CommunityWiki: FrontPage

ProjectSpace

Tue, 12 May 2009 19:46:10 GMT

This idea describes a portion of ThePublicWeb dedicated to projects:

projects themselves,
coordination within projects,
the topical relationships between projects,
the social relationships between projects

The projects could be:

educational – to teach beginners people Calculus
software – to make some software project
art – some story world or collaborative project or whatever
whatever

The space will plausibly self-organize itself into a network, which we call, “the ProjectSpaceNetwork.”

ProjectSpaceNetwork

The ProjectSpace network is a self-organizing network of projects.

Here’s what it might look like:

Some time in the far future (by Internet time,) you decide you’re going to make a program to recognize chess piece arragements, given a digital image taken from the physical world of a chess board and pieces on it.

You check Google, looking for “chess visualization project.” You see some projects that have been dedicated to rendering 3D imagines of chess pieces, given a machine representation of a board. But, you want something that goes the other way- you want to make something that takes digital images from the physical world, and turn them into the machine representations of the board.

So, you look at the project you found from the perspective of the ProjectSpaceNetwork.

You push the right keys, and you see the network, centered on this particular chess visualization project. At the default level of detail, you see the facts of this particular project: VoiceOverInternetProtocol channels that it uses, video channels that it uses, real-time edit document stores (modern day wiki), links to people who are involved in the project (highlighted if they are available for correspondence on this project right now), etc., etc., etc.,. It’s all in a beautiful non-rectilinear futuristic interface. Very nice.

We can imagine something like:

Now, you zoom out a bit, and find that it’s part of a network of projects, visualized in a TensionMap. Nearby is a project related purely to the creation of models for chess pieces. Further away, you can see, in the distance, myriad projects related to teaching the game of chess, both to humans and to machines (automatic code-installers, best-play or best-for-training lookup-servers, etc.,etc.,.). You can also see projects related to the mapping of the history of chess, projects keeping stats on major chess games, projects keeping representations of chess games, etc., etc.,. But that’s all looking too far.

You also notice that nearby, there’s a project dedicated to just what you wanted to do! It’s a project dedicated to the visual analysis of chess board photographs, in order to make machine representations of chess board configurations.

You travel over to that project (by clicking on it’s node), and zoom in on it. It looks like there’s only 1 or 2 people casually working on this project, and 3 or 4 people casually observing. They have a status blog, a document respository, a source code repository, a mailing list, etc.,. You plug yourself in as an interested casual observer, subscribe to the blog, and start looking through the source code repository.

You realize that some of these concepts are too deep for your immediate level of understanding. No problem- you just zoom out, and see what projects are in the neighborhood. Sure enough, there’s a few visualization communities nearby. One is producing a hypertext on visualization on computers in general, one is a place for more general communication and coordination over visualization projects. It seems that the ProjectSpaceNetwork around the chess projects wiki has also linked to some library projects that it uses, and some specific reference maintenance projects.

This is the “ProjectSpaceNetwork.”

Anyone who wants to work on anything goes into the network, and looks for projects that look like a close-enough match, explore the territory, learn what’s available, and goes to work on what they like. The network is maintained by the nodes. That is: The particular nodes take care of their own particular space, and make agreements (generally implicit, but some times explicit) between each other on how to link together, what to accept, what not to accept, etc., etc.,. Some chunks of the ProjectSpaceNetwork are highly formalized, with clear procedures for determining what is linked and not. The vast majority is very casual: “Does this link that someone added look good? Let’s keep it. Oh: This looks like a spammer, or something. Toss that link.”

When you start a new project, you just create whatever is needed to make the project’s node, link in the project resources, and then link your project up with the neighboring projects, and you link from theirs to yours. If they don’t think your project is relevant, or you’ve positioned your project too “close” to theirs, or even too far away, they’ll correct it themselves, by their own process.

What does this network do for us? It makes us highly aware of what projects are going on in the immediate vicinity. We learn very easily when a related project, that we would care about, appears. It is localized to likely interest. It is not based on key-word, which means that if people use different words for the same things, they are still (likely) connected. It is also something that helps create community, because people who are interested in what each other are interested are likely to discover each other, and create a relationship between themselves. The ProjectSpaceNetwork contributes to the InternetConcentration, and forges a SharedAwarenessSystem.

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AboutLogistics

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:29:24 GMT

This page is called “About Logistics” rather than something meaningful, because it’s just a rough braindump of ideas connected by the keyword: “Logistics.”

… the stuff on communications through mesh networks will soon move to the MeshNetwork page …

This page talks about literal logistics (getting raw materials to the place where they are processed, and getting the processed end-results to the end user) as well as other things that more or less metaphoric analogies can be drawn with logistics. Logistics: “I, Pencil”. CyberneticEconomy full of spimes. An amateur courier network. The importance of “sharing” the “what” process. Analogies with logistics: “Programming is logistics”. self-organization.

I, Pencil

“I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe … if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. … Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”

Thus begins the influential essay “I, Pencil. My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read” (1958).

Many students spend years of their life in highly structured hierarchy. So the idea that hierarchies are not absolutely required is a bit of a surprise. The idea that alternatives to hierarchies are often superior – HierarchyConsideredHarmful – is even more surprising.

The essay “No Silver Bullet Revisited” by Brad Cox (1995) argues that software is different from pencils: “This underlying difference is that electronic goods are made of bits but tangible goods are made of atoms.” However, it holds out hope. We have an astonishingly complex yet astonishingly efficient “I, Pencil” system that today converts a desire for a pencil in someone’s head into a physical pencil in one’s hands. It holds out hope that perhaps, someday, we will have an analogous system that, although complex, efficiently converts a desire for software in someone’s head into software that implements that desire. A system where people are paid well to keep that system running. A system where people are guided towards doing things that are highly useful, rather than wasting their time on stuff no one wants. A system where people can rapidly assemble useful software from pre-existing components, rather than creating everything from scratch every time. A system that allows people to use that software at low cost, without needing years of study to understand all the complexity involved in putting it together. (But will this system solve the “fun” problem discussed at ProgrammingAtWorkIsLessFun ?)

The “I, Pencil” system works great for commodity items. But IntelligenceFailure describes situations where it doesn’t work so well, even for physical objects.

"No Silver Bullet Revisited" by Brad Cox (1995)

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OrganizedCulture

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:10:11 GMT

Organized Culture is our name for the idea that society will compartmentalize into groups.

The theory is that it will do so because social affiliations will be ExplicitInformation, or "reified." That is, that they will be encoded, written down, inside computers. This is in contrast to how they are mostly spoken, and “in our heads,” at present. What is written is recorded, referenced, visible, and revisited. What is spoken is ephemeral, frequently intended for a small audience, and heard only once. (See: DocumentsVsMessages.)

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SudburySchoolForAdults

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:39:51 GMT

We need to collaborate.

As of 2007, collaborating online is far more difficult than collaborating face-to-face. So there are 2 things we need to work on:

Setting up physical places where people can come out of their cocoon and collaborate on educational and cool stuff
Improving online collaboration.

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LocalNames

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:00:11 GMT

Local Names is a project to use wiki-like linking just about everywhere.

Imagine: You’re reading a web page you like, such as: http://slashdot.org/

You are going to talk about it in your blog, so you click a bookmarklet, and name the page, “SlashDot.”

Then you go to your blog, or your favorite wiki, or are writing a comment somewhere, and you say, “I was just looking at SlashDot the other day, and I saw this idea, …”

When you hit “Save” (or “submit” or “comment”), your blog automatically hyperlinks “SlashDot” to http://slashdot.org/ for you.

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InformationOverload

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:37:47 GMT

I feel this is one of the big up and coming problems with society (well, first world society, but in a way that affects its dealings with the rest of society).

InformationOverload is the problem of dealing with the sheer amount of information available. It is the common ground between sorting through the news, sorting through email spam, and the problem of how to build a search engine. It is the problem of reading articles on the web, and getting the feeling that each one was important and valuable, and then afterwards deciding that you spent too much time reading articles on the web. The first problem is that there is too much junk to sort through; the deeper problem is that there is too much good stuff to sort through.

There are many ConsequencesOfInformationOverload.

I feel wikis are a powerful weapon in the battle against InformationOverload, and I feel they could become even more so in the future. See WikiVsInformationOverload.

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ConversationProcess

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 03:16:35 GMT

On the CommunityWiki, we ask ourselves, “How do we want to talk? What’s our conversation process?” With those questions come other questions: “What do we want in DocumentMode? How do we ensure reworking?”

This wiki includes wiki itself as a subject, and we experiment with conversational forms on this wiki. Our answers to the questions on this page are by no means settled.

PageMaintainer: LionKimbro

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MicroContribution

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 13:27:17 GMT

The principal of microcontribution: people should be able to make a small contribution to discussion or decision-making on an issue (rather than being forced to either contribute nothing or to pledge tons of time to it).

In decision-making, this allows a broader spectrum of people to be represented in the decision.

The extent to which MicroContribution is possible is limited by the structure of the medium. For example, the internet allows the ideal of MicroContribution to be better achieved because one can write as little as a sentence in a single post. Prior to the internet, the shortest written form of communication was something like a letter, or a pamphlet.

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PageMaintainer

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:59:41 GMT

Here on CommunityWiki, we are performing an experiment that we call, “Page Maintainer.”

When you see a page that says “PageMaintainer: Foo” near the top of the page, that means that “Foo” (a person) is maintaining the page.

That person may be operating as:

secretary & notekeeper – keeping track of key ideas, questions, insights, and so on
continuous reworking – building up DocumentMode content as people write
discussion leader – asking people questions, directing conversation, and so on
dashboard intelligence – looking up relevant information and links within the wiki & on the Internet, and posting it
moderator – making sure that some specific conversation process is being followed, making sure that people are getting fair share in discussion
…or something else!

The page maintainer should, in some way, be helping the conversation or final document. (We like final documents.)

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CommunityWikiBank

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:13:34 GMT

A proposal to conduct a real experiment into WhatIsMoney & AlternativeCurrency, by creating a CommunityWikiBank (one possible CwB entity). This proposal is quite serious, hence…

The Bank’s first loan of $1,000.us will be used to purchase shares in CommunityWikiBusiness?.
- The proposal for the allocation of these shares will be decided by a Vote conducted according to the CommunityWiki Governance methodology.
Until specific Authorities are formally delegated, proposals to raise additional capital and expand the scope of the Bank’s activities will also required this type of approval.
- There is a “Pledges” section under which individuals can indicate their willingness to “deposit” funds, once the Terms & Conditions required for the Bank’s operation have been established.

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CriticismOfWiki

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 19:56:50 GMT

The page criticism of wiki is for critical remarks about wiki. For the positive aspects of wiki see praise of wiki.

Things that often fail in wikis:

LackOfReworking – pages aren’t reworked nearly as often as we believe they do
Publicizing, Releasing for Public – RecentChanges is indecypherable to the outside world (but see: BlogControlledByWiki)
Just letting people talk. – people are discouraged from making new pages, because of the pressure towards OnceAndOnlyOnce in DocumentMode - consider “AttackTheDocumentMode” - and may even be a force for WikiSectarianism
Adapting to Change. – ChangeFailure - The world changes faster than wiki can adapt, so successful wikis often seem out-of-date, lagging behind. (note: WikiPediaIsNotTypical.)
Categories. – they do not really make it easier to recall pages.

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