What shall we call ourselves? [New Deadline 23:59 PM GMT 10th May]

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by George E. Mobus on May 9, 2008 at 21:12

Jack,

Well I think you hit the nail on the head. Modeling is a necessary tool for anticipatory systems. I've been deeply involved in strategic planning for our campus and have been pushing a sensemaking approach to internal systems analysis. The Director of Institutional Research is familiar with IBIS and is going to be looking into it.

As regards ConsensUs it has been on hold for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is a dirth of students who are long-term committed enough to produce coherent code. We don't have PhD students on this campus and MS students seem to only be here for the paper to get a better job! Since joining this group I have been thinking about a white paper if for no other reason than to get some ideas out on the table. The main issues with ConsensUs was that it attempts to address scalability issues to support really large discourse communities (overlain on a P2P network to achieve cost effectiveness). I thought the topic tree backbone approach would add more structure to the process to support top-down analysis and bottom-up solutions (sort of a divide-and-conquer strategy).

Anyway, if folks here were interested I could put some effort into a white paper to summarize its concept without having to read through that long screed I have now.

BTW: I can't find the poll for this thread. I must be missing something. I need to e-mail David I guess.

George

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Permalink Reply by Jack Park on May 9, 2008 at 21:31

The pole appears on the home page. It's an applet that pops up at the top of the page. I presume that's what you are talking about.

In an earlier life, I built a program I called TSC (short for "The Scholar's Companion"). Before I met Doug Engelbart, I was mostly interested in augmenting personal intellect; after that meeting, I grew to believe collective IQ makes more sense. TSC is a qualitative process reasoner with a genetic programming component (similar to Eurisko) that allows for internal mutations of concepts and relations. A grad student at U.Dayton used it to discover new polymer curing rules, and I used it personally to discover a new behavior that turned out to be important but which was not generally known to medicine men: don't take antioxidants when you are a compromised host. That all fell out of a model of immune response that TSC learned from human inputs; I'm writing a bit about that as a "connecting the dots" example in my Knowledge Federation 08 paper. Modeling turns out to be enormously valuable.

I already read through the long screed. It was helpful. While you do go into some detail about using JXTA, I have yet to be fully sold on the value of P2P, except that video skype really works well (when it works at all).

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Permalink Reply by Al Selvin on May 10, 2008 at 14:22

Alas, I can't find the poll either. I don't get any kind of applet that pops up. Can someone post a URL to the poll?

Thanks!

Al

Permalink Reply by David Price on May 7, 2008 at 23:12

Thanks for the suggestion, George, and for introducing a new meme.

I have added SystemScienceEarth to the collected list at the top.

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Permalink Reply by David Price on May 8, 2008 at 10:59

Drawing Mark Aakhus's and George's ideas together, how about describing what we are doing as building a:

GlobalSensemakingSystem?

GlobalReasoningSystem?

GlobalThinkingSystem?

GlobaDebatingSystem?

...as the mental equivalents to a GlobalPositioningSystem [GPS].

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Permalink Reply by David Price on May 8, 2008 at 11:23

GlobalDeliberation?

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Permalink Reply by Simon Buckingham Shum on May 8, 2008 at 12:05

While Climate is our current focus, it is of course desirable that other thematic clusters will emerge, from ourselves or others who want to use our tools to tackle their burning issues.

So I like Mark's suggestion that we stick to something non-thematic for the top level domain. So, the welcome page would introduce people to the world of structured deliberation/debate tools, and then go to /climate to get to our Ning network. The implication is that we or others might add their own subspaces. Each thematic community will have distinctive features and tools that might change the way our generic tools are used.

So, much as I love GlobalSensemaking it may be a little opaque to some, and broadens the field to ANY tool that supports SM. I would suggest the friendlier GlobalDebate.net to keep it focused on our core business of dialogue, argument, deliberation and debate (but of course, supported by other tools relevant to this theme, like simulations etc).

Simon

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Permalink Reply by David Price on May 8, 2008 at 12:50

Thanks Simon.

I have added GlobalDebate.net to the collected list at the top—and it appears that it is possible to achieve a degree of thematic structure within Ning, using the (sub)Groups feature—although the range of features available within a (sub)Group is not as extensive yet as those available within the network as a whole.

David

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Permalink Reply by Jack Park on May 8, 2008 at 19:47

I got to thinking, and this is what fell out. Visit bioforge.net and perhaps you might think along a similar line. What I've discovered quite recently is a host of really cool sensemaking efforts, like Open Notebook Science, and a bunch of similar sites entailed by that, the opnTag things I mentioned elsewhere, and then bioforge. What struck me is that there's a plethora of stuff going on 'out there' that could easily be imagined to federate and contribute in some way to to the effort we propose. I guess I'm thinking of a federation of sensemaking efforts as perhaps a different, but worthy of consideration, goal, with members here contributing as Simon has suggested.

What struck me is the meta-opportunity to become a forge where we foster the creation of better dogfood, nourishment for sensemaking (sorry, I couldn't resist).

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Permalink Reply by Simon Buckingham Shum on May 8, 2008 at 21:24

As and when people request /poverty, /terrorism, /health etc (not that frequent one imagines), then we could manually set up redirects to whatever environment they choose to use to coordinate their efforts, be it Ning or something else.

S

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