George,

I was in high hopes when I first discovered the GSm, because of the similarities of my ambitions with the Do Good Gauge. Before the GSm, I customized over one hundred letters to various authors, universities / professors, politicians, and journalist over a 8 month period. The approach got me about 10% response and about 2% meaningful but short lived dialog.

My initial posts and responses to the GSm Ning were promising. An extended email exchange with Jack Park was a great learning experience for myself and I would hope provided some benefits for Jack.

Since then, I have found the GSm ning to lack direction, focus, or provide feedback.

Though I claim the requirement for developing a process for creating an intelligent argument is not necessary for the Do Good Gauge, I have thought much about this requirement. Specifically, I see Benjamin Franklin's Junto as an intelligent argument development process which has rarely been duplicated with such success and longevity. As a member of the House of Junto Google group, I initiated some thoughts about Benjamin Franklin's success with his Junto:

Was Franklin's Junto an Anomoly?

As a group, I feel the GSm is too focused on tools which granularize argument into such small grains that the problem is lost on the beach.

As a pragmatic software engineer, I believe it is better to develop software based on a working manual process. As a suggestion, I would recommend forming a Junto based on Benjamin Franklin's principles. Instead of focusing on the GSm tools, I would suggest this group collaborate to develop several intelligent arguments of publication quality. I would focus on narrow topics. An example could be, a patient managed medical record repository. I started a thread on the House of Junto to discuss this topic.

Scott's September Query - Patient Managed Medical Record Repository

The lessons learned by manually creating intelligent arguments could be beneficial to generating tools. Since the Do Good Gauge does not require the toolset for generating an intelligent argument, these manually generated arguments could be used as an inspiration for developing the Do Good Gauge framework.

George, I was hoping that your "Philosophical Aspect of Sense Making" topic would interest you in continuing this dialog. I would be glad to discuss with you on or off line.

Thank you for your time,
Scott Nesler

Just joined. I like learning stuff too. I also have a long-standing passion for dialogue, our earth, our wicked problems v a more peaceful planet, and a congruent walk trough this life. Plus I have a couple of old visions for tools that could only come to life in cyberspace (is that term still used?), and this generates curiosity in computer apps. I'm a systems thinker by nature and a resource developer by profession and practice, as well as a writer and all those other things I gave in my bio. Hope that this net will be as fascinating and productive as my hunch tells me it will be. Lynne

Yes, it is. And Bravo! Carry on. We'll connect. Lynne