feedback to Open Co-op project

I wrote the piece below as part of an ongoing discussion with Professor Gary Alexander from the Open University on a sustainable community and economy project that he and various others are planning. The quotes from previous emails are both mine (">") and his (">>").

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In order to create a network with organic connectivity I feel you need an organically-integrated information architecture and user experience. It's like with the metaphor of the human organism in that piece you linked to on the Viable Systems model: the autonomous elements of the organism, as well as existing in particular and hierachical relationship to one another, are made from the same "fabric", which arises from a shared DNA structure. The organism is wholistic.

> [a network that] allows tracking of organic connections to others within network

>> Nice concept, but how? Do you have an algorithm in mind?

So to achieve that, you need to be able to track all the interactions within the system—links, comments, collaboration, whatever—and then integrate the search function with the resultant database of relationships (whilst at the same time allowing users to withhold the personal information of their choice for data privacy), and make the whole accessible through an intuitive and consistent UI. Just as Google can track the hyperlinks between web sites thanks to the consistency of the http protocol, the information architecture of a semi-closed network must be integrated at the deepest level for it to function organically. Tikiwiki evidently has many merits but it doesn't embody such an integrated information architecture and UI (such a product hasn't yet been made—but I believe I've designed it!). What is being proposed on your wiki is a patchwork of ingenious technological solutions, which I'm sure will in itself be a valuable resource. But, from my point of view, the network itself must constitute an integrated, consistent whole if you wish to facilitate the emergence of multidimensional community with nested autonomies, emergent decision making and flexible search and permissions "scoping" for the human beings who utilise that technology as a community-building tool.

> [a network] fosters emergent and focused decision making process

>> Very important. We have some ideas but would like more.

So if you have a network that allows the tracking of the organic connections within it, and if each community member had their own space within which to express themselves, the community's space could track (via RSS feeds) what each member writes on the topic under debate. At the same time, compelling ideas would get linked to by other community members and hence percolate to the top of a search on that topic within that community (remember that the search can be "scoped" according to any meta-data criteria—including social group). Community members are motivated to participate in creating network content in the knowledge that it will feed back into community processes such as this decision making. For further cross-fertilisation of ideas, the community could look beyond their own boundaries to the popular posts on the same topic across the network, or across the web as a whole (with Google/Technorati). Then you might be at the point where a voting system could resolve any remaining conflicts.

> to what extent is expressing a human being’s identity as a set of numbers useful in a social network context?

>> Sounds like you are saying, 'reducing a human being to a set of numbers' and I don't think that is a good idea. Think of the eBay ratings, where there is a list of verbal comments attached to numbers that give an overall sense of the feeling. So a set of numbers can give a sense to a qualitative set of information attached to it.

The verbal comments certainly would help, I agree. But I feel it's important to remember a big difference between eBay and the Open Co-op is that while with eBay the community of the bulletin boards is a layer on top of the core trading mechanism, which focuses on price and service standards as highly measurable criteria gauged mostly by people with no direct social connection with one another, in the Open Co-op you are mixing the social and the commercial. That is the strength of your vision. But it brings with it a whole new set of challenges (as I'm sure you're only too aware!), in that people's undeclared social affiliations, personality issues and political agendas will surely impact on the transparency of a rating system that is abstracted from the actual, traceable interactions within the online network. Perhaps a combination of organic and declarative (ratings) systems could work, so you could check out the organic connections between a rater and a rated person?