deserves some of the hype. However, care must be taken: the exciting part about social software is people not software.    (0000SG)

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Self Reference and Self Expression

In a comment to Insight versus Answers Andrea says all kinds of interesting things about the tension between developing shared understanding and effectively communicating ideas outside of the near group. Go read it.    (0000R0)

Here are some teasers, brought to you by TransClusion:    (0000R1)

I think an interpretation of what Andrea is saying is that communication of ideas outside social or disciplinary circles is good for the ideas and good for the thinkers. In much the same way that it is helpful for an individual to write something down to get it out and into something other than private language it is good for a group to do the same.    (0000R3)

I agree. One of the problems with these PurpleNumber things is that they make it possible to make an email, wiki or blog posting that is nothing but a series of links. I've heard these referred to as a HomeworkPost. They cut down on the narrative flow which is often necessary for language to be persuasive.    (0000R5)

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A WikiWiki World

The New York Times has an article about Wikis:    (0000QJ)

I like this part:    (0000QL)

Elsewhere in the article they mention SocialText and their product that apparently tries to bridge the gap between traditional office software and Wikis with an integrating suite of stuff.    (0000QN)

Done right (loosely coupled) such a thing could be quite cool. Done wrong (too many features, too much prediction of what a user will or should be doing with the integration, too many constraints on data reuse) such a thing ends up as a monolithic beastie.    (0000QO)

Nodes in a network--people, tools, info--bobbing in a moving sea.    (0000QP)

Props to poupou pour the pointer    (0000QQ)

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PlaNetwork Conference

June 6-8, 2003 PlaNetwork is hosting the Networking a Sustainable Future conference. Blue Oxen is helping out by facilitating online collaboration for participants and distant observers before, during and after the conference.    (0000OI)

With help from EricSinclair I drafted a strategy for encouraging blogging by using the InternetTopicExchange and Blogrolling.    (0000OJ)

The first topic created at the InternetTopicExchange is a general one simply called Planetwork Conference.    (0000OK)

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Insight versus Answers

There's a discussion going on at the Blue Oxen Collaboratory that started out with BillSeitz wondering if mashed together wiki words were the best presentation.    (0000OB)

The conversation has since wandered in some interesting directions. one of my contributions inquires about the importance of new insight compared to the value of retrieving answers to known questions.    (0000OC)

This division seem to be central to many discussions about the Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, and relations.    (0000OD)

My basic conclusion is that it takes many kinds to make the world go round but the message makes it obvious where my bias lies.    (0000OE)

The entire thread is very interesting. Check it out.    (0000OF)

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More fun with Purple Numbers

This evening I spent some time with MovableType and PurpleWiki to get PurpleWiki parsing working in blogs comments instead of just entries. This enables a few features in comments:    (0000MJ)

• PurpleNumbers    (0000MK)
• WikiWord parsing    (0000ML)
• WikiFormatting possibilities, such as headers, lists, italics, bold    (0000MM)

Because of the way MovableType is set up, all comments get the same text formatting options, so PurpleWiki for comments is either on or off. It's on now. For those of you who don't care, just keep on as before; there shouldn't be any disasters. Give it a try.    (0000MN)

A project for this month is to merge the several disparate branches of PurpleWiki development into a new release and in the process:    (0000MO)

• Create a technical specification so that other tools can implement purple numbering features.    (0000MP)
• Create a roadmap for future developments.    (0000MQ)
• Write a Why Is PurpleWiki Cool evangelical sermon of sorts that spreads the good word and acts as a tutorial.    (0000MR)
• Address some usability issues that come about from conflicts that occur when optimizing for the internal (invisible) and external (visible) representations of the PurpleNumber.    (0000MS)

There are some more thoughts about this stuff at PurpleWikiScratchpad.    (0000MT)

A primary goal is to get this stuff more out there and for that I could do with help and advice from anyone who happens to be reading this. If you are familiar with PurpleNumbers and have some comments about them, please leave them here. If you see them, but just don't get it, let me know, as that's valuable too. If you have suggestions on how to build some bridges with other developers to integrate Purple ideas into their tools, that would be good too.    (0000MU)

What's lacking is a salient bit o' info that captures what makes these little purple things helpful. Thus far people either get it quickly or don't get it, and that's not good enough.    (0000MV)

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Knowledge Craft

Hackers and Painters    (0000JC)

Paul Graham discusses similarities between hackers and painters in an essay all about craft that never uses the word "craft". In the process of saying that hackers are more like painters than engineers or scientists he (again, sometimes indirectly) criticizes academia, supports extreme programming and agile methods, explores and explains some economics of innovation, trashes formal knowledge representations, suggests a model for collaborative software development and a bunch of other fun stuff that somehow fits together.    (0000JD)

Throughout it all he maintains a notion of activity where how things are done and what is being done are not separated. This is craft.    (0000JE)

So, with that in mind, I think it is time Knowledge Management Consultants went in for a name change. It's Knowledge Craft.    (0000JF)

(Which means, according to google I need to read: Knowledge Work As Craft from Jim McGee?, but that will have to be tomorrow.)    (0000JG)

Posted by cdent at 07:49 AM | Trackback This | | bl

Concrete Collaboration

Anne and others, in various places, have reminded me that although I may like it there, living in the land of abstraction doesn't often change things in any immediate sense. So, since she's been suggesting that her husband and I need to provide some concrete advice on how buzzword-compliant collaboration can improve "respect in the workplace" and "help people do their jobs better right now" here's something that worked for me. I'm drawing directly on my own experience managing what was, for a while, an extremely high performance team. There's nothing new or revolutionary about this, but people don't often do it and I wish they did, so maybe writing it down has some value. No guarantees, context is everything; results will vary with degree of application. This method has a bias towards a certain work style. Explaining this briefly does not do it justice but time, at the moment, does not allow more. Thus you might find this rather, well, unexciting. And excuse any missteps, I've probably left out something important, but this is a blog after all.    (0000H8)

This recipe applies to small teams working synchronously and in-person. It assumes that the participants are performing some kind of "knowledge work" in which maintaining a good flow of information, understanding and context is important. It may apply equally well in other situations. I suspect it would.    (0000H9)

First:    (0000HA)

1. Make a group email list.    (0000HB)
2. Archive it.    (0000HC)
3. Use it for all internal communication.    (0000HD)
4. If your group makes regular contact with other groups have that contact go through the email list (send and receive) but designate one role that responds to those contacts. The responder role should rotate amongst the group members.    (0000HE)
5. When communication occurs somewhere other than the email list, backload it to the list for the archive and to keep everyone informed (e.g. meeting minutes)    (0000HF)

That makes for a lot of email but it has several benefits:    (0000HG)

1. It enforces learning.    (0000HH)
2. It exposes shortfalls in people's understandings which can then be remedied.    (0000HI)
3. It automatically creates an archive of much of the tacit knowledge in the organization that can later be refactored as training materials, project documentation, reports, etc.    (0000HJ)
4. It identifies individuals in the group that have special skills which can be put to greater use. (Or to put it another way, the secretary, the source of all the how-to knowledge, can be glorified; merit goes where merit is deserved.)    (0000HK)
5. It maintains or at least informs the narrative or script that drives activity.    (0000HL)

That alone addresses some of the needs that Anne mentioned but there's more. A system like this, when managed well, encourages a sense of openness and discussion that can often lead to innovation. It also frees up the mind from remembering context and how to do the job by creating a system of external cognitive aids that by there mere presence (i.e. even if you don't use them but just know they are there) install some confidence, understanding, and a sense of place and belonging.    (0000HM)

Identifying those external structures as cognitive aids is what leads to the abstract meanderings and tool building that is usually happening on this weblog. What are the mechanisms, metaphors, analogies and patterns that support those cognitive aids?    (0000HN)

PurpleNumbers, for example, are a tool to enhance the accessibility of document based cognitive aids. They provide a way to create handles to artifacts out there in the world.    (0000HO)

All of this emailing of course comes with significant cost in overhead. It's a lot to read and there has to be someone in the group, usually the manager, who process managerial directives and other big picture bits of context into the flow of information (this is a crucial part of the activity, requiring a manager that is fully converted and committed to the religion). Those are time consuming activities.    (0000HP)

My opinion is that calling it overhead does the activity a disservice. If the job of a "knowledge worker" is to smartly process knowledge, then managing communication is a crucial part of the job. My experience has been that the performance enhancement that results from increasing the access to context and knowledge makes up for the supposedly lost time.    (0000HQ)

Many people react to this prescription by saying they don't have time do the email or they simply don't like having email play such a large role in their activity (for example, they are too busy out with clients trying to sell things). I'm not sure how to respond to that. Again, my experience has been that the increased knowledge and access to knowledge that results from all the sharing results in increased performance and synchronicity between participants (using the sales example again, salespeople are more able to sell products and services that actually exist, at the right prices and with the correct specifications).    (0000HR)

Certainly there is a limit to the number of people that can work with this kind of scheme. I suspect it is somewhere around 10 people.    (0000HS)

My concerns with systematizing collaboration fit in with this picture. The above is not something you can foist on a group of workers by managerial decree and all of sudden there will be higher performance and greater respect in the workplace. You have to have to have commitment from all the participants. Getting that commitment is a chicken and egg problem which might make another topic some other time.    (0000HT)

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Banging on an open door...mumble

In a comment on my Blue Oxen Vision entry Tom Munnecke says some thought provoking stuff, including:    (0000GD)

(Read the whole thing for the whole context.)    (0000GF)

I think "banging against an open door" is apt. Part of my personal conflict over BOA is that an effort to formalize and aggregate collaboration, collaborative tools and collaborative thinkers somehow takes the edge off. It is the (undefined) edge which gets people going.    (0000GG)

When people say, "Hey, collaboration is good, let's collaborate on, um, uh...something!" it feels like they are separated from the core energy that drives the process. Places like moveon are a success because they are attached to a real and concrete need that is regularly updated and placed in the real world.    (0000GH)

The passionate language I use is an effort to try and inject some motivation (for me, something to grab onto) into a space that has none on its own. In the end, though, it feels ineffectual; that is, I don't feel more connected.    (0000GI)

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Think on This

Things I read today that seemed to have a connection, to me and to each other. Things I'd like to think about some more.    (0000FA)

CITIZENS, NOT CONSUMERS: A MANIFESTO FOR A NEW NON-COMMERCIAL ECONOMY    (0000FB)

Dave Pollard provides advice on a slow revolution against the "commercialization of everything".    (0000FC)

The tools of this revolution are frugality, education, and the creation of non-commercial economy.    (0000FE)

What's the best MetroCard option for you?    (0000FF)

From kottke.org: A simple demonstration of what's wrong with the economy.    (0000FG)

McGee Roughs    (0000FH)

Eric presents his notes from a presentation on collaboration at the Seabury Institute that included Jim McGee?.    (0000FI)

Eric has some musings I found valuable. He questions whether knowledge management is an imposition of answers or the empowerment of knowledge workers. I think this is the question that must be answered soon, or else knowledge as an empowering tool for individuals will be co-opted into the consumerist universe Pollard describes. Large segments of the KM business see knowledge tools as ways to harvest the latent creativity of the workers to reach economic goals. If the workers happen to be shinier happier people in the meantime, that's great and all, but don't forget the bottom line.    (0000FK)

More development, less progress    (0000FL)

Loosely Coupled presents an article in response to an interview with Marc Andreesen.    (0000FM)

I made this argument about faceted classification once upon a time. Philip Murray found a brief note of mine that claims faceted classification fails in the face of the criteria in innovation diffusion theory. I've complained in a similar fashion about RDF.    (0000FP)

I think, however, that there are economic and political factors that drive creators to make things complicated: they create barriers that require work to get across and separate the powerful from the not.    (0000FQ)

Will Technology Transform the Modern Corporation?    (0000FR)

Rob Paterson compares two British naval ships, HMS Inflexible and HMS Dreadnought, as examples of a cultural shift in attitudes about knowledge.    (0000FS)

True enough: technology on its own does not "do it". But why the unfortunate reference to sales?    (0000FU)

Open Here    (0000FV)

From stpeter:    (0000FW)

It's remarkable the number of times people says things like "Oh, hey, I know, if we get some people talking, things will be better." Isn't that obvious? Shouldn't that be obvious? Fie on my malgnostic thinking. Isn't it great that so many people are talking about it these days?    (0000FY)

That's better.    (0000FZ)

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A Classification of Associative and Formal Concepts

A Classification of Associative and Formal Concepts    (0000EN)

A paper from Uta Priss, briefly my advisor at SLIS, that "describes a ten-fold classification of concepts that correspond to different stages of cognitive development". The "paper argues that associative and formal conceptual structures are combined in human cognition".    (0000EO)

Dense, pithy stuff. I don't feel quite right about the way in which formal concepts and full language are so tightly coupled. It conflicts with the process of analogy that I see (because I want to?) going on in persuasive communication.    (0000EP)

I guess that's part of the point she's making though: there's a travelling up and down on the various dimensions she describes that happens as we think.    (0000EQ)

More from the paper:    (0000ER)

I'm an associative structures groupie.    (0000EU)

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Anarchic Emergent Collaboration

Here's some more of a continuing exploration of the politics of collaboration.    (0000DY)

I find it helpful to distinguish between two dimensions of collaboration: Emergent versus Imposed and Loose versus Tight. There are presumably many more.    (0000DZ)

Emergent collaboration comes about in response to a discovered need that is shared amongst a group of people. This is often seen in the group-forming associated with weblog networks.    (0000E0)

Imposed collaboration is arbitrary group work where frequently the shared need is given (by some outside force) to a group that has been created for the task. People get this in their work as employees or students.    (0000E1)

Loose collaboration occurs when there is no formal relationship between the participants. They are associated by their shared understandings and shared beliefs, often across distance and time. I'm in Seb Paquet's creative network and I think of him as being in mine. I've never met him, and emailed only twice.    (0000E2)

Tight collaboration occurs where there are relationships and roles which are more formal: co-workers, teammates on sports teams.    (0000E3)

Any collaborative event can presumably be mapped onto a coordinate plane representing these dimensions. Blog-style collaboration is highly emergent and loose, for example.    (0000E4)

My contention is that emergent and loose collaboration is the most natural style. By this I mean that it is the most in tune with human nature. From this I'm willing to state that emergent collaboration and consensus building is not simply emergent democracy in action as some people like to think, but is in fact communal anarchism in action.    (0000E5)

Anarchism can be about the emergence of communal process and communal authority. That is, process and authority is not imposed but rather is emergent because the forces that create enabling processes and structuring authority are allowed to act and evolve; through consensus, through willful appreciation of diverse voices (see ThinkOutLoud), through attention to simple needs.    (0000E6)

A community which is the result of communal anarchism has participants that believe themselves to be in a CovenantingGroup and act accordingly: in accordance with one another.    (0000E7)

Take ExtremeProgramming? from a political perspective. It eschews the external authority of leads and specifications for adherence to an evolving set of shared understandings and shared goals. The developers perform well because they are performing "naturally". They are doing what they do best in an environment that is supportive of them. That's Anarchy (with the capital A) in a nutshell.    (0000E8)

Unfortunately Anarchy is probably a lost cause at the macro scale, but in smallish groups it has a huge amount of potential and is directly aligned with buzzword compliant terms of the day like emergence, complexity theory, systems theory and can probably even be rolled back to intersect with ideas such as AutoPoesis?.    (0000E9)

So I wonder if there are threads of connection that we can draw between extremist political theory (and history), systems theory and discussions of collaboration. Even if the threads prove ephemeral the exploration will probably be productive.    (0000EA)

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Collaboration -> Discipline -> Profession -> Stink

This past week, Blue Oxen released its first research report, An Introduction to Open Source Communities. The paper was released on the same day as the launch party. For reasons I don't yet understand Richard Stallman happened to be at the party. When I got a moment I introduced myself to him and he expressed his (understandable) displeasure at our use of the term "Open Source" in a way that subsumed the Free Software movement. He suggested we consider the term FLOSS (Free/Libre?/Open? Source Software).    (0000DL)

His gripe was that Open Source was something worse than a bastardization of Free Software, pursuing a set of goals that have little to do with ensuring freedom for people and everything to do with economic benefits (giant, low-cost pools of talent for finding and fixing bugs).    (0000DM)

When I was able to get a word in, I expressed my agreement.    (0000DN)

It's interesting that we had this encounter because I've been having similar thoughts about the nature of collaboration as a discipline. I've gathered some of them here to see what they look like lined up. Much of this is pulled from different emails so excuse the lack of continuity.    (0000DO)

Set aside for a moment that at least in the contexts I've been using it collaboration is not well defined and consider ways in which and why collaboration might be used:    (0000DP)

In the rosy picture, collaboration is a way to generate ideas and consensus; to use freedom of thinking and access to knowledge to create more freedom.    (0000DQ)

In the stinky picture, collaboration is a set of tools and processes that could be co-opted by existing power holders into a suite of methods for increasing access to workers and worker productivity (see Open Source above).    (0000DR)

In both of these scenarios collaboration is a tool and thus its use is an exercise of power. Wherever power is used, we have politics. Professionals (those trained in a profession) tend to pretend to a face of political neutrality: Journalists have their objectivity; Scientists their method; Doctors their oaths. I'm in the process of reading Howard Zinn's Declarations of Independence. He suggests that professional training installs an essential conservatism that insures the continuation of the power granted a professional and belies the pretense of neutrality. He quotes Jarold Auerbach's Unequal Justice:    (0000DS)

An early goal of Blue Oxen has been to take steps towards the establishment of a discipline of collaboration. Discussions have been occurring internally and in the Collaboration Collaboratory. Care must be taken because one step beyond discipline is profession. What will we have when collaboration is a profession in which people engage rather than a tool people use? Will we have the stinky picture described above where worker productivity takes precedence over freedom?    (0000DU)

This is plenty long already. More to come soon. Your comments are much appreciated.    (0000DV)

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Meta Note to Self

In the comments to one of my Notes to Self the quotable Mike recalls a description he made of me that I used to head a project that got me where I am today. It's called Hypertext and Knowledge Enhancement.    (0000DH)

Mike said:    (0000DI)

Mike's comment made reference to yet another paper worth review that fits into the big picture. And while I'm at it, Seb's weblog points out a wiki article I'd like to give some thought.    (0000DK)

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Blue Oxen Vision

I was recently in California for the Blue Oxen launch party. As one of the cofounders of the organization, I was expected to participate in a presentation given to the party guests. In the presentation we hoped to give an overview of where we were coming from and where we hoped to go. To prepare, and clear my head for things more practical, I wrote the below on the airplane on the way out to California. Due to sickness, a busy schedule, other flavors of chaos and what basically amounts to an unfortunate lack of guts on my part much of the message below did not make it into the presentation. This remains a fairly accurate statement of what motivates me and what I hope Blue Oxen can achieve.    (0000D8)

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Note to self

High style vs. vernacular in habitats, software and philosophy    (0000D4)

Just a note to myself: I'd like to think about these sorts of things some more. I think engages my thoughts on craft, design, metaphor, analogy, phenomenology, anarchy, emergence, etc etc.    (0000D5)

There's a manifesto brewing here somewhere.    (0000D6)

This fits in too: about blogging and the memex.    (0000D7)

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Abstract Monkey Wrenches

Danny Ayers comments on an anti-RDF piece by Sean McGrath?, saying it is "trival to debunk." I don't think his concerns can be tossed aside so easily.    (0000BV)

There is a lot of truth in what Sean is saying. I don't think he's really saying that there's anything wrong with RDF itself, but suggesting instead that since it is an abstraction (such an abstraction) it has significant barriers to entry and use.    (0000BW)

Also, I don't think you can put people's willingness to use programmatic abstractions and data abstractions into the same box. Especially in a situation where people imagine that the data abstractions are only a few short steps from being a human communication medium.    (0000BX)

This is related to what I was trying to say over on the collab lists.    (0000BY)

A tool like RDF is hard to use because its uses are abstract rather than concrete. You can't walk up to it and comprehend, in short order, what it is for. Nor is it particularly easy to try so the sort of clear breakdown that would lead to a present-at-hand moment doesn't happen so the real goal, where use is ready-to-hand, doesn't happen either.    (0000BZ)

More on tools that are first present and then ready-to-hand.    (0000C0)

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Body in a Coffin

A series of events in the last seventy two hours or so has done some damage to the words I've been using to describe the philosophy that supports my attitudes towards learning, communication, collaboration, tool use, knowledge transfer and a bunch of other stuff. I'm doing some ThinkOutLoud with this entry, so excuse my mess.    (0000A3)

Last summer, to gain some credit for my now completed degree, I worked on a couple of independent studies. In one, my research partner and I workshopped a paper in support of formal knowledge access structures for reference, but opposed to formal knowledge representation for communication. We ran up against some opposition from some of the participants who felt we were being scruffy and illogical.    (0000A4)

Being scruffy is one of my identifying characteristics and I hope I stay that way.    (0000A5)

The other independent study was a readings group called Augury. We created the group in an attempt to discover connections between the philosophy of Doug Engelbart, as described in Thierry Bardini's ''Bootstrapping'' book, and embodied cognition as described in Andy Clark's ''Being There''.    (0000A6)

In a fit of zealotry I went off and found what I was looking for: pivot points of connection between the two sets of ideas. It was an extremely productive time for me. I solidified many ideas that had been percolating for a few months, especially ideas associated with knowledge transfer and tool craft.    (0000A7)

It was good and it was fun but unfortunately it was built on a stacked deck of cards.    (0000A8)

Poupou's in a cogsci class in which they talk about brains. She has some issues with the class and the participants. A long time complaint with cognitive scientists has been that they tend to think of the brain as an entity in a jar that, with perfect information, can be recreated. I've never liked this mechanistic view of things. Embodied cognition, for me, represented a way out of that morass: brains with bodies living in the world, participants in very complex and infinite network. Poupou's comments about her class and this diatribe about embodied cognition (found by my handy little GoogleTracker whoosit) show that's not really the case. I had taken embodied cognition to mean cognition of an individual in their sensory network situated in a world environment; interactive cognition; informed cognition; world conscious cognition. Turns out, for a lot of those folks it just means having some limbs that bump into the things.    (0000A9)

So we go from brains in jars to bodies in coffins; a slight movement of the membrane outward. Wee ha! Go team! Great, cheers, thanks a lot; I still think I'm right: my interpretation of embodied cognition, maybe call it environmental cognition (although it looks like maybe that's been taken over by people who think of the environment as "out there" while the brain is "in there"), and the roots it finds in folks like Heidegger and Bateson, is still strongly supportive of Engelbart's philosophy and human-centered improvement and agumentation.    (0000AA)

How does this fit in with formal knowledge representations? The gang over at the Blue Oxen Collaboration Collaboratory are having a chat about structured-dialog systems. Many of the participants in the group are big fans of outliners and IBIS. They're neaties, not scruffies. There is some historical precedent that tries to put Doug Engelbart in with the neaties and Ted Nelson with the scruffies (I think this is not right, but people seem to enjoy the fight). Some of the collaboratory members appear to feel formal knowledge representations are a personal aid in communication. I heartily disagree with this principle. Formal knowledge representations are a secondary or tertiary step: communication first (scruffy communication) followed by digestion and summarization. One of the participants touches on this. A process of facilitation is required, either by oneself or someone else, to get to the "formal" state.    (0000AB)

Once in the formal state, the information (or knowledge, if you insist) is available for reference and is valuable as such. It is not, however, valuable as communication. Communication is what people do with one another, situated in their worlds. If one insists in the use of formal representations for communication and in the belief of an achievable truly shared ontology one is there in the coffin, not too far from the jar, being a brain, without a world. When the world's not really there, what happens in the brain can sometimes be far more important and enjoyable than what is going on in the world and action outside the world may slip away in favor of a process of regular and eventually useless brain lubrication.    (0000AC)

Posted by cdent at 02:23 AM | Trackback This | | bl

SpaceCGI

I've cleaned up the FrontPage and the rest of the wiki and added some more detailed information on the SpaceCGI tool. Once I get the MovableType issues worked out, I'll provide more info in the wiki about the MovableType PurpleWiki integration. Right now, the most complete information on that can be found in the Movable Type support forum.    (00008X)

Posted by cdent at 08:34 AM | Trackback This | | bl

More purple testing

I'm halfway there to getting the purple number parsing working with MT's new Text Formatting plugins. The display is by plugin, but the creation of the numbers is still in MT::Entry::save() with the double save, as described here:    (00007I)

  http://www.burningchrome.com:8000/~cdent/mt/archives/000034.html#nid00003X    (00007J)

This posting is a test of putting the 2.51 modifications back into 2.62, with some minor adjustments to check the convert_breaks value.    (00007K)

Posted by cdent at 10:11 PM | Trackback This | | bl

Playing with Reversible

Found via tesugen.com, there's this thing called Revervislbe that smells like it has promise, but it's not clear for what.    (00004D)

The place tracks referers Kottke made a page, inspiring Tesugen and now there's one for me too.    (00004E)

It will also accept trackback pings, so I'm ping there with this entry.    (00004F)

What will it do? I dunno, but something'll probably come of it.    (00004G)

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Business Process Augmentation

Over at Loosely Coupled they're establishing a link between business process management and Engelbart style augmentation while talking about Krispy Kreme doughnuts (mmm doughnuts):    (000049)

Yup, process and tools matter more than applications. What's the difference between a tool and an application? An application makes large, usually incorrect, assumptions about the needs of the user. A tool helps with a task.    (00004B)

I've a paper that ruminates broadly on such things.    (00004C)

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NID Sequence Testing

This entry tests writing the purple numbers to an index for later use by a thing I'm planning to call Space. Given a purple number from a single sequence source, find it's original document.    (000044)

Idea is that you use the same sequence/nid generator for all document creation in a domain, no matter what the document creation tool happens to be. In my case I've got this MovableType blog and its associated wiki pulling NIDs from the same generator.    (000045)

Space will take a NID and redirect to the original context, or parse out just the structural element that the NID points to.    (000046)

There's no reason the nid generator has to only work with local tools. It could be a remote service.    (000047)

Didn't work, don't have access to ID. Trying saving twice.    (000048)

Posted by cdent at 12:49 AM | Trackback This | | bl

Wiki and Purple Numbering for Movable Type

Inspired by the Wiki plugin at 0xDECAFBAD I've done the first steps of a dirty integration between PurpleWiki and MovableType.    (00003S)

I had hoped that I would be able to use Movable Type's plugin scheme but in the end I got confused and messed up, so I'm seeking feedback.    (00003T)

PurpleWiki is a modification of UseModWiki to support Collab:PurpleNumbers (the marks that should be on the end of each of the structural units of this entry). The marks identify addressable sections of content for more effective referencing and will eventually help transclusion.    (00003U)

Source for the parser is available at blueoxen.org. Source for the Movable Type changes are swirling around on my disk trying to settle down. Happy to share upon request.    (00003V)

Instead of using the plugins I made changes in MT::Entry::save() and MT::Template::Context::_hdlr_entry_body():    (00003W)

• save() has been modified to take the entry text, parses it to a PurpleWiki::Tree format, adds the purple numbers on nodes without them, serializes the tree as 'wikitext' and saves it. The purple numbers are unique for an established domain. If you look at some of the other PurpleWiki parsed entries in this blog (see the trackbacks) you'll see the numbers are distinct. Eventually it will be possible to have just a domain and a purple number and get stuff via a straightforward retrieval mechanism.    (00003X)
• _hdlr_entry_body() has been modified to, if the text contains purple number tags, to parse the wikitext format back to a PurpleWiki::Tree and from there into wikihtml. This does the formatting and also parses for WikiWords. When I was doing some testing with this portion using a filter plugin I ran into trouble because the test had already had some htmlification done to it before I had a chance to pass it to the parser.    (00003Y)

What I would like to know from anyone who cares to answer: Can I move these functions into plugins, or am I stuck in the bowels of MT? If you don't know the answer but know how to find out, that would be helpful too. Thanks.    (00003Z)

Posted by cdent at 11:33 PM | Trackback This | | bl

The Unknowable

From an abstract of a lecture by Gregory Chaitin:

In other words, God not only plays dice in physics, but even in pure mathematics, in logic, in the world of pure reason. Sometimes mathematical truth is completely random and has no structure or pattern that we will ever be able to understand. It is NOT the case that simple clear questions have simple clear answers, not even in the world of pure ideas, and much less so in the messy real world of everyday life.

This is such a relief for me. Nevermind the god stuff, that's not really relevant to me. What gets me, what excites me, is that logic tells us that logic will never be completely logical. I love that. For me it encourages more play, more exploration, more interest. I don't understand why it gets some people down.

Posted by cdent at 07:20 PM | Trackback This | | bl

wikitesting

This is the PurpleWiki parser presenting pieces of pie.    (000038)

WikiWord    (000039)

Heading    (00003A)

• list 1    (00003B)
• list 2    (00003C)
• list 3    (00003D)

Home Page    (00003E)

Further testing shows MoreMore    (00003H)

Posted by cdent at 07:26 AM | Trackback This | | bl

Blog Matchmaking

Seb's Open Research: matchmaking service

Seb says he can suggest blogs worth following based on a posting of interests mixed in with his experience and a dash of intuition. So here's my limited post of some limited interests; wouldn't want to give it all away.

Collaboration: Mostly of the asynchronous variety, of the sort we're supposed to be researching at Blue Oxen. Of late I'm becoming more and more interested in the political activism that may lie latent (intentional and unintentional) within "improvement activitivies" and "activity improvement".

Agile Methods: Patterns, extreme programming, unit testing, etc. are very appealing software development and design methods. I reckon the philosophical ideas that support it migth be good life development and design methods too.

Climbing: Not just a hobby and exercise: some degree of sanity maintenance with tangible, dirt-related, goals.

Books: 1920s short and long fiction always seems to tickle my fancy. I'm fairly certain that it has something to do with the underlying doubt ("Are we going to be okay or have we screwed the pooch?"). Same thing drives an interest in movies without happy endings.

Cognition, Augmentation, Craft: The Augury readings group from last summer fleshed out a lot of ideas and the connections between.

That should be a reasonable start.

Posted by cdent at 08:37 PM | Trackback This | | bl

Scientific Method and Knowledge

Tesugen.com: 20 January, 02003

Way down in the bottom of an entry on the creation of small world networks, Peter Lindberg comments on the creative problem solving and science:

Also, in the context of creativity, I find the problem solving strategies of scientists to be interesting. For example, how does a mathematician go about solving problems? I guess that it's a lot less rational than you'd expect.

I've had ongoing issues with the belief that science is dependent on rational behavior. Seems to me that the science that changes lives, that moves things ahead is the science that results from insight. Sure, confirmation is important but why do we need confirmation in the first place: it's because something interesting happened. Something different.

I think those differences come about in large part from knowledge access.

Posted by cdent at 07:47 PM | Trackback This | | bl

PurpleWiki databasing

Blue Oxen Associates: PurpleWiki

Made some small headway in the direction of changing PurpleWiki to use a database for storage rather than delimited text files. The default format is freaky to say the least and getting the code changed is something of a nightmare.

Nevermind that this version of the schema will be scrapped when we move to storing nodes instead of pages. But this is good. It is progress.

Posted by cdent at 10:12 AM | Trackback This | | bl

Helium + Advogato

Helium Performance

I decided to post to advogato about Helium, citing my Helium Performance religious document. Exposure.

Gregory is nervous about exposure, I think that nervousness is misplaced. If you want things to grow they have to get out there in the sun. If people piss on them, that's still water.

Posted by cdent at 06:31 AM | Trackback This | | bl