K.I.S.S.S

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or Keep It Simple, Software Socialists! Tom outlines how he and the team who developed UpMyStreet Conversations approached the project:

“The process of developing the UI and functionality of the sites (which, along with Dan Burzynski and Dorian McFarland, has been one of my major responsibilities) has presented some particularly interesting challenges. Throughout the process my main aspiration was to make it almost so obvious to use that people completely ceased to notice how novel it was. This involved paring down the message board functionality to its simplest core and concentrating on fully understanding the very distinct issues that a geographically-organised board might engender.”

» Plasticbag.org: On the Guardian and UpMyStreet Conversations…

Bridging the bubbles

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Browsing blogs, I’ve often had what I call the “glittering cave moment”; when I leave the dowdy, familiar surrounds of my blog-neighbourhood and get taken by the hand (or link) by someone I trust into a new and sparkling world of scary new knowledge, opinions, thoughts and views. That bridging moment has a tangible excitement to it.

My biggest “glittering cave moment” was last year’s ETCON, when I realised the fun that was happening in the techcave, as opposed to where I was. Another huge one was when I discovered the parallel universe of LiveJournal.

Worth remembering bridges happen at divides: they are erected over chasms, canyons, torrents.

This post at greaterdemocracy.org by Adina Levin explores what happens if the systems you navigate tend to keep you in your cave.

Noted socialnetwork analyst Valdis Krebs has been discovering the lack of bubble-bridges at Amazon:

“There’s a set of books that seem to represent “left-wing” readers, with titles by Chomsky and Michael Moore and Tom Friedman. And there’s a parallel set of books that seem to represent “right-wing” interests, with books by writers including Ann Coulter and Patrick Buchanan.

The clusters of recommendations seemed to be mutually exclusive. Only one book appeared on recommendation lists in both clusters: What Went Wrong, a book by Bernard Lewis about Middle East history.”

I believe that’s what’s being illustrated in the lovely, lucid accompanying diagram [above, reminds me superficially of this by Stewart]. Mr. Krebs goes on to say:

“The challenge is to create *bridges* so that diverse information and ideas can be exchanged (not just via hollering and arguing).”

As I mentioned before, one of the things we’re finding from our ethnographic study of people working to change their civic environment, is how successful people or organisations often shift from being adversaries to allies, and how important and how delicate those bridging moments are in achieving this in real-life.

We have a “charrette” tomorrow to try and figure out some alternatives to encourage and manage this online.

Tricky.

Dumb un-thought-through ideas I have lodged in my head: I’m thinking some kind of compass of links or opinions that give you a panorama view of those associated with issues you’re concerning yourself with. In my mind it looks like the variations tool in Photoshop meets politicalcompass.org. You know, where you have your original picture in the middle and then are shown variants which are more yellow, more cyan, more magenta, etc.

Or maybe some kind of implementation of the ‘publish my friends on my page’ feature that LiveJournal has, except you publish contrarian or adversarial views – not a lot different from having comments turned-on on your blog perhaps! 😉

Some kind of functionality to facilitate “hand-shaking” and create common-ground to establish cooperation within are going to be important. Turn-taking is going to be important. Also, some kind of auto-glossary commonground, where you can discover whether you are talking about the same thing just from different view points and share/merge the langauge you’ve been using [XFML/Taxomita involved somehow?]. Tools to widen “the circle of empathy” as Steven Pinker puts it: Telempathics

Very glad we have some models from real-life research to start from. Going to dig out everything Meatball and Valdis Krebs have to offer.

Any other pointers?

» Greaterdemocracy.org: Is the “Daily Me” at the doorstep?

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Side-question to self: must read in-depth and figure how does this relate to ShellyBurningbird’s great recent run of posts on the matter of connections between one’s commonplace books and “the commons”

Track-Back to basics

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Phil tried to explain it. Simon still doesn’t get it and asks the lazyweb to explain itself. Stef slaps the lot of us for trying to baffle his mum.

“I’m an unashamed populist. If my mum can’t use it, if a complete web novice doesn’t get it straight away, I’ve failed.

And the Trotts, and all these people writing more endlessly self-referentially feedback mechanisms for staring up the arse of your referrers, are failing too.

Why do we keep making the web harder instead of easier?”

» Whitelabel.org: Survival of the easiest: Trackback

Some Feynman stories

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A couple of quotes from a longer piece at the Long Now Foundation website:

“He pretended not to like working on any problem that was outside his claimed area of expertise. Often, at Thinking Machines when he was asked for advice he would gruffly refuse with “That’s not my department.” I could never figure out just what his department was, but it did not matter anyway, since he spent most of his time working on those “not-my-department” problems. Sometimes he really would give up, but more often than not he would come back a few days after his refusal and remark, “I’ve been thinking about what you asked the other day and it seems to me…” This worked best if you were careful not to expect it.”

and

“The last project that I worked on with Richard was in simulated evolution. I had written a program that simulated the evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over hundreds of thousands of generations. The results were surprising in that the fitness of the population made progress in sudden leaps rather than by the expected steady improvement. The fossil record shows some evidence that real biological evolution might also exhibit such “punctuated equilibrium,” so Richard and I decided to look more closely at why it happened. He was feeling ill by that time, so I went out and spent the week with him in Pasadena, and we worked out a model of evolution of finite populations based on the Fokker Planck equations. When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our “discoveries” were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. “Hey, we got it right!” he said. “Not bad for amateurs.”

In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress. “

» Longnow.org: Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

The web got complicated

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Trying to redesign my site. Trying to do the right things, but in the 2-3 years since I did this design, the web got really complicated. I still get HTML. I understand my content caught up in presentation, just like I like my jokes told by a funny person rather than written down in logic statements expressed in esperanto.

I could build the design I want to do in a couple of hours in HTML. If I did I get the feeling that I would be banished from the village in rags and never spoken of again. I also get the feeling that once I left the village I’d find a whole wide world full of uncomplicated places; free of the perpetual, byzantine betterment of the blogosphere.

I’ll try and give all this new fangled stuff another go though.

Sigh.

What does a DIV do again? Ugh.