Fri, Jan 30, 2004
Happy Birthday, Doug!
#
DougEngelbart turns a young 79 today. (W5)
/blueoxen |
Posted at 10:50am
Tue, Jan 27, 2004
Sheldon Chang's SocialWave Blog
#
SheldonChang, a member of our CollaborationCollaboratory, recently
announced a new blog: SocialWeaver:
Building Real Communities Online. Sheldon has a startup called
SocialWave that builds online communities as a way to strengthen
communities within neighborhoods. He's thought quite a bit about
community-building in general and has a lot of interesting things to
say, which is why I'm very glad to see him join the blogosphere. (W1)
In his first post, "A Real
Model for the Virtual Community," Sheldon suggests that people must
feel comfortable to build their online identities in order for an
online community to be successful. This requirement prevents
effective online communities from truly scaling. (W2)
See more....
/collaboration |
Posted at 11:35pm
Mon, Jan 26, 2004
ChiliPLoP 2004 Hot Topic
#
My
proposal for a Hot Topic on patterns of collaboration and
HighPerformanceCommunities at ChiliPLoP 2004 has been accepted. We'll be identifying and
discussing these patterns and creating and refining the language,
building on previous work by BlueOxenAssociates and others. (VD)
PLoP ("Pattern Languages of Programming") is a workshop devoted to
reviewing pattern languages. The HillsideGroup sponsors several of
these workshops throughout the year. Although the original mission
focused on patterns for software engineering, the scope has expanded
to cover practically everything, technical and not. As far as I'm
concerned, these folks are the experts on writing good
PatternLanguages, regardless of topic. (VE)
I'm looking for people who'd like to participate in the workshop. You
do not have to be a member of the HillsideGroup to attend, although
you will have to register for ChiliPLoP ($600 before March 1, or $500
for commuter participant). If you're interested in improving
collaboration or learning more about PatternLanguages, I highly
encourage you to attend. ChiliPLoP 2004 will be held April 13-16 in
Carefree, Arizona. Drop me an email if you're interested in
participating or if you have further questions. (VF)
/blueoxen |
Posted at 10:40am
Fri, Jan 23, 2004
Tools As Place
#
When we first launched the BlueOxen CollaborationCollaboratory, a few
people expressed some confusion about the tools. Specifically, one
person said, "I'm not sure whether I should post ideas to the mailing
list or the Wiki." (UG)
Someone I'm working with recently asked a similar question. Our
project has a group blog and a Wiki, and this person expressed
confusion over where to post a story. (UH)
See more....
/collaboration/tools |
Posted at 6:51pm
Huberman on Communities of Practices and Forecasting
#
BernardoHuberman, the director of the
Information Dynamics Lab at
Hewlett-Packard, gave a talk at Stanford on January 8 entitled, "Information Dynamics in the
Networked World." Huberman covered two somewhat disparate topics:
Automatically discovering CommunitiesOfPractice? by analyzing email
SocialNetworks, and a general forecasting technique based on markets. (TX)
See more....
/talks |
Posted at 6:04pm
Tue, Jan 06, 2004
"Low-Focus Thought" in Knowledge Management Systems
#
DavidGelertner? wrote an essay called "The Logic of Dreams" (a chapter
in Denning and Metcalfe's Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years
of Computing), where he discussed the creative process. Gelertner
suggested that there are two kinds of thought: high-focus (analytical,
logical) and low-focus (free association). The former we understand
well (according to the Gelertner); the latter we barely comprehend. (TI)
Low-focus thought is the story of weak ties, not just in the context
of SocialNetworks but of ideas in general. It's a story that is told
over and over again. A poet smells a rose, and is reminded of his
lover. FriedrichKekule dreams about a snake biting its tail, wakes
up, and solves the structure of benzene. GraceHopper?
remembers an old play
from her college basketball days and figures out a memory-efficient
algorithm for her A-0 compiler. (TJ)
Gelertner was interested in implementing low-focus thought in
ArtificialIntelligence? software. I'm interested in facilitating
low-focus thought via KnowledgeManagement systems. (TK)
See more....
/collaboration |
Posted at 10:58pm
Blog Backlinks Enabled on PurpleWiki
#
If you view the BackLinks on any of my
Wiki pages, it will now display
BackLinks from both the Wiki and also this blog. For example, if you
view the backlinks to "DougEngelbart", you will see a list of all of my Wiki
pages and blog entries that mention Doug. (SG)
The beautiful thing about this feature is that it maintains context
for all of the different concepts described on my Wiki. I list
several Patterns on my Wiki, with some level of detail on each
page. But when you look at the BackLinks to those Patterns, you
see a list of all the stories where the Patterns are mentioned. I
tell the stories as I have before, and the tool explicitly ties the
concept to the stories that describe the context. That's
augmentation! As ChrisDent
said, it "makes the universe bigger." (SH)
My essay, WikisAsTopicMaps, describes this phenomenon in further (and
slightly more technical) detail. (SI)
See more....
/tech/purple |
Posted at 9:03pm
Fri, Jan 02, 2004
Battling Group Think
#
GeoffCohen
asked: (PM)
As we build different kinds of groupware/social software, what's the role of consensus, and how powerful is it? Does software make reaching consensus easier or harder? For purely message-driven systems like email lists or USENET, consensus is much harder to reach than it would be in a real-life meeting. But once consensus is reached, breaking that consensus often brings down the flames of wrath. All of this is somehow invisibly coded in the interstices of the software architecture and human nature. (PN)
... (PO)
Could we architect social software that fought groupthink? Or does it just make the gravitational attraction of consensus, even flawed consensus, ever so much more irresistable? (PP)
See more....
/collaboration |
Posted at 3:43pm
