Mexico!

Well, here I am in smoggy Mexico City, the start of a two week holiday with Charla which will see us jetting over to the Yucatan Peninsular on Thursday. But smog aside (and it´s truly choking, with traffic on the multi-lane highways at a constant near-standstill) it is quite an experience, not least the food, which all comes with chillies in and lime on the side. The people have also been very friendly and helpful, and Charla´s friend Peter has proved an excellent guide. Lots of photos to post on our return...

feedback to Open Co-op project (part 2)

Here's some more from my discussion with Gary Alexander. The main text is my own. His words are marked by ">>", my words from my previous mail by ">>>>".

>> I also would like to see software which is created from its core to suit the kind of social networks we are envisioning, and I think that might happen at some stage.

I feel my core contribution to any project will be to muse on how the information architecture and user experience of the online product can embody the functionalities and characteristics required by the project in the most simple, transparent and integrated way possible, and similarly to look at online/offline integration from the same point of view. So if we can dialogue around that in a "blue skies" way, perhaps we might get a sense of if and when an original software development project might make sense. An open or shared-source project would allow the development of common core functionalities (content and social network management system, UI etc.) with branching into our's and others' projects' requirements.

>> To give us a quick start we are using tikiwiki because a)out of the box it can give us a lot of the immediate functionality we want so we can start without waiting for a major development project, b)the developer community behind tikiwiki is solidly with us (or we are solidly with them?) so the tools we want to see soonest - trading and governance, are what they are working on now.

It's funny, it's like you're saying "we haven't got time to wait for an ideal online platform" and I'm saying "we haven't got time not to maximise the effectiveness of the online dimension at the outset"! : )) I do totally understand where you're coming from in wishing to manifest your vision and having faith that the human beings of the network, in all their amazing creativity, will find ways to make the system work—go for it!

But then at the same time: "as above, so below". My vision of the online and offline dimensions of i-together is a mutually transformative, symbiotic relationship. The online platform provides virtual "blueprints" for offline community dynamics: complete creative and relational freedom within a perfect respect for boundaries; transparent and organic evolution of community; flexible expression of identity along a scale of individual to collective. The offline roots the online in real situations and real people's relationships and experience, which in turn feed back into the evolution of the online network.

>> Also, they say that tikiwiki, in its ramshackle structure, is very easy for open source developers to work on a little bit at a time. A more integrated structure would create an intellectual barrier that would put off casual helpers. (i.e. learning an extensive set of object classes)

Isn't that a bit like saying Kingdom Brunel should have built his bridges from driftwood and string and with a general intention that they span to the other side of the rivers they were to cross rather than with iron girders and a proper blueprint, in order to encourage volunteers to help out? ; ) A different age, for sure, but isn't strong leadership (albeit emerging from chaotic, impassioned and distributed debate) and clear focus a hugely important part of the challenge we are setting ourselves?

My hunch is that, ironically, the very potential power of a deeply integrated online/offline combination such as you are proposing could massively amplify any distortions or lack of integration in the infrastructure of either dimension, like a feedback loop, causing chaos and friction. Who knows? Maybe that's a valid part of the process of evolution. But I don't think all the changes in our world have to play out chaotically—it all depends how clear and centred we can be in it all.

>> It may be that when we are up and running, and have some of the social structures and protocols worked out not just in theory but tested by practice, we (i.e. the whole network) will commission a totally new, from the ground up, software system. Or maybe we will be so entrenched in our make-do system that we simply carry on using it, much as we humans make do with our backbones evolved mostly for 4 legged creatures and brains in which, for example, the smell system has become the deeper cognitive system!

Interesting comparison! It's a great point about working out the social structures and protocols in practice to inform the online platform's development, and that's why we're growing i-together from the roots up with a blog network for Global Generation.

>>>> 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, ratings, 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.

>> Your statement, again, is very evocative but not knowing the fullness of what you have been thinking, it is not enough for me to work with. Can you give me a few examples of how you imagine this functioning? Two or three imaginary stories illustrating different uses of it? Maybe we can come up with something simple which easily gives some of the power of it.

Ok, let's take the example of our discussion about the Open Proposal. It's a paradoxical example, which supposes our debate is taking place in the context of the system I am evangelising to you. : ) Back to the future.

Firstly, consider the dynamics of our discourse as it is now. Gary and Oli know each other well and have met and conversed in the physical world.

I have emailed you both and spoken to Gary on the phone, but never met either of you. I read about the Project on the wiki (a collaborative space), where each of you has posted content. I then emailed you both (in a single mail) with info about i-together and Global Generation, including hyperlinks to my blog (a personal but socially permeable [through comments] platform) and their website. I didn't post a message directly on the wiki from a tacit sense that the ideas I was presenting were too divergent from the wiki's content, and that the wiki was intended for the group of people with a tangible involvement in the project. The three of us have started to exchange emails (a private medium), and I have now begun to post copies of my mails to you guys on my blog, adding links where appropriate (to your wiki, for example).

Now, how would we have been able to go about the same discussion within i-together (for which read the potential "blueskies" online Open Co-op?) Let's make it more real by using the present tense. : )

I come across your Open proposal by searching the whole of i-together for "sustainable economy". As administrators of your Open Project Discussion Space, you have set "Active Identity" access permissions so that both anyone in the administrators' "Open Project Members" favourites folders (i.e. the Open Project Members!) and any i-together member receiving an outgoing interaction (link, comment, message, rating etc.) from Open Project Members can contribute content; any other visitor may leave comments on content or messages in the mail box (which is just another content repository with Active Identity privileges set to "content viewable by... Open Project Members"). That way, the community boundaries around the Space are porous, but more so to people who are of interest to and trusted by the Project Members, as expressed through their organic interactions.

I leave a message in the mail box, telling you of my ideas, and with a link to my own Space, for which I've set blog-like "Active Identity" boundaries—only I can post, but anyone can comment or leave a message. Interested by my message, you each reply individually, and Oli proposes that we discuss our mutual ideas in a third Space set up for the purpose—a neutral zone if you like—which he duly sets up with permissions for anyone to contribute content. Let's call it the "Blue Skies" Space. We each set up RSS-enabled "Doorways" (a combination of link and feed into a single interactive metaphor, allowing inline previewing of content) within brief posts about the background to the discussion on our respective Spaces, thus encouraging anyone else who interacts with our Spaces to follow us to the new Space and join the debate. We also add Doorways to our personal mail boxes to make sure we know when something new is posted in the Blue Skies Space (Gary and Oli also have personal Spaces within i-together, which mirror content they create in the Open Project Discussion Space by means of bi-directional RSS feeds hooked spliced into content Containers [for which read blog-like dynamically organised spaces]).

As our discussion continues, people begin to flow into the Blue Skies Space from our respective Spaces (including Gary's personal Space, as the post he advertised the Blue Skies Space with on the Open Space is mirrored in his own Space; perhaps Oli, being human, neglected to post about the discussion on his own Space). People interested in stuff related to Open also find the discussion by searching i-together for any Space that is one outward-bound interactive remove from the Open Project Space—that saves them from plowing through all the content with inline links (which have largely replaced the static link lists typical of old-fashioned Blogs and Wikis etc. : ) These people in turn link to the discussion from their own personal and group spaces, and an organic community begins to form around the discussion. As enough people join the discussion, even if only passively as readers and linkers, the more persuasive ideas begin to percolate up the search rankings for a progressively broader swathe of i-together users and bloggers/wiki-users on the wild seas of the web (because we support open standards and granular/permalink URLs, so Google and Technorati can track our network too). Yeeeeha! Beautiful ideas explode across the virtual world and begin to seed projects in the real world, while being informed by already-manifested projects and relationships.

I could go on building the picture, but I have to go out now!

>>>> 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?
>> I'm trying to work out what you mean here. How's this? I see reputation as multi-dimensional. In my talks I suggest 3
>> possible measurable dimensions, based upon ongoing ratings - 'wisdom' - coming from ratings of people's comments in >> public discussions (as in Slashdot), 'service' - as coming from hours freely given to the community on various tasks, and >> 'integrity' - being an eBay rating on their exchanges with other people. Another, unmeasurable dimension would be an >> overall sense of 'trust'. Is that what you mean by 'organic'?

Briefly on this point—here organic means the aspect of relationship rooted in actual interactions within the system rather than declarations of relationship and evaluation ("friend", "a good worker", "a nice person", a description of a service rendered etc.).

curvy tube

See the tube from a bird's eye view as never before. Rather lovely.

OASIS User Interface Markup Language

These people are developing a specification for an abstract meta-language that can provide a canonical XML representation of any user interface (UI).

That could be an important part of the jigsaw that allows us to implement visually and non-visually focused user interfaces for i-together.

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 (">>").

===================

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?

global generation

So here is our first attempt at a Global Generation hub blog. Not much to write home about yet, but the start of great things, we hope!

Bryony

I heard this evening that my friend Bryony Daly had passed on a few days ago. She had a particularly virulent form of cancer which swept through much of her body. And she was only in her mid twenties. I met her just once, at my pupils' concert, which she lit up from the back of the auditorium with her radiant smile. Be in peace, Bryony.

blog busters

This is great—big corporations waking up to the power of informed and networked customers:

"Mighty corporations ignore the whispers on web diaries at their peril. Sean Hargrave reports on how the big brands are logging on to save face"

How to Save the World

I joined the discussion in the comments section of Dave Pollard's review of James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds.

My second comment:

"Dave: I agree that technology does not make community in itself—it's a tool that could be shaped to facilitate community building. So Global Generation, the NGO I'm working with to set up a blog network, is already faciliating groups of kids in Britain, Africa and the Caribbean to work together with each other and the natural world. Trusting and caring is a big part of that process. We hope that the blog network will help the various groups of kids share their experiences, common in terms of environmental and creative focus, diverse in terms of culture and place, to cross fertilise G.G.'s ongoing work—to give the kids themselves a voice in determining our direction.

My vision is the virtual and the physical aspects of community existing in a mutually beneficial dialectic: the online providing models of transparency, clarity of boundaries, emergent leadership and organic connectivity for the offline; the offline rooting the online in real situations with real people in real relationships and communities."

Transparency Begets Trust in the Ever-Expanding Blogosphere

A great piece by J.D. Lasica here on how Transparency Begets Trust in the Ever-Expanding Blogosphere:

"The openness of Weblogs could help explain why many readers find them more credible than traditional media. Can mainstream journalists learn from their cutting-edge cousins?"

Some "Web as platform" noodling (kottke.org)

Jason Kottke writes about his vision of the web as a distributed data storage/processing/filtering/formatting platform, with various apps like TypePad, GMail and iCal providing content that can be aggregated, via RSS perhaps, into one's personal webspace. Sounds like a great potential use of i-together to me: as a layout and relationship manager fed by RSS feeds from other services. So we could develop an initial version that didn't have its own CMS but was coupled with Movable Type or similar via RSS.

identity commons

Wonder if this new "portable identity framework" will take off? A more approachable description of the project is here.

Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower

Ethan Zukerman of Havard Law School has written a fascinating essay on Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower. It would seem to be a real challenge...

Tropisms.org

Tropisms.org is a videoblog with a world map at the heart of its navigation. What a fantastic site! Let's talk to them about i-together...

What Does a Connection Mean in a Social Network?

I weighed into this discussion around a piece by Peter Caputa IV on What Does a Connection Mean in a Social Network?.

My contribution:

"It seems to me that in addition to distinguishing between directionalities, one can further differentiate two broad strata of networked social connectivity:

1) declarative. the explicit permissions that a person gives to others to interact with their online identity (i.e. allow commenting/content sharing/wiki-style content co-creation etc.) and the FOAF-like explicit categorisation of others as 'friends'

2) organic. the actual interactions that person is involved in within the network (i.e. linking or being linked to, commenting, messaging, content sharing, content co-creation, rating etc.)

So (1) is focused on the explicit definition of relationship with others (it construes 'inter-personal' relationships between a separate 'I' and 'you'), whereas (2) arises out of the organic web of interactions between people (the 'trans-personal' aspect of relationships—a fluid interaction of 'I's together). In other words, there's a difference between describing one's relationship with others and the actual, organic nature of the relationship itself. It seems to me that this has implications for FOAF portability between social networks, in that (2) is only coherent within the context of specific networks (whether that's an SNS or the web as a whole) with their unique interactive structures. So is a portable FOAF in effect perhaps an expression of the declarative aspects of relationships between people that can be abstracted from any specific social network context?"

Steps

Here is a provisional list of steps we could take to move towards the fruition of our pilot weblog project:

1) Luke researches best value web hosting accounts with necessary features

2) Luke liases with Blake, Jane, Robin and Sara (et al) to agree on hosting account

3) Luke completes installation of Movable Type software on G.G.'s server and implements G.G. hub blog

4) Peter Ford develops blog project educational and support material for staff and kids

5) We all ongoingly discuss the nature of the pilot project regarding structure and content, integration with offline project(s) etc.

6) Luke and Peter (and others?) produce costings for our educational consultancy work

7) Luke and Jane(?) identify costs for project as a whole (incl. consultancy) and produce funding application(s)

8) Luke helps G.G. staff (those who are so inclined) to get blogging!

9) (e.g.) Odiri works with kids at (e.g.) Pertwood Farm on poetry writing

10) (e.g.) Blake types up poems to put on hub blog along with photos as example of possibilities

11) blogging education work starts in (e.g.) Roots and Shoots youth group (after half-term break of Autumn term?)

Open Source Conservation?

Alex Steffen writes about the way in which environmentalists are adopting open-source strategies for knowledge-sharing and collaboration. Seems pretty relevant to our project, given that we have environmental and software angles.

editing multiple blog templates in one go with MT

This piece on "Moveable Type 3.1 as Coursware" points to a new feature of MT that will be a godsend for our blog network project: the ability to edit the template content of multiple blogs within your MT installation. So, with just a single edit, Global Generation could add a new section for a new project not just to their hub site but also to the spoke sites of the groups and kids they work with. This will save us a lot of time!