Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Ben Tremblay

Ben Tremblay — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 22:33:51 GMT

Lateral – a historical note:
In 1975 I needed to index a large collection of resources. Different types (moves, photos, books, magazines, brochures, clippings) and a large number of topics. I devised a “card based” system and the project introduced me to taxonomy.

Does anyone remember COBOL card sorters? The system I used was almost as antique, yet captured the algorithmic essence of the matter: cards with holes punched along their edges, sorted by passing knitting needles through them. Rather elegant, it was … not fun to produce, not easy to maintain, but simple and something like fun for the user!

Ben Tremblay — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 04:38:10 GMT

I’m sure there’s a tortoise|hare dichotomy to be found in this somewhere.

What proportion of the wiki-community are active wiki-gnomes? (Note how I resisted the urge to use CamelCase. *oh-woops!*)

Chaotic systems are dynamically stable … so, within limits, they are ready and able to digest entropy i.e. disruptive development. (And even when perturbed beyond those constraints, the system “merely” re-stabilises in a way that, to us, is unpredictable. Which is to say it passes through a phase transition that, to us, seems nothing but noise. Which … oh, what was I talking about? *grin* But is “wiki” in action at all disruptive? I think it’s paradigmatically L7. (That’s “square”, for you yungins.)

Within the context of wiki I suspect we can see manifested lines of control and demarcartions of exchange (C2 goes on in depth about dialog form.) that actually and very really exist elsewhere, if only latent.

—bentrem

Ben Tremblay — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 04:51:56 GMT

Alex – I’ll see your encyclopedia and raise you a Julia-set shaped mandala.

I just found that “groundplane -antenna” showed me #3 in google.

Why “groundplane”? Because the physics of antenna allow that system to discriminate best when working against a base reference.

What’s the antidote to “glut”? Well … how about subjective salience?

Correct me here, but “Data is information that matters”, no?

And how do dullards and pedants judge what matters to people? Poorly.
What about plods, fakes, and phoneys? Worse.

How does my cognitive schema in-form the encyclopedia I’m experiencing via the web? Likely, not at all, except as yet another user case that ends in my being just a bit more dumbed down.

Discourse. Discussion as though persons matter.

Or, from another direction (“mandala theory” always in mind): _glasperlenspiel_.

The all inclusive nature of “encyclopedia” ... that, surely, is abused, debased, and demeaned when thought of as 2-dimensional. So how many, then?
Back when SGI was a player I toyed with 3. *shrug* Fun … tedious … futile.

Feed-back/feed-forward … re-entrant … manifold. DITA is kludge, fit only for computing machines, not nearly up to the task of making semantic web worthy of human consciousness.

But call me Cassandra: I’m bound not to have any credibility at all. Paradigmatically disruptive, ehh whot?
*grin*

—bentrem

Ben Tremblay — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 04:56:56 GMT

Heads Up: alas, I found ” Building a Metadata-Based Website” to be 404.

p.s. your 10 points … dang that’s good. I’d love to spend a weekend just beating up on them and then putting the pieces back together. Really, that’s a fine set you’ve forged. (I mean forged as in black-smith, not forged as in fake.)

Ben Tremblay — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 03:48:21 GMT

Yup. A good start on this could lead to a couple more developing some aspects and setting things out in more detail.

FWIW, I came across this in a comment to Why Enterprise Software Sucks (The other comments would interest you too.:

“Development was totally (and I mean totally) driven by feature lists that were shaped by the checklists … UI design was most of the time just an afterthought, the responsibility of programmers, who often saw it as “trivial” versus the “challenging” back-end programming and technical architecture.

Ben Tremblay — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 03:54:26 GMT

Some HCI study I read 2 or 3 years ago had a section on “user confidence” ... what can matter more than how likely it was that folk would actually click through a series of pages. And the confidence the users felt correlated very well with how many pages they viewed / how long they stayed … and I bet how often they returned. In that study it seemed that folk would spend time with a dull site if they got to the beef in the end. Show me a site with too much sizzle and I start feeling like I’m having my chain jerked. (A triply mangled metaphor?)

Ben Tremblay — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:08:47 GMT

A lovely serendipitous mistake today: I was looking for Innovators’ Network (startups and such … a nice compliment to FoundRead) and came across Innovate on Purpose. That might be a good source for exchange / anecdotes.

Ben Tremblay — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:21:28 GMT

French isn’t rocket science, and the logic of the German language is not carpentry.

But seriously folks … how about using Heidegger’s “Essays on Technology” as a launch point? techne as making real what was previously only imaginary. The closest I come to design (No artistic ability?) is to conceptualize a realizable form for the suggestion I see inherent in a description of the problem … almost dialectical.

Ben Tremblay — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:24:39 GMT

I would like to see, and anticipate that you would include, a treatment of how failure to realize the design at the detail level triggers a very pragmatic reaction at the level of “holistic vision”, where a more dumbed-down ambition is likely to ignore the small stuff and end up tangled in a rat’s nest.

Ben Tremblay — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:27:58 GMT

Likely you’ve pondered this, but in one project I had to deal with the fact that different groups/teams were using different names for entities i.e. nomenclature … which I coped with by drawing a multi-layer family tree that captured the variant nomenclatures. Almost like translating, this got me thinking in the late 80s (SGML was just being finalized) about what would eventually become XML.

Ben Tremblay — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:28:39 GMT

s / variant nomenclatures / variant taxonomies

Ben Tremblay — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:32:33 GMT

I haven’t experienced Tinderbox (Next good contract I’ll buy a Mac, promise!) but outliners are, IMNSHO, the hidden jewel. I can’t recall the name of the 80s Mac product, but Brøderbund’s “ThinkingCap” for the C=64 … I’d pay cash money for an app that restored me that functionality.

It’s a whole way of thinking … from experience I know that … and danged if I can every explain the workflow to someone who hasn’t been there … the Tao of effective outlining, or something.

Please!

Ben Tremblay — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:37:48 GMT

Without the “Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned” my comment would have been something like “Fill your boots!” in the sense of giving you enough rope to uhhhhhhh end up doing macrame.

But yaa … heaven knows I /adore/ things Wiki, so when and where and how it fails or falls short I think is significant for all sentient beings.

(FWIW I find “design” too broad; there are aspects of decision making, to my way of thinking, where wiki fails spectacularly.)

Ben Tremblay — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:41:29 GMT

I’m sure this will find a home somewhere over in blogspot.com

Ben Tremblay — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:45:26 GMT

*wiki-gnome on duty!*

David penned thusly:

””Collaboration”, “data sharing” and other like-minded buzzwords are all the rage in enterprise data management circles in government right now. The real question, however, should be the “why” and “when”, not the “how” (which thousands of software vendors assure us constantly they have the be-all, end-all solution for).
Within DHS alone there are mandates stating (in a nutshell) “thall shall share data” amongst other govermnent entities. I’m sure many readers have heard the same from corporate leaders as well. The real trick will be defining what it is you are trying to accomplish (outcomes), who else (in either government or industry) is trying to do the same thing, and are your business processes, lexicons and terminologies similar enough that you will understand what it is you are trying to collaborate on?”

For myself: an absolutely stellar workshop on problem solving grouped together folk from different teams who were at equivalent levels on the org chart; most of the groups that didn’t get carried away with bitching about their superiors / subordinates aced the problems. It was truly remarkable. Like minded? Similarly pent up creativity? Hard to say … but anybody who’s experienced symbiotic collaboration wants more.