Eric.
You are talking here about stuff dear to my heart, but it is so complex
I cannot just immediately respond in a satisfactory way - especially
because I am overloaded and my mind is getting slower while my body is
screaming to get me away from my desk.
I would want to tick off the points you raise in a media/educational
setting, which is something I would want Fleabyte to evolve into, but
which I am not likely to ever see.
Media, typically are close to one-way instruments, from emitter to
receiver. Oh yes, readers may write letters to editors, but it is the
editors who select what and how much of each letter received is printed.
In other words, the readers are under editorial control.
Schools to a little better. Students may ask questions, but even those
questions may be ignored or rephrased.
Eventually I shall have to produce an article outlining how Fleabyte
might move from being a webzine toward a collaborative tool. One
question is: who are doing the collaborating? Another: what is the depth
of that collaboration, the commitment involved. These questions ought be
posed in a well-defined context of which I perceive various stages.
Stage one is getting, evaluating, pruning information. We now have
search engines; we lack evaluation engines. And we haven't got
well-defined means of making individuals with their limited mental
capacity feel comfortable with an extensive body of machine-held
information. To make matters more complex, that body is dynamic with
information continually added, removed, altered in a way that any person
who exhibits this kind of a continually changing mind is considered
fickle, unreliable, undependable, and, hence, even unemployable!
Stage one would involve a moving feast of involved expertise, knowledge
workers with a sense of the future and a sense of how directions in
their field are potentially being deflected by projected developments
elsewhere. (Think of Doug's "frontier outpost" people as discussed
during the colloquium!)
A next stage would involve "spreading the word" to a critical mass of
decision-makers, which "at bottom" is the electorate, but which need
depend on either experts trusted by their elected representatives or
depend on digitally held expertise - a benign auto pilot.
Following that comes planning for action, the problem of alternatives,
levels of certainty, etc., all of which would lead into appropriate
action.
I guess I have gone a little beyond the kind of cooperation people
normally think of when contemplating tools for collaboration. Really, we
are here in the domain of dynamic, coevolutionary collaboration. The
kind of stuff Doug is talking about.
Too bad he has not been getting the needed support.
Too bad, Fleabyte is likely to whither on the vine.
But, by all means, let's keep on dreaming and scheming.
Henry
The production of the
On Mon, 2003-01-06 at 18:10, Eric Armstrong wrote:
I've just published a document at my web site, entitled
Technical Impediments to Persistent Collaboration Tools.
http://www.treelight.com/software/collaboration/Technical_Impediments.html
I would appreciate feedback from you guys.
The document is an attempt to identify the set of necessary
infrastructure features that, by their absence, make it
difficult or impossible to develop usable collaboration tools.
Essentially, it's an "infrastructure wish list", and you folks are
admirably positioned to tell me what's missing from the list.