Tag: collaborative

Enforcing netiquette

Paradoxic: so given your apparent dislike for forums, you have never found any useful information off forum ?
Paradoxic: I find myself discovering a wealth of information off forums almost everyday
gregorrothfuss: i guess the kind of info i am looking for is not on forums
gregorrothfuss: and your in the business of caring about forums
gregorrothfuss: so that figures
Paradoxic: you have never found anything from a forum tho /
gregorrothfuss: well, maybe some posts from the googleguy
gregorrothfuss: but since most forums have horrible urls they are not indexed
gregorrothfuss: so how would i find the gems
Paradoxic: what is your solution for forums then
Paradoxic: there needs to be a way for communities to discuss
gregorrothfuss: forums are ok for nebies
gregorrothfuss: because novice web users do not realize they use the medium ineffectively
gregorrothfuss: if you work on the web all day, you appreciate better tools
Paradoxic: i don’t wanna argue with you on it, just seeing what solution is more effective
Paradoxic: mailing lists aren’t
gregorrothfuss: yeah
gregorrothfuss: mailing lists suck too
Paradoxic: you waste a shitload of time downloading useless crap
gregorrothfuss: for different reasons
gregorrothfuss: and blogs suck for yet other reasons
gregorrothfuss: i think you can do a lot with netiquette
gregorrothfuss: if you have good titles, concise posts, forums work well
gregorrothfuss: same for mailing lists
gregorrothfuss: i would focus on educating people how to use the tools properly
gregorrothfuss: seems the best ROI
gregorrothfuss: i wonder if tools can be made to enforce netiquette
gregorrothfuss: for instance, it should not be possible to send email without a subject
gregorrothfuss: that is just plain broken

blogs vs mailing lists

one of the crucial questions i want to explore in the remainder of 2003 is whether blogs are better than mailing lists for collaboration. i believe they are, but need to try it to be sure. some data points:

  • persons with inadequate email archives are no longer crippled
  • categorization beats subject prefixes
  • linkability: prior art (older posts) are first class citizens as opposed to vanishing in the archives / trash
  • trackback: get more brains to attack the problems
  • it is easier to filter out “me too” posts

the klog mailing list (ahem!) has very good thinking on the issues.
related issues: blogs vs wikis. mailing lists vs wikis

java.net

sun is waking up to communities.

java.net is a place to meet and work. “This site was designed from scratch to set a new standard for what’s possible in online collaborative software development”. It has been primed to thrive as a dynamic, live, international, 24×7, real-time community for hands-on Java software development.

with considerable luck they may be able to attract enough interest in the widely dispersed java blog / open source community. i went ahead and registered apache lenya, although the project will of course not move there. the site will point to its official home. maybe it will help to attract some more attention from the general, java-using population. we shall see.
they even let mr. gosling out to play with the other kids, although what good is a blog without rss.

Quoting & metadata

ralph levien talks about quoting netiquette.

It is considered good etiquette not to quote email without permission. However, these days, emails are often part of a broader discussion spanning blogs, web fora, and so on. It’s increasingly easy to run afoul of this etiquette rule. Thus, I propose the 2-character string “+ as a shorthand indicating that permission to quote, with attribution, is granted. Permission is also granted to integrate the email into any copylefted documentation (most copylefts do not require attribution).

“+ is a nice idea until we figure out how to attach rdf metadata to arbitrary text fragments. semantic web here we come. raph is right, quoting is increasingly a problem.

A less than clued-in person recently accused me of wanting to spam a mailing list when the intent was to use affero to provide users a possibility to give back by donating to select charities. that person was in possession of the whole trail of discussion, and only used that conclusion to discredit me. a generalized quoting system would allow anyone to trace these tidbits back to the source, and decide for themselves.

Accelerating change

The world is getting more complex at a rate we can’t cope with, it seems. The fabric of society needs to be updated. Collaboration needs to happen at deeper and broader levels, entire layers of abstraction need to be designed to fight complexity. Can massively parallel collaboration technologies help? I hope so, and David Gelernter thinks so as well.

His livestreams concept sounds like an advanced form of weblogs to me.
2003-08-03: Accelerating Change

I’m considering attending I will attend the Accelerating Change conference.

In both universal and human history, there is a special subset of events that have continually increased their speed and efficiency of change. Accelerating systems are regularly able to accomplish more with fewer resources; as a result, they avoid normal limitations to growth. Over the 20th century, several domains of technological development have accelerated, even during deep recession, driven primarily by the powerful new physical and economic efficiencies that they introduce into the human economy. Perhaps even more interestingly, looking ahead we can see no natural limit to specific accelerating physical and technological efficiencies.

2003-09-13: The mixer at Accelerating Change was mind blowing. A very diverse group of people at my table, from Todd who is a researcher with the Alcor life extension foundation to Michael Anissimov to Alex Jacobson who was at reorient too.
2003-09-14: The Accelerating Change conference is still going on. There is so much good material being presented, and not having wifi forces me to just write down the major points.
things to look up
Caloric Reduction
eintelligence.com
innovationwatch.com
openEEG.org
IPTQ.org
notions
3D computing makes slow circuits (brain) fast
exponential computing power applied to exponential problems leads to linear increases (speech processing etc). This is valuable
Is substrate-independent computation possible?
There are 1000 basic protein shapes. Think of it as the atomic table of proteins. All these are assembled with 1 protein
As computing power increases, the simulation becomes the reality
GP (genetic programming) is able to find patentable new solutions with 30 day runs on a 1000 node cluster.
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) as a singularity trigger
One human life has ~1021 bytes of information
The universe has performed 10120 computations since the big bang
People to follow up with
Paul Boutin
Michael E. Muston
Steve Jurvetson
2003-09-15: Accelerating Change was without doubt one of the most inspiring conferences I attended the last couple years. It will take me weeks to digest the torrent of mind boggling, challenging notions I gathered in these 2 short days. The crowd was most excellent, to the point that I felt like a toddler among adults. The schmoozing was most excellent too. I conclude with some random notes (again, no time to write them up properly, alas)

cool stuff

tribe.net social networking
iawiki.net information architecture
danah boyd has a “net nanny” blog with netiquette rules
keith devlin writes awesome math books
stumbleupon.com social bookmarking
quantumtheology.com intersection of technological change and consciousness

notions to think about

there are more molecules in a drop of water than transistors ever built
brain circuitry is 10k times more efficient than CMOS
solid state lighting will reduce energy consumption for lighting by 50% worldwide
how much do you have to vertically integrate nanotech to have a product? can’t sell a speck of sand can you 🙂
Imago has a 3D atom imaging device
it should be possible to bootstrap new organisms starting from a minimal genome of 300 genes
technology enables more and more non 0-sum games
0-sum games do not communicate, while non 0-sum games rely on communication
there is a recognition stack for voice recognition that goes like this: phonetics – phonology – morphology – syntax – semantics – pragmatics
the nuance vocalizer 3.0 has achieved almost human levels of speech synthesis
computers outperform humans in certain voice recognition tasks (noisy environments)
tim o’reilly claims that NCSA was inspired to write mosaic by o’reilly pitches
the read / write ratio for wikis is approx. 20 / 1

stay in touch

terry frazier
ross mayfield
mila golynski
ramez naam
2003-10-23:

“Crackpots, too SciFi,” were the comments he kept getting from other nanotech entrepreneurs. “I still find it absolutely amazing that one early-adoption population considers another early adoption population a bit too ‘out there.’ “

Hm, I guess that makes me a double crackpot (or a kool aid drinker) for attending Accelerating Change. I’m ok with that though.
2004-09-18: I will be attending Accelerating Change 2004. This will be without doubt the best conference of the year again.
2004-11-06: Accelerating Change 2004 has begun. Last night was simply awesome (writeup over at terry frazier’s). It is not every day that you get to casually hang out with Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Doug Engelbart at the same time. Doug and Larry had a lot of fun playing with Roomba, and we had a discussion with Helen Greiner from iRobot about upcoming APIs for these autonomous robots. Pictures coming 🙂

This morning I am sitting in a presentation by Helen. She is talking about how her field, robotics, benefits from accelerating change. Roomba, their cleaning robot, sold 1M units already, with prime time advertising. Their vision is “Eliminate dangerous and repetitive tasks.”
She is showing movies from Afghanistan, with special ops soldiers sending robots into caves for reconnaissance, and Iraq, where robots defeat bombs remotely. One of these robots is about a 100k worth of equipment. She estimates the size of the autonomous robotics industry to be about $500M today, with their company increasing business 4x in the past year.
Now she is showing a movie with 10s of robots swarming in a room, only communicating with their closest neighbors. It looks surprisingly like an ant nest.
How can robotics tap into accelerating change? Moore’s law of course (Helen mentions CCD sensors as an example: what used to require extremely heavy computation for object recognition is now helped by advances in sensor quality). Getting OEM involved to grow the market, strategic relationships (iRobot developed $200 toy robots, brought it down to $18 by learning from their toy industry partners) She is showing a video of a velociraptor toy, complete with roars. Think Aibo, dinosaur style. Another strategic partnership: John Deere. Think robotic tractors.
Helen predicts that the aging population will drive demands for robotic elder care applications. “building on the beerbot idea, the robot that brings you a beer during the super bowl, build a robot to make sure people are sufficiently hydrated at all times.”
Entertainment: 33% of furby sales went to adults without kids.
Interesting sightings

  • Buddy Buzz, combining mobile speed reading with posse-style recommendations. It’s principal BJ Fogg has some scary ideas about persuasive technologies that he calls captology.
  • Alicebot is the leading bot technology, with an open source community behind it’s aiml, the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language, which is the markup language for the alice bot. Seems obvious to try to apply wikipedia lessons to the nurturing of its body of knowledge.
  • Digital space, a commons in cyberspace which tries to bootstrap old and new organizational models using the tools cyberspace offers.

2006-10-03: A pretty decent futurist blog by Michael.
2007-03-01: Nice accelerating change type video.

2007-08-15: A warning

Given this mysterious and rapidly approaching cloud, there can be no doubt that the time has come for the scientific and technological community to seriously try to figure out what is on humanity’s collective horizon. Not to do so would be hugely irresponsible

2014-09-29: Factors of accelerating change

From Moore’s Law to property development, drones, and space exploration, Steve Jurvetson discusses factors affecting accelerating technological change.

Steve is the rarest of creatures: a VC who gets it at a MUCH deeper level than all the “social media / disrupt” clowns. You might not agree with everything, but he’s consistently interesting.

Critical Discussion Tools for the Web

Developed for the Foresight Institute to enable critical discussions and enhance productivity for those using the web, CritSuite takes vital steps toward a truly connected and interactive Web structure.

CritSuite consists of 3 pieces of integrated software which allow individuals to comment on and view existing hypertext documents (CritLink), to navigate the Web using a graphical interface (CritMap), and to archive email exchanges using the features of hypertext (CritMail).

Web navigation using CritSuite may be accomplished in 1 of 3 ways: by following a link in the document being viewed in the browser; by entering an URL in the CritLink location field at the top of each screen; or by selecting a link directly using the visual interface of CritMap. Each of the navigation methods are synchronized, i.e. when a new link is selected, CritLink and CritMap will each display the new site.

Collaborative development

We build WYSIWYG editors for sharing richly-annotated source; we use glass TTY editors (vi, emacs) to hammer on flat ASCII files in which most of the metadata (comments) is completely unstructured.

i just discovered jon udells very interesting newsgroups. some nice quotes about software development in the web era:

greg wilson on why xml-style coding might not catch on:

Many programmers would rather change the way the global economy works than change the way they brace and indent their C code. Many also program as an end in itself (even when they’re being paid to do so). They don’t see an advantage in switching to a format that looks odd (compared to what they’ve been weaned on), and whose primary benefits are team-oriented (lower long-term maintenance costs, easier for newcomers to navigate the code, etc.).

very very sad. i’d gladly switch to tools that allow me to capture my intent on a higher semantical level. however there is apparently hope:

greg again:

I am hoping that as old programmers die off, younger ones will start bringing tools that they’re used to using in other contexts into the coding arena. For example, the proportion of programmers using IDEs instead of legacy command line tools (Emacs + gdb, makefiles, etc.) seems to be increasing. I believe this is because students are introduced to both while they’re still impressionable, so they can choose without worrying about the cost of change.

on the need to include communication in the process:

Finally, LP systems only addressed the problem of “static” communication — I write a doc, you read it, information flows one way. This only addresses the needs of big corporate dev environments, where audit trails and 20-year life cycles are an issue. I’ll bet most of the people reading this group need something much more fluid to sustain their day-to-day work. Even those of us in our late thirties are now used to the “dynamic” 2-way threaded ongoing communication of newsgroups like this. I’ve watched developers in their 20s use Messenger to throw around hasty sketches of data structures and snippets of code while chatting; offer them an IDE that does this, and their reaction is likely to be, “Well, duh, about time.”

i for one would love to integrate jabber with my ide. given a decent xslt, these conversations could be nicely integrated with the source to provide more clues about the code.

sourceforge is a first attempt at such a highly integrated ide that tries to embrace group ware. finally there seems to be a very good book by karl fogel on Open Source Development With CVS that will hopefully be on my bookshelf one day.