I agree that this is an interesting idea. The first point especially seems very ambitious to me—it seems like your system of recommendations would be taking up a lot of the system’s time.
On the fourth point, I would be careful not to assume that a given participant, even a talented and qualified one, is willing to assume a moderation role. Also, I don’t quite understand what a “group” consists of in this context. Can you give a couple examples of the kinds of groups that might exist and what they might accomplish on the site?
The business plan seems like it would need to be on a private and/or heavily moderated section of wiki, more so than the open-source example. I do really like the open-source project use of this, though; basically, it’s an interactive prose design document.
I don’t feel I have the time or skill to donate to this project at the moment, but I’ll be curious to see where it goes.
Recommendations: I have a feeling that this will turn out to be relatively trivial—as I see it, it is essentially a parallel problem to the one that google solved, but with a data set many orders of magnitude smaller. The system surveys the relationships between propositions that have been supplied by users (I don’t think it need/should infer connections for itself), and determines a relevance score.
Moderators: I am sure you are right, and that this could easily be a fraught area. Ideally, the system would be flexible enough to allow for groups to self-identify and self-manage in a variety of ways—unlike wikipedia, where a single ecosystem is the be-all and end-all, there is space here for a wide range of ecosystems—groups would certainly rise and fall, fail, feud, coalesce; but no propositions will disappear when a group associated with it collapses—the propositions remain for other users to find and work with. The system should be set up as an evolutionary playground, with mechanisms that are rigged to marginally favour groups that coalesce more, flame less.some sort of ranking system would allow neglected propositions/networks to fall to the bottom.
Groups: I believe that as humans are a social species, human communities are essential structures and the necessary (but not sufficient) locus for creative responses to problems (even if the responses are associated with individuals, those individuals will generally be more effective within a supportive community).
However, the communities of the past generally used restrictive and non-rational codes as social glue (variously, religion/tribal culture/geographic isolation/economic dependence/political domination etc) People who wish to use their consciousness to improve their lives have often had a hard time in relation to these codes, and at an accelerating pace in the last century, have abandoned traditional communities—leaving these dominated by the happily or cynically non-rational. Secular cities with weak communities, fundamentalist rural areas with strong but misguided communities. I am interested in developing tools and mechanisms which can allow people to form communities on the basis of conscious assent. I am enough of a darwinist not to want to attempt to say what I think those communities should aspire to.
I would use such a tool to attempt to set out my own web of beliefs and interests, in the hope of connecting with like minded individuals. My hope is, that with a large subset of the ‘ground rules’ clearly communicated and the relationships between them identified, that highly effective development of new/difficult/ill defined areas could be worked on.
I would also use such a platform to make proposals like the one we are discussing here.
I would expect certain groups to turn up quickly; cults; obsessives and the like—but I fondly hope that these will either remain tiny or will disintegrate or, most likely, find that the structural characteristics of the tool tends to expose inconsistencies in their thinking, and leave of their own accord.
I would expect that political groups might follow the same trajectory, albeit more slowly and with less fireworks.
I would hope that purposeful individuals with positive and constructive intentions will find it a more congenial arena that wider forums or more narrow blogs.
A concrete example: as a founder of a small school, I attempted to establish the principal policies of the school as a network of ‘patterns’, ranging from fundamentals (Support the developing child; Learning is part of living; Self-governance; Family involvement is fundamental; Ethical consciousness and action) to intermediates (Relationship with the state) to specifics ( In the absence of a tool like the one proposed, collaboration with other people involved was impractical, and we retreated to the standard solution of sets of prose policies, which no-one ever reads, and which are inaccessible and becoming less relevant to actual practice with every passing week.
As to what groups might accomplish, I can say this very succinctly; they might well succeed in expanding the range of metaphysics available to humanity. By which I mean, expanding the number of ways in which we can usefully communicate about phenomena. As this seems to me to be the only reliable yardstick by which to measure ‘progress’, I modestly suggest that this might be a Good Thing.
Business Plans: given some sort of ‘freemium’ model, than yes, users/groups wanting privacy / security would be able to pay for various levels of same, or presumably for implementation of stand-alone installations on their own servers. Open-source software offers successful models for this (Drupal is one example).
“basically, it’s an interactive prose design document”—I hope not. The structured and templated nature of the Pattern Language approach has a higher order than prose, and should increase both the information content and the utility of the resulting collection of propositions. The book ‘A Pattern Language’ , which was published in 1977, and conceived years previously, works exactly like a hypertext document, with directed but essentially free-form navigation the implied mode of use. The requirement that all content is directed towards the resolution of the particular problem/proposition at hand is rather powerful in practice, and the requirement that each proposition should be assigned larger scale propositions which it helps to refine, and needs smaller scale propositions to flesh it out in turn imposes a need for clarity of thought about the outcome of the system as a whole.
Engagement with the project: at this stage, comment and discussion is what is needed.
“basically, it’s an interactive prose design document”—I hope not.
Sorry, I can see how that didn’t mean the same thing outside my head as in it. I didn’t mean prose as opposed to hypertext, but prose as opposed to flowcharts. I was reading recently about the way grown-ups write design docs, and immediately made a face and went back to my habit of putting prioritized feature lists in text files.
I agree that this is an interesting idea. The first point especially seems very ambitious to me—it seems like your system of recommendations would be taking up a lot of the system’s time.
On the fourth point, I would be careful not to assume that a given participant, even a talented and qualified one, is willing to assume a moderation role. Also, I don’t quite understand what a “group” consists of in this context. Can you give a couple examples of the kinds of groups that might exist and what they might accomplish on the site?
The business plan seems like it would need to be on a private and/or heavily moderated section of wiki, more so than the open-source example. I do really like the open-source project use of this, though; basically, it’s an interactive prose design document.
I don’t feel I have the time or skill to donate to this project at the moment, but I’ll be curious to see where it goes.
It’s good to have positive responses!
Recommendations: I have a feeling that this will turn out to be relatively trivial—as I see it, it is essentially a parallel problem to the one that google solved, but with a data set many orders of magnitude smaller. The system surveys the relationships between propositions that have been supplied by users (I don’t think it need/should infer connections for itself), and determines a relevance score.
Moderators: I am sure you are right, and that this could easily be a fraught area. Ideally, the system would be flexible enough to allow for groups to self-identify and self-manage in a variety of ways—unlike wikipedia, where a single ecosystem is the be-all and end-all, there is space here for a wide range of ecosystems—groups would certainly rise and fall, fail, feud, coalesce; but no propositions will disappear when a group associated with it collapses—the propositions remain for other users to find and work with. The system should be set up as an evolutionary playground, with mechanisms that are rigged to marginally favour groups that coalesce more, flame less.some sort of ranking system would allow neglected propositions/networks to fall to the bottom.
Groups: I believe that as humans are a social species, human communities are essential structures and the necessary (but not sufficient) locus for creative responses to problems (even if the responses are associated with individuals, those individuals will generally be more effective within a supportive community). However, the communities of the past generally used restrictive and non-rational codes as social glue (variously, religion/tribal culture/geographic isolation/economic dependence/political domination etc) People who wish to use their consciousness to improve their lives have often had a hard time in relation to these codes, and at an accelerating pace in the last century, have abandoned traditional communities—leaving these dominated by the happily or cynically non-rational. Secular cities with weak communities, fundamentalist rural areas with strong but misguided communities. I am interested in developing tools and mechanisms which can allow people to form communities on the basis of conscious assent. I am enough of a darwinist not to want to attempt to say what I think those communities should aspire to.
I would use such a tool to attempt to set out my own web of beliefs and interests, in the hope of connecting with like minded individuals. My hope is, that with a large subset of the ‘ground rules’ clearly communicated and the relationships between them identified, that highly effective development of new/difficult/ill defined areas could be worked on. I would also use such a platform to make proposals like the one we are discussing here. I would expect certain groups to turn up quickly; cults; obsessives and the like—but I fondly hope that these will either remain tiny or will disintegrate or, most likely, find that the structural characteristics of the tool tends to expose inconsistencies in their thinking, and leave of their own accord. I would expect that political groups might follow the same trajectory, albeit more slowly and with less fireworks. I would hope that purposeful individuals with positive and constructive intentions will find it a more congenial arena that wider forums or more narrow blogs.
A concrete example: as a founder of a small school, I attempted to establish the principal policies of the school as a network of ‘patterns’, ranging from fundamentals (Support the developing child; Learning is part of living; Self-governance; Family involvement is fundamental; Ethical consciousness and action) to intermediates (Relationship with the state) to specifics ( In the absence of a tool like the one proposed, collaboration with other people involved was impractical, and we retreated to the standard solution of sets of prose policies, which no-one ever reads, and which are inaccessible and becoming less relevant to actual practice with every passing week.
As to what groups might accomplish, I can say this very succinctly; they might well succeed in expanding the range of metaphysics available to humanity. By which I mean, expanding the number of ways in which we can usefully communicate about phenomena. As this seems to me to be the only reliable yardstick by which to measure ‘progress’, I modestly suggest that this might be a Good Thing.
Business Plans: given some sort of ‘freemium’ model, than yes, users/groups wanting privacy / security would be able to pay for various levels of same, or presumably for implementation of stand-alone installations on their own servers. Open-source software offers successful models for this (Drupal is one example).
“basically, it’s an interactive prose design document”—I hope not. The structured and templated nature of the Pattern Language approach has a higher order than prose, and should increase both the information content and the utility of the resulting collection of propositions. The book ‘A Pattern Language’ , which was published in 1977, and conceived years previously, works exactly like a hypertext document, with directed but essentially free-form navigation the implied mode of use. The requirement that all content is directed towards the resolution of the particular problem/proposition at hand is rather powerful in practice, and the requirement that each proposition should be assigned larger scale propositions which it helps to refine, and needs smaller scale propositions to flesh it out in turn imposes a need for clarity of thought about the outcome of the system as a whole.
Engagement with the project: at this stage, comment and discussion is what is needed.
Sorry, I can see how that didn’t mean the same thing outside my head as in it. I didn’t mean prose as opposed to hypertext, but prose as opposed to flowcharts. I was reading recently about the way grown-ups write design docs, and immediately made a face and went back to my habit of putting prioritized feature lists in text files.