“The data structure I’m proposing here is not just about new information but an attempt to define a structure into which the existing, and typically very scattered and ad hoc, information about all kinds of techniques and production processes can be organized as a way of offering a strategy for its collectivization.

With some rough model that encompasses how this knowledge tends to exist ‘in the wild’, we can then explore standardization of presentation and media forms. We can craft (most likely experimentally) a kind of style manual for the documentation of designs, techniques, process recipes relative to the information elements and the basic media forms (writing, recorded audio, illustration, photography, video) based on this common structural model. With that we can then define coherent digital database systems and start the collectivization process based on translating old and new information to these standard forms. We can also define a specific style manual for print media/ebooks we can associate with a publishing ‘brand’ (for want of any better word) associated with the co-op community that takes on this task of collectivizing the civilization’s industrial knowledge. You might imagine this as being akin to the branded book style of the ‘In A Nutshell’ series of books by O’Reilly.

Once we have this sort of standardization in the form of industrial knowledge we’re able to take on the much more difficult task of putting it into machine-usuable forms. That’s a task that’s almost impossible with the unrestrained ad hoc forms of information we have ‘in the wild’ today with this. So we make the task more manageable by separating the basic knowledge collectivization process from this machine interpretation process through that intermediary of a still human-oriented but standardized knowledge structure that takes a lot of the messiness out the process of devising machine interpretation and encoding schemes. In the mean-time, we’ve created this hugely powerful on-line knowledge resource that can empower large segments of the population, create huge cultural gravitas, and a steady flow of income (and when I say ‘income’ I’m also referring to an in-flow of resources from the larger community that’s benefited from this, not just cash) to support the livelihoods of the community working on this endeavor.

Ultimately, the end result of this exercise is a form of Total Automation, emerging out of our deliberate and organized collectivization of this human knowledge and the interpretation of it into a machine-usable form which can flow back out in a parallel channel through the community network we’ve established with the human-specific knowledgebase, along with the designs for the machines to use this knowledge. We’ve long tended to treat things like Total Automation as some sort of magical inevitability that comes out of technology itself. But that’s not how things work in the real world. Like most things, this is a process and here I’ve tried to crudely define one such process to that end.”