Month: December 2003

More waste coming

George has an update on the situation in Crete.

Today, a friend went to the hospital where the clinically dead kid’s life thread is sustained by machines to pay his respects to his family and had a brief chat with the kid’s brother. he was obviously devastated and told him that his life’s no longer important and that he will avenge his brother’s murder. the kid will become an organ donor any time today as his family asked the doctors to unplug him. you should know that it’s very easy to find a firearm or explosives in crete – a place where 50% of the population possess non-registered weapons. vendetta is on the air and even the police seems frightened and with good reason. very ominous….in a nutshell, the entire island of crete is in a state of emotional turmoil, and the whole situation is very fragile.

The story has also been reported elsewhere.

patience

.. is not a virtue of mine. yet i have been morphed into a homo commutus, and i am spending more time than i ever thought possible in transit. being offline most of the time has been “interesting”. funny how i can focus much better when i am not tied into my social networks though.
there are 2 modes to my work, idea capturing / synthesizing and implementation. the first is very much a p-time activity, the second m-time. now, to adjust.

waste

george dafermos:
someone i kind of knew years ago was shot in the head 3 days ago when the car he was in refused to stop to the signs of a special police squad known as “special guards” in crete, greece.
oh wow. and these guys want to be in the eu.

The spirits I called

Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.

This strikes home with my experience helping to build different tools over the years.
I finally got around to read shirkys longish essay about groups being their worst enemy. There is too much good material in the piece to give it justice with commentary, so I will just quote interesting paragraphs instead.

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you’re dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice.

It’s very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can’t see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic. In Joi’s conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room. People would type “Hand,” and the moderator of the conference call will then type “You’re speaking next,” in the chat. So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.

1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. 2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. 3.) You need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities. 4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense 2-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe’s law is a drag.