On 9/8/10 8:52 AM, Andrew Plumb wrote:
 > and separate -discuss or -users lists, to contain the chatter.

You may well be right in practice with email, but none-the-less I think this
once again suggests the need for much better tools for communications than
plain email. If we were using something like a social semantic desktop (or
whatever) to create these open manufacturing systems, people could post
whatever they wanted to a cloud of ideas and semantic tagging done by the
community (including how hardware oriented some post was) would let items
that Adrian was interested bubble up to some semantic-related queue he set
up for himself, essentially as a form of topical moderation (but, where
there was an infinite number of topics). At least, that's the hope. :-)

For example, someone makes a post about ball bearings. That gets tagged
later as "hardware" related. Or even more specifically, as about "bearings".
Someone else posts about how some company or other does not get some aspect
of a purported open source ethic. That post gets tagged as "social" or
"business" or "ethics" or maybe all of those. Adrian sets up a filter so
that only things tagged "hardware" come to his attention (although maybe
once in a while he might look at a broader stream, from which he might
decide to add some new tags).

If someone tags something inappropriately just to get attention, then
somehow that social gaffe is noted (making the users tags less heavily
weighted). Similarly, tags might even be weighted as to that post is mostly
about social but a tiny bit about bearings. Or, perhaps tools would allow a
community (under a granted free license) to just mark sections of an email
with contextual tags. One could even mark items as "posturing". :-) Of
course, then there might be a whole set of etiquette that revolves around
how people label posts and each other... Or other tools to manage that.

One might also have some automated tools that help with all this or do it in
parallel (so much of what Google Search is essentially about). But a key
point is that right now, once an email is sent, you can't change it -- but
all these other processes involve putting metadata on top of things after
they have been sent, so you either need to modify the original or you need
tools that can somehow link later items (emails with moderation
information?) back to the original data.

And at that point, you may want an entirely different system than email, but
you are still stuck with the fact everyone uses email (including to notify
them of new events like a post somewhere). Some email systems like
Thunderbird are extensible and also support RSS feeds, so one could imagine,
to begin with, a Thunderdbird add-on that does some of this for a group --
assuming everyone uses that plugin, since otherwise the group is going to
have a bunch of messages about metadata that a person might find hard to
wade through (although I guess one could have a "metadata" tag).

For an example of someone doing this in an adhoc way, Brian pulled out some
key posts to this list early on:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread...
But his site seems to be down at the moment:
   http://heybryan.org/om.html
At least email is distributed and in that sense more resilient...

One thing I've thought about is just having a system where every email
contains an attached file with structured data (like in the current Pointrel
System format). But, rather than email, it might just make more sense to
post those filed directly to a git repository (see the previous comments on
GitHub). Anyway, I'm still working on those sorts of ideas on and off..
Mostly off for a variety of reasons, though I've been doing some stuff
recently.. :-)
   http://www.twirlip.net/

While I've never posted on that reprap list myself, or really follow it,
still, I don't think you can in a healthy way separate tools from their
context or bigger implications especially in community discussions, because
that is in part what got us in such a mess in the first place. (See also
Langdon Winner or many other writes on technology and society.)

But, as above, I think one can productively talk about how individuals can
relate to that all, especially since it can take a lot of concentration for
a time to accomplish various technical objectives. For example, even within
the context of email, there could be a reprap-dev list where there is a lot
of discussion, and a reprap-dev-gems list that only a few of those posts are
forwarded to, where Adrian is subscribed to that filtered list. That's a lot
like what you said, although maybe with some formal level of filtering in
there. But it really is just kludgy. And many lists just do "moderating" up
front by one person rejecting posts. And it doesn't really reflect the
deeper issue of creating and sustaining a community, or as Doug Englebart or
Clay Shirkey talk about, how tools co-evolve with their communities.
http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

Anyway, I can understand Adrian's frustration, but ultimately, it's a
general issue that needs a general solution. Also, when you essentially bill
your device as "the end of capitalism" (or something like that which used to
be on the reprap.org main page, but seems to be gone now) you're going to
get a lot of diverse chatter. :-)

The long-term social issue has to revolve around some form of appropriate
semantic tagging, IMHO. And I don't see that as a before-the-fact filtering,
as in, "is this post appropriate for this group?", but more an
after-the-fact tagging done by the community, as in, "what aspect of the
community interests do various people think this post contributes towards
now that we see it?". Web forums can do that to some degree, which is why
some people like them (whether slashdot with its moderation system, or other
systems where you can add tags even after the fact to a post). As I note
here, based on what Doram said on the OpenVirgle list:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/browse_thread/thread/09c12e...

Anyway, so, I'd semantically file Adrian's comment as essentially a
design-related bug report on email and mailing lists. :-)

Is all that tagging a lot of work, and so likely to not get done? Well, yes.
I can't find it at the moment, but there is a great rant by someone on why
semantic tagging will never work because people are "lazy". :-) Of course,
ironically, it's also exactly because people are lazy that we do want good
semantic tagging. :-) That's all part of the problem. Although, again,
automated tools can help some with that, essentially generating the tags and
other relationships by keywords or how things are linked to each other. And,
if people know that Adrian is only reading stuff marked "hardware" or
whatever, then people might put some effort into adding that tag, and they
will get a bad reputation in the community as far as tagging goes if their
tagging is over the long term not deemed reliable (although that is yet
another layer for tagging about, or weighting tags).
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
   http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
   http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop

One can just also by fiat (like in a company) say that part of the job
description is adding metadata and semantic tagging, same as one may enforce
coding standards:
   "Semantic Tagging "
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O50GXw11748
Or, one can find people who like to do that sort of thing (historically,
librarians and scholars...)

Also, by tags I don't mean just simple word or phase tags. I'm thinking in
terms of a reified triple-like relationship (RDF-like), where you say, this
item is related to this item (a tag perhaps) by this third item, as in
triple1234 has contents "post123 has-tag hardware" which is ultimately a
much more flexible system, because then you can also say "triple1234
weighting low" or "post123 license CC-BY-SA" or lots of other stuff down the
road, where, essentially, people are communicating by modifying an object
database defined by triples.

I think the problem here, more than anything, is the paradigm gap between
people who see a mailing list as a community (which has its own dynamics)
and people who see a mailing list as a semantic tag (that is, all posts
should appropriately have a specific tag or set of tags that some person
finds acceptable). Something like the above suggestions might be a way to
find some common ground between those two paradigms.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.