Fwd: Re: Douglas C. Engelbart's Call to Action at Google Video
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Matthias Mueller-Prove
Sep 7, 2007, 3:43:16 PM9/7/07
to med...@googlegroups.com
>Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 09:30:42 -0400
>From: "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com>
>To: ba-unr...@bootstrap.org
>Subject: Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Douglas C. Engelbart's Call to Action at Google
> Video
>Sender: owner-ba-...@bootstrap.org
>Reply-To: ba-unr...@bootstrap.org
>
>Mei Lin-
>
>I enjoyed this video as a great summary of Doug's vision. Thanks for sharing
>it.
>
>This is the first post to either ba-unrev-talk or ba-ohs-talk I have
>received in a long time; I had not thought these lists still active.
>
>Here are some comments on seeing the video and perusing my copy of the
>mailing lists. Wow, we had some fun discussions. I forget how wonderful and
>inspiring many of the email conversations were.
>
>The biggest thing I got out of participating in these mailing lists was a
>sense of how much was going on in the world in the field of knowledge
>management and related tools and paradigms. And the thing one can see from
>the video is how much there is yet to do in terms of the paradigm shift Doug
>talks about moving from what might be termed a page centered view to a more
>finely grained view of information including with multiple views of the same
>data, perhaps determined in some linking fashion.
>
>If there is one disappointment about these lists given the Bootstrap idea it
>is that we as a group did not make a transition form a mailing list to using
>OHS-type tools to expand these discussions into more structured forms
>(IBIS-like) -- including from my point of view for licensing reasons.
>Although Rod Welch at Welcho had one approach to that (though not a free one
>at the time, sadly, either in terms of code or content). And there is now
>OpenAugment in Squeak, and several other tools of various sorts (outliners
>and so on). And there was another effort by a student. As is said in the
>video, structured representation are hard work (echoing IBM's Thomas
>Watson's comments that thinking is hard work, but very important). Still, as
>was said in an old post by someone else, tools can help with building
>structure from unstructured text -- Google's search engine is one such
>approach -- so we are seeing new paradigms emerge beyond human labor to
>build information networks we can use to seek information and wisdom. I know
>these discussions used to be available through the web, but sadly the
>current links do not seem to work except for the original unrev-ii stuff; I
>hope someday they are back online so they can be part of search engine results.
>
>A lot has happened over the last few years since the bulk of the
>conversations of this list wound down. Google has become a household world,
>and it and other search engines have become things many people use many
>times a day. Wikipedia has gone from nothing to a useful source of
>information on just about anything. A worldwide network of blogs comment on
>everything under the sun as well as each other (so, the blog entry became a
>form of cross-referenced document). SourceForge (and other sites) have
>become repositories for hundreds of thousands of free and open source
>software projects worked on by millions of developers; the GNU Public
>License GPL and other free and open source software licenses have become
>constitutions of collaboration for these subgroups. And email archives put
>on the web via mailman, Yahoo groups, Google groups (after Google bought
>dejanews and so has all of Usenet too), and so on have continued to expand,
>and coupled with individuals growing personal email archives add up to a
>huge set of on-line information about a variety of topics. Java and the JVM
>has finally gone truly free, and most of the worst bugs are finally out of
>it, making it finally a good cross-platform choice for tools, especially if
>you program it with, say, Jython. GNU/Linux has gone from obscurity to a
>market force, and is now about to be in the hands of hundreds of millions of
>children worldwide in the guise of the One Laptop Per Child project.
>
>That last was something I hopefully predicted here on one of the Bootstrap
>lists back in 2000: :-)
> "The DKR hardware I'd like to make..."
> http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0754.html
>"And remember that in five years this entire thing will cost US$100 each.
>Consider a couple of these souped up devices given to each village in
>Africa. Anyone with $1 billion for true development aid to 500,000
>African villages? (This is just the cost of one unfinished dam or one
>shut down nuclear plant.)"
>So, score one point for this list predicting the future (or encouraging it. :-)
>
>To an extent, with its user interface guidelines talking about activities
>and a common journal and a free exchange of applications,
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines
>the OLPC represents yet another step towards realizing the vision Doug outlines.
>
>But in every case, there still remains much to do to continue improving
>things. But that is what a (Meta) Network Improvement Community is all
>about. :-)
>
>These themes from the video still have great resonance:
>* Easy to use versus a great investment to learn.
>* Barriers to paradigm shifts: moving from flipping pages to flying around
>data trees.
>* How far we have come, but how much there is yet to do.
>
>Like Alan Kay and others with the seed of Smalltalk in the 1960s, or AI
>pioneers with various search and knowledge storage ideas which they did not
>have the hardware to try in the 1960s (Google is a practical example now),
>or others, Doug's ideas from the 1950s and 1960s have informed us for
>decades, even if the early paradigm-changing implementations were eclipsed
>by more expedient systems tied up in older paradigms. But with computers
>getting more powerful, we can expect even more possibilities to open up to
>realize the vision Doug outlines -- as well as to motivate it. The 1980s
>Apple II desktop was 1Mhz with 4K RAM, The Apple MacPro desktop of today is
>eight cores at 3Ghz with 4GB RAM, the $4000 equivalent Apple of 2030 desktop
>will likely (extrapolating from Moore's law like I did to predict the OLPC
>specs) have the equivalent of millions of cores each at 3GHz or faster
>speeds and enough RAM to hold the entire surface internet of today --
>4000TB. Or, using its 300,000 TB of long term storage (disk?) space you
>could just perhaps store the interesting bits of life video for perhaps a
>hundred thousand people or so -- and storing all of human music currently on
>CD would be trivial and not even noticeably strain such a computer's
>capacity (but there might be little point, as the system could possibly be
>able to just improvise music to suit your mood if you asked it. :-) And of
>course it would come with a *3D* printer. So, things will continue to change
>a lot -- and likely ever faster. Related links:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
> http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
> http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
> http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
>
>For me, a big thing I think about now is Manuel de Landa's notion of a need
>for a balance between meshwork and hierarchy.
> http://t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
>"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains
>and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly
>turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and
>hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory
>alone but demand concrete experimentation. ... After all, meshworks grow by
>drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The
>goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire
>to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization
>and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be
>wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different
>hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call
>for."
>
>It's not clear to me the big problems in the world which are front page
>(starvation, war, pollution, oil getting more expensive, economic
>perturbations) are due mainly to complexity. I think they have more to do
>with a balance of power in terms of meshwork and hierarchy which has gone
>too far in some directions. Still, tools to help manage complexity may well
>help in finding a way to a good balance of power which will help humanity
>and the rest of the biosphere and now noosphere survive and prosper. But
>ultimately:
>* There is skill -- or knowing how to do something, and
>* there is wisdom -- or knowing what is worth doing, and
>* there is virtue -- or actually doing what is worth doing.
>Intelligence of one form or another is just a skill, like being good at
>soccer or being a good listener. You really need all three (skill, wisdom,
>virtue) to some degree to have a chance at a good life. Well, all those and
>also time. :-)
>
>So any dynamic knowledge repository systems we create will still be limited
>by our collective wisdom and virtue in the rest of the Networked Improvement
>community (or culture). Will a NIC help with developing wisdom and virtue?
>I'm sure we will see. One can hope.
>
>Doug's "Unfinished Revolution" may still be unfinished -- but that's the
>nature of all great works that evolve, especially ones that involve groups
>instead of solitary individuals. We can just look back and see how far we
>have come -- and it has been very far.
>
>Thanks Doug (and Mei Lin and many others) for all your past and present and
>continuing good works in positive directions.
>
>--Paul Fernhout
>
>From: "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com>
>To: ba-unr...@bootstrap.org
>Subject: Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Douglas C. Engelbart's Call to Action at Google
> Video
>Sender: owner-ba-...@bootstrap.org
>Reply-To: ba-unr...@bootstrap.org
>
>Mei Lin-
>
>I enjoyed this video as a great summary of Doug's vision. Thanks for sharing
>it.
>
>This is the first post to either ba-unrev-talk or ba-ohs-talk I have
>received in a long time; I had not thought these lists still active.
>
>Here are some comments on seeing the video and perusing my copy of the
>mailing lists. Wow, we had some fun discussions. I forget how wonderful and
>inspiring many of the email conversations were.
>
>The biggest thing I got out of participating in these mailing lists was a
>sense of how much was going on in the world in the field of knowledge
>management and related tools and paradigms. And the thing one can see from
>the video is how much there is yet to do in terms of the paradigm shift Doug
>talks about moving from what might be termed a page centered view to a more
>finely grained view of information including with multiple views of the same
>data, perhaps determined in some linking fashion.
>
>If there is one disappointment about these lists given the Bootstrap idea it
>is that we as a group did not make a transition form a mailing list to using
>OHS-type tools to expand these discussions into more structured forms
>(IBIS-like) -- including from my point of view for licensing reasons.
>Although Rod Welch at Welcho had one approach to that (though not a free one
>at the time, sadly, either in terms of code or content). And there is now
>OpenAugment in Squeak, and several other tools of various sorts (outliners
>and so on). And there was another effort by a student. As is said in the
>video, structured representation are hard work (echoing IBM's Thomas
>Watson's comments that thinking is hard work, but very important). Still, as
>was said in an old post by someone else, tools can help with building
>structure from unstructured text -- Google's search engine is one such
>approach -- so we are seeing new paradigms emerge beyond human labor to
>build information networks we can use to seek information and wisdom. I know
>these discussions used to be available through the web, but sadly the
>current links do not seem to work except for the original unrev-ii stuff; I
>hope someday they are back online so they can be part of search engine results.
>
>A lot has happened over the last few years since the bulk of the
>conversations of this list wound down. Google has become a household world,
>and it and other search engines have become things many people use many
>times a day. Wikipedia has gone from nothing to a useful source of
>information on just about anything. A worldwide network of blogs comment on
>everything under the sun as well as each other (so, the blog entry became a
>form of cross-referenced document). SourceForge (and other sites) have
>become repositories for hundreds of thousands of free and open source
>software projects worked on by millions of developers; the GNU Public
>License GPL and other free and open source software licenses have become
>constitutions of collaboration for these subgroups. And email archives put
>on the web via mailman, Yahoo groups, Google groups (after Google bought
>dejanews and so has all of Usenet too), and so on have continued to expand,
>and coupled with individuals growing personal email archives add up to a
>huge set of on-line information about a variety of topics. Java and the JVM
>has finally gone truly free, and most of the worst bugs are finally out of
>it, making it finally a good cross-platform choice for tools, especially if
>you program it with, say, Jython. GNU/Linux has gone from obscurity to a
>market force, and is now about to be in the hands of hundreds of millions of
>children worldwide in the guise of the One Laptop Per Child project.
>
>That last was something I hopefully predicted here on one of the Bootstrap
>lists back in 2000: :-)
> "The DKR hardware I'd like to make..."
> http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0754.html
>"And remember that in five years this entire thing will cost US$100 each.
>Consider a couple of these souped up devices given to each village in
>Africa. Anyone with $1 billion for true development aid to 500,000
>African villages? (This is just the cost of one unfinished dam or one
>shut down nuclear plant.)"
>So, score one point for this list predicting the future (or encouraging it. :-)
>
>To an extent, with its user interface guidelines talking about activities
>and a common journal and a free exchange of applications,
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines
>the OLPC represents yet another step towards realizing the vision Doug outlines.
>
>But in every case, there still remains much to do to continue improving
>things. But that is what a (Meta) Network Improvement Community is all
>about. :-)
>
>These themes from the video still have great resonance:
>* Easy to use versus a great investment to learn.
>* Barriers to paradigm shifts: moving from flipping pages to flying around
>data trees.
>* How far we have come, but how much there is yet to do.
>
>Like Alan Kay and others with the seed of Smalltalk in the 1960s, or AI
>pioneers with various search and knowledge storage ideas which they did not
>have the hardware to try in the 1960s (Google is a practical example now),
>or others, Doug's ideas from the 1950s and 1960s have informed us for
>decades, even if the early paradigm-changing implementations were eclipsed
>by more expedient systems tied up in older paradigms. But with computers
>getting more powerful, we can expect even more possibilities to open up to
>realize the vision Doug outlines -- as well as to motivate it. The 1980s
>Apple II desktop was 1Mhz with 4K RAM, The Apple MacPro desktop of today is
>eight cores at 3Ghz with 4GB RAM, the $4000 equivalent Apple of 2030 desktop
>will likely (extrapolating from Moore's law like I did to predict the OLPC
>specs) have the equivalent of millions of cores each at 3GHz or faster
>speeds and enough RAM to hold the entire surface internet of today --
>4000TB. Or, using its 300,000 TB of long term storage (disk?) space you
>could just perhaps store the interesting bits of life video for perhaps a
>hundred thousand people or so -- and storing all of human music currently on
>CD would be trivial and not even noticeably strain such a computer's
>capacity (but there might be little point, as the system could possibly be
>able to just improvise music to suit your mood if you asked it. :-) And of
>course it would come with a *3D* printer. So, things will continue to change
>a lot -- and likely ever faster. Related links:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
> http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
> http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
> http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
>
>For me, a big thing I think about now is Manuel de Landa's notion of a need
>for a balance between meshwork and hierarchy.
> http://t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
>"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains
>and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly
>turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and
>hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory
>alone but demand concrete experimentation. ... After all, meshworks grow by
>drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The
>goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire
>to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization
>and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be
>wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different
>hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call
>for."
>
>It's not clear to me the big problems in the world which are front page
>(starvation, war, pollution, oil getting more expensive, economic
>perturbations) are due mainly to complexity. I think they have more to do
>with a balance of power in terms of meshwork and hierarchy which has gone
>too far in some directions. Still, tools to help manage complexity may well
>help in finding a way to a good balance of power which will help humanity
>and the rest of the biosphere and now noosphere survive and prosper. But
>ultimately:
>* There is skill -- or knowing how to do something, and
>* there is wisdom -- or knowing what is worth doing, and
>* there is virtue -- or actually doing what is worth doing.
>Intelligence of one form or another is just a skill, like being good at
>soccer or being a good listener. You really need all three (skill, wisdom,
>virtue) to some degree to have a chance at a good life. Well, all those and
>also time. :-)
>
>So any dynamic knowledge repository systems we create will still be limited
>by our collective wisdom and virtue in the rest of the Networked Improvement
>community (or culture). Will a NIC help with developing wisdom and virtue?
>I'm sure we will see. One can hope.
>
>Doug's "Unfinished Revolution" may still be unfinished -- but that's the
>nature of all great works that evolve, especially ones that involve groups
>instead of solitary individuals. We can just look back and see how far we
>have come -- and it has been very far.
>
>Thanks Doug (and Mei Lin and many others) for all your past and present and
>continuing good works in positive directions.
>
>--Paul Fernhout
>
--
User Experience and Interaction Design :: http://www.mprove.de
Matthias Mueller-Prove
Sep 7, 2007, 3:43:49 PM9/7/07
to med...@googlegroups.com
>From: stephen white <spw...@chariot.net.au>
>Subject: Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Douglas C. Engelbart's Call to Action at Google Video
>Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2007 00:52:15 +0930
>To: ba-unr...@bootstrap.org
>Sender: owner-ba-...@bootstrap.org
>Reply-To: ba-unr...@bootstrap.org
>
>On 30/08/2007, at 11:00 PM, Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
>>--Paul Fernhout
>
>Wow. That response was so comprehensive and such a good summary of the progress in the last couple of years that it seems a shame that it is a posting on a mailing list that is fading away. Even putting it up onto a blog doesn't avoid the effect of being one posting out of millions, difficult to find even in its own forum.
>
>Yes, I agree that it is a shame that this forum did not move to tools for collaboration, however I say this knowing that I would have been the last person to move across to such a construct. Any requirements like installing plug-ins would be more obstacles, excuses that would delay the process. It's someone else's idea, I have no buy-in to even care in the first place.
>
>Like many great ideas, the detail that prevents it from ever happening can be simply summarised: It's a great idea if everyone's using it, and I'll use it when everyone is using it. When I read about what Douglas Englebart wanted, and think about why his great revolution failed to happen, it is because he has his idea of what he wants and that's the way he wants it.
>
>I think that what is happening now is so far short of what it could be, but I'm also unable to think of something that would get somebody like me to care. There are so many possible solutions, and Douglas Englebart had one of the better ones, but I also think that there is an engineering benefit in the way that so many people have mass indifference to innovative new ideas.
>
>If a new idea is adopted as an important foundation for society, then an essentially random set of pros and cons are also unavoidably embraced. It is like pulling the trigger on something unknown, and it takes a real problem with the old situation before a jump like that becomes the best option. That's why most large changes in history are gradual, offering extra options on the existing options, until the uptake is large enough that the old options can be phased out.
>
>For me to say that is all very nice for me, but you probably don't care... if I wasn't the one that had these ideas, I wouldn't care about these ideas either. I sometimes think that people with ideas need a website to connect them with people who are willing to expend effort into making the ideas happen. This happens with companies and investments, but the ideas get lost in such a brutal mash-up.
>
>Once we crack the problem of getting individuals working closely in a group, I think we'll form group consciousness. I have some very good ideas as to how this will happen, and a way of doing it too. So I'm like Douglas Englebart in a way, but with even less resources towards making it happen.
>
>Yet I don't care about what Douglas wants, because I have my idea of what I want, and that's the way I want it.
>
>Steve.
>
>--
> spw...@chariot.net.au
>Subject: Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Douglas C. Engelbart's Call to Action at Google Video
>To: ba-unr...@bootstrap.org
>Sender: owner-ba-...@bootstrap.org
>Reply-To: ba-unr...@bootstrap.org
>
>On 30/08/2007, at 11:00 PM, Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
>>--Paul Fernhout
>
>Wow. That response was so comprehensive and such a good summary of the progress in the last couple of years that it seems a shame that it is a posting on a mailing list that is fading away. Even putting it up onto a blog doesn't avoid the effect of being one posting out of millions, difficult to find even in its own forum.
>
>Yes, I agree that it is a shame that this forum did not move to tools for collaboration, however I say this knowing that I would have been the last person to move across to such a construct. Any requirements like installing plug-ins would be more obstacles, excuses that would delay the process. It's someone else's idea, I have no buy-in to even care in the first place.
>
>Like many great ideas, the detail that prevents it from ever happening can be simply summarised: It's a great idea if everyone's using it, and I'll use it when everyone is using it. When I read about what Douglas Englebart wanted, and think about why his great revolution failed to happen, it is because he has his idea of what he wants and that's the way he wants it.
>
>I think that what is happening now is so far short of what it could be, but I'm also unable to think of something that would get somebody like me to care. There are so many possible solutions, and Douglas Englebart had one of the better ones, but I also think that there is an engineering benefit in the way that so many people have mass indifference to innovative new ideas.
>
>If a new idea is adopted as an important foundation for society, then an essentially random set of pros and cons are also unavoidably embraced. It is like pulling the trigger on something unknown, and it takes a real problem with the old situation before a jump like that becomes the best option. That's why most large changes in history are gradual, offering extra options on the existing options, until the uptake is large enough that the old options can be phased out.
>
>For me to say that is all very nice for me, but you probably don't care... if I wasn't the one that had these ideas, I wouldn't care about these ideas either. I sometimes think that people with ideas need a website to connect them with people who are willing to expend effort into making the ideas happen. This happens with companies and investments, but the ideas get lost in such a brutal mash-up.
>
>Once we crack the problem of getting individuals working closely in a group, I think we'll form group consciousness. I have some very good ideas as to how this will happen, and a way of doing it too. So I'm like Douglas Englebart in a way, but with even less resources towards making it happen.
>
>Yet I don't care about what Douglas wants, because I have my idea of what I want, and that's the way I want it.
>
>Steve.
>
>--
> spw...@chariot.net.au
Matthias Mueller-Prove
Sep 7, 2007, 3:44:20 PM9/7/07
to med...@googlegroups.com
>From: Richard Karpinski <di...@cfcl.com>
>Subject: Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Douglas C. Engelbart's Call to Action at Google Video
>Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2007 19:57:52 -0700>My suggestion is to create a wiki, with account and login required to limit spam.
>
>We probably will need some champions to make the wiki really work well. If we could develop a community like Wikipedia, but with somewhat different constraints on point of view and encyclopedic flavor rather than its reliance on published and peer reviewed sources, it could be wonderful.
>
>There is a five minute video at http://www.truthmapping.com/about.php which discusses the problems with time-organized discussion such as mailing lists and traditional message forums. Wikipedia doesn't have that problem.
>
>Another issue is that here we probably want to represent multiple viewpoints at the highest levels. My inclination is to adopt an IBIS (Issue Based Information System) style now known as Dialogue Mapping. There is a book by that title by Jeff Conklin who was involved deeply with gIBIS, QuestMap, and now Compendium from http://compendiuminstitute.com/ . This approach does not actually need any specific support since it is just a style of organizing information in Questions, Answers, Pros, and Cons. The key point is that while questions can apply to anything, answers must each be linked to a specific question and arguments pro and con must be linked to a specific answer. Footnotes and links to other sites and documents can go anywhere.
>
>When one has this structure, it is easy to find the part of the discussion that concerns you at the moment. It also makes it quite obvious that there is always room for another question, answer, or argument. In particular, my belief is that well framed questions are more important than answers, and their relevance lasts longer.
>
>I think the point is to pursue continual improvement in both understandings and methods. The enlightened business community threatens to embrace Lean Management, Theory of Constraints, and the methods of the Toyota Production System. I say it that way because the specific methods, such as Just-In-Time are easier to adopt (and less effective, long term) than the entire culture of kaizen and the learning organization. The best companies practice science every day, with new ideas coming from all levels of workers and rapid, inexpensive experiments to test them carried out within days if not hours of their invention.
>
>My favorite how-to authors include W. Edwards Deming with the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, Tom Gilb (gilb.com) and "Principles of Software Engineering Management" and the detailed handbook "Competitive Engineering". The first is easier to read, but not as comprehensive. Niels Malotaux at http://malotaux.nl/nrm/English/index.htm has a number of booklets and presentations which provide gentle introductions to Gilb's approach as well as hints for getting started and some experience reports with success stories.
>
>This message is so detailed that it could be among the items mined from the mailing list to serve as seed material for a wiki or other non-time-oriented focussed discussion. Even so, there is a wealth of related material from the Poppendiecks and many others addressing Agile Development, time boxing (one-to-four-week cycles),
>stakeholder identification and enlistment and much much more.
>
>The time to empower ourselves using these philosophies is now.
>
>
>Richard Karpinski, World Class Nitpicker
>148 Sequoia Circle, Santa Rosa, CA 95401
>di...@cfcl.com Home +1 707-546-6760 Cell +1 707-228-9716
>http://cfcl.com/twiki/bin/view/Karpinski
>
>ps Put (or leave) "nitpicker" in the subject line to get past my spam filters.
>Subject: Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Douglas C. Engelbart's Call to Action at Google Video
>
>We probably will need some champions to make the wiki really work well. If we could develop a community like Wikipedia, but with somewhat different constraints on point of view and encyclopedic flavor rather than its reliance on published and peer reviewed sources, it could be wonderful.
>
>There is a five minute video at http://www.truthmapping.com/about.php which discusses the problems with time-organized discussion such as mailing lists and traditional message forums. Wikipedia doesn't have that problem.
>
>Another issue is that here we probably want to represent multiple viewpoints at the highest levels. My inclination is to adopt an IBIS (Issue Based Information System) style now known as Dialogue Mapping. There is a book by that title by Jeff Conklin who was involved deeply with gIBIS, QuestMap, and now Compendium from http://compendiuminstitute.com/ . This approach does not actually need any specific support since it is just a style of organizing information in Questions, Answers, Pros, and Cons. The key point is that while questions can apply to anything, answers must each be linked to a specific question and arguments pro and con must be linked to a specific answer. Footnotes and links to other sites and documents can go anywhere.
>
>When one has this structure, it is easy to find the part of the discussion that concerns you at the moment. It also makes it quite obvious that there is always room for another question, answer, or argument. In particular, my belief is that well framed questions are more important than answers, and their relevance lasts longer.
>
>I think the point is to pursue continual improvement in both understandings and methods. The enlightened business community threatens to embrace Lean Management, Theory of Constraints, and the methods of the Toyota Production System. I say it that way because the specific methods, such as Just-In-Time are easier to adopt (and less effective, long term) than the entire culture of kaizen and the learning organization. The best companies practice science every day, with new ideas coming from all levels of workers and rapid, inexpensive experiments to test them carried out within days if not hours of their invention.
>
>My favorite how-to authors include W. Edwards Deming with the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, Tom Gilb (gilb.com) and "Principles of Software Engineering Management" and the detailed handbook "Competitive Engineering". The first is easier to read, but not as comprehensive. Niels Malotaux at http://malotaux.nl/nrm/English/index.htm has a number of booklets and presentations which provide gentle introductions to Gilb's approach as well as hints for getting started and some experience reports with success stories.
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>This message is so detailed that it could be among the items mined from the mailing list to serve as seed material for a wiki or other non-time-oriented focussed discussion. Even so, there is a wealth of related material from the Poppendiecks and many others addressing Agile Development, time boxing (one-to-four-week cycles),
>stakeholder identification and enlistment and much much more.
>
>The time to empower ourselves using these philosophies is now.
>
>
>Richard Karpinski, World Class Nitpicker
>148 Sequoia Circle, Santa Rosa, CA 95401
>di...@cfcl.com Home +1 707-546-6760 Cell +1 707-228-9716
>http://cfcl.com/twiki/bin/view/Karpinski
>
>ps Put (or leave) "nitpicker" in the subject line to get past my spam filters.
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