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Visioneering an information system for P2P practice and research

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[Note: The following is a transcript from the Facebook P2P Group of threads discussing some possible directions for the information technology we may wish to apply to our work.  The bulk (not all) of the discussion is of a technical nature assuming some information science or software engineering background. This conversation transpired over seven days in October…]

Poor Richard: I hope no one will mind if I indulge in a little visioneering here. I am imagining an information system of P2P practice and research. The P2P collaborative economy, free culture, and new commons movements are creating a lot of digital content. Most is in discursive and narrative form that is time consuming to read. Among this volume of content are case studies in a variety of formats (many very informal), business plans, proposals, and presumably many legal documents (charters, agreements, etc.).

I am imagining a semantic ontology according to which the key ideas and data of this content could be parsed and tagged to form a distributed database using semantic linked-data structures. This would help transition the collective knowledge base of the research, activist, and social entrepreneurial communities into a machine-readable, semantically linked, searchable form.

The P2P Foundation Wiki is an excellent searchable resource, and perhaps the semantic wiki extensions for the wiki engine could eventually be applied. “A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages. Regular, or syntactic, wikis have structured text and untyped hyperlinks. Semantic wikis, on the other hand, provide the ability to capture or identify information about the data within pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_wiki

A fringe benefit of creating such data structures for existing content would be to provide common templates for future content creation and data collection.

  • Gure Guretxa, Linda Larson Kemp, Lynne Desilva-johnson and 14 others like this.
  • Helene FinidoriSergio Storch, yes I would like to know more about your endeavor. Also as far as ontology is concerned, you can have a look at the pearl tree linked by Richard higher up and it’s background explanation. Michel remember I suggested to do something like this (linked data accessible through graph pearltree is an intermediary step) with the p2p foundation internal links. Keep me in the loop smile.
  • Michel Bauwens will do Helene, but having time for such things is clearly an issue for now ..
  • Helene Finidori Well Michel, I would suggest that we let this emerge from some interactions we are having here… working on it smile! And so is Richard it seems?
  • Helene FinidoriJohn Love, Richard welcome to the Exploring Alternatives pearl tree team!

  • Poor RichardHelene, I am still far from any good answers to the questions you pose in the “background” pearl of the Exploring Alternatives pearl tree. I particularly like what you did with debategraph, and after my initial experience with that user interface, I consider it an impressive achievement on your part!

    While I’m finding debategraph difficult to master, I like its capability to define crossliinks between nodes, a capability absent from many idea graphing/mapping tools using the “tree” metaphor. I created a simple debategraph for the “hex model” here: http://debategraph.org/Stream.aspx?nid=231296&iv=09&mac=231299-231300-231298-231296-231303-231304-231302–

    (note: if the graph window is empty at first, try refreshing your browser)

    You have to go around and click on all the nodes before the cross links are shown in the graph. That’s one example of the problems with the interface. You should be able to easily select a view where all that information is included. Also, I don’t know how you got such a clean looking “outline” view (debategraph calls it “box” view) in yours.

    Debategraph might be suitable for designing ontologies at the conceptual level if it were easier to use. Things like Delicious or Diigo are good tools for creating folksonomies via tagging, but a folksonomy is just a vocabulary or word list without any organizational substructure. What is needed is more like a nested tree/outline format to turn a folksonomy into an ontology. Debategraph has this, plus the valuable crosslink feature, but it lacks the convenient browser “bookmark bar” button to capture content into the graph the way pearltrees, delicious, and diigo can do.

    None of this goes any farther towards creating open linked-data structures, either. I am focused on the ontology design first, but perhaps there are tools that cover both bases that I’m not aware of yet.

    debategraph.org

    Debate map visualization of: Commons

  • Poor Richard Another part of the “research information system” I am visioneering is pattern detection and recognition. An ontology gives us set of semantically charged patterns. Then what we need is a pattern language with which to parse existing content and match it with our ontology. I am thinking of something like the “regular expressions” used in the old unix text editors or in the Pearl and Awk programming languages I once used. http://encyclopedia.tfd.com/Regular+expressions

    encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com

    Wikipedia article about Regular expressions

     

  • Dante-Gabryell Monson Hi Poor Richard , this is a vision we share. Programming work has been on its way. I invite you to have a look at http://automenta.com/netention, and to join this list https://groups.google.com/group/global-survival

    www.automenta.com

    Software that works with us, instead of for us. A future that promises accelerat…See More
  • Michael Maranda Ontologies of/for what?
  • Michael Maranda Pattern languages best emerge by direct human effort.

  • Lorraine Lee And of course I will again plug http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Pubwan

    scratchpad.wikia.com

    Pubwan is a proposed project in open source, non-profit data mining. Applications to consumer…

  • Dante-Gabryell MonsonMichael Maranda , perhaps you mean Folksonomies ?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

    en.wikipedia.org

    Afolksonomyis a system of classification derived from the practice and method of…See More

  • Dante-Gabryell Monson further note : although it may not yet have the visualization potentials I hope Netention will have, it is also of great interest to look into OntoWiki ( cc: Pavlik Elf ) :
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OntoWiki
    http://ontowiki.net/Projects/OntoWiki
    Its mailinglist :
    http://groups.google.com/group/ontowiki-user

    en.wikipedia.org

    OntoWikiis a free,open-sourcesemantic wikiapplication, meant to serve as anontol…See More

  • Dante-Gabryell Monson I also feel like citing a phrase used by Seth , in relation to the development of http://automenta.com/netention ( see links to prototypes and mailing list above – code is open sourced )

    “I’ve explained to people that Netention is not just a product – but that it refers to the evolution of human language into new semantic and syntactical domains of higher expressiveness and effectiveness in programming reality itself, not just software. so anything that can help this goal ought to be part of the project, as long as it doesn’t complexify it.”

    www.automenta.com

    Software that works with us, instead of for us. A future that promises accelerat…See More
  • Poor Richard Thanks for posting the links y’all. I hope these projects will all continue to develop and gain momentum. How and where does it all come together?

  • Poor Richard Dante that netention semantic editor would be truly awesome! Not that I’m any expert on the topic, but that is the first tool of its kind I have even seen a coherent description of. I would suggest that such an editor should have easy switching between several views including an outline view and a semantic graph view as well as the wysiwyg document content. Is there any way in hell that a great editor like LibreOffice (a free and open source office suite, developed by The Document Foundation. It is descended from OpenOffice.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice) could be forked and retrofitted with semantic functions? Then we’d have semantic spreadsheets, outlines, etc., too. (LibreOffice Online will allow for the use of LibreOffice through a web browser by using the canvas element. Development is ongoing and it has not yet been released)

    en.wikipedia.org

    LibreOfficeis afree and open sourceoffice suite, developed byThe Document Founda…See More

  • Dante-Gabryell Monson I suggest these projects come together by supporting the synthesis of these technologies, and then use these technologies to continue our interactions. What could help, is to support developers / programmers. I believe a “collective” could be a good format to converge programmers and non-programmers sharing such intentions ( much in the way other platforms emerged, such as couchsurfing ).
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective

    I imagine it being like some kind of temporary artist / developer residency.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist-in-residence

    It would be good to cover the food, heating, water and electricity costs, and find some agreement in relation to rent. I believe this approach is, at first, one of the most cost effective approaches to converge and mutually empower each other. It would need to be decided where to hold such collective ( I have in mind some places in Germany – perhaps there are other suggestions ? Or perhaps we could change location every 3 months ? Europe, US, … ).

    If need be, I imagine partnering with existing not for profits, or eventually a limited liability partnership, or setting one up.

    We are discussing legal frameworks here ( edgeryders are also interested in graphed approaches , midst other projects )

    http://edgeryders.ppa.coe.int/where-edgeryders-dare/mission_case/can-we-and-should-we-pull-official-edgeryders-organisation

    Edgeryders also discuss potentials for collectives / residencies , called “unmonastery” :

    https://twitter.com/unmonastery

    I personally suggest a permanent collective residence :

    http://edgeryders.ppa.coe.int/who-ryder-what-edge/mission_case/permanent-collective-leipzig

    en.wikipedia.org

    Acollectiveis a group of entities that share or are motivated by at least one co…See More
  • Poor RichardDante-Gabryell Monson, per Seth “as long as it doesn’t complexify it.” — LOL, yeah, right…
  • Poor Richard Dante, I agree that a collective-in-residence approach would be ideal. If one exists or forms with the scope discussed here I would try to be involved as much as possible via net.

  • Poor Richard OntoWiki looks very promising but I don’t have a server. Does anyone know if there is a hosted wikifarm running OntoWiki? Also this:

    “Possible drawback: since OntoWiki is based on RAP (an RDF API for PHP and SQL databases), it cannot be used to host large RDF/OWL models (hosting more than 5 MB of RDF/OWL is not possible, I would estimate). However, we could still try to represent some selected parts of the demo datasets in OntoWiki.” http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-semweb-lifesci/2007Jan/0229.html

  • Michael MarandaDante-Gabryell Monson I meant what I said .. someone else mentioned ontologies being facilitated by a tool, I think debategraph. I want to know Ont. applied to what specifically?
  • Michael Maranda Unless what was meant in that case WAS folksonomy, but the term ontology was used?
  • Poor Richard “Towards an Interlinked Semantic Wiki Farm Abstract. (pdf) This paper details the main concepts and the architecture of UfoWiki, a semantic wiki farm { i.e. a server of wikis { that uses form-based templates to produce ontology-based knowledge. Moreover, the system allows diferent wikis to share and interlink ontology instance between each other, so that knowledge can be produced by dierent and distinct communities in a distributed but collaborative way. Key words: semantic wikis, wiki farm, linked data, ontology population, named graphs, SIOC” http://smw.referata.com/w/images/Towards_an_Interlinked_Semantic_Wiki_Farm.pdf
  • Poor Richard note: Distinctions between folksonomy and ontology (information science) were briefly discussed in a prev comment.
  • Mark Dilley An interesting thread – it got a little TL;DR – what it makes me think about is how we work together – on Facebook & other threaded media we have an http://bit,ly/WriteOnlyMemory – if we were working in a wiki – we would be building our knowledge and conversations into reference able points that could help us work together better.
  • Poor RichardMark Dilley I’m looking for a hosted semantic wiki platform for my work and for collaboration like this. OntoWiki sounds like the best semantic wiki platform so far, but no hosted sites available yet. Any suggestions? (anyone)
  • Michael Maranda Indeed – Mark Dilley thats one aspect that makes FB particularly unsuited for this work. It’s fine for stream of the moment, but meaningful work requires some room for curation/stewardship. Potential for subgroups, space to summarize and cull…

  • Michael MarandaPoor Richard are you at all familiar with wagn? see http://wagn.org— it’s more relevant if you can get to the level of wagneer. It’s billed as a variety of wiki, and as a application platform. I’ve known the folks involved for many years, and have been serving on their board. they are an NPO. (GrassCommons.org)

    wagn.org

    team-driven websitesWagn helps creators work together. Most web teams are badly …See More
  • Mark Dilley Wagn is a great wiki, very powerful – a semantic MediaWiki farm http://referata.com is also available.
  • Poor Richard I was considering referata, but I’ve hesitated because I am a little underwhelmed with the mediawiki semantic extensions. I wouldn’t get into wagn if not ontology-aware.
  • Mark Dilley I believe Wagn is ontology aware
  • Helene Finidori That’s the problem maybe? Many wikis and apps are just ‘ontology aware’, or ‘folksonomy aware’ through tags or keywords. Not many are ontology generating through hyperlinks (linked data) that are representative of activity and actual emergence. Not the perception thereof… At the beginning of emerging memes, tags are not very usefull because lost in the noise, or struggling to find an expression. Just look at the commons tag. What turns out is creative commons…
  • Michael Maranda We can ask Ethan McCutchen the manner or extent to which Wagn is “ontology aware”
  • Poor Richard MM, Helene’s qualification of “ontology generating” should be the operative one. Thanks, Helene.
  • Michael Maranda Not yet convinced of that, I am afraid.
  • Michael Maranda Or it is unclear what the purposes and uses are of these ontologies.

  • Poor Richard Michael, ontology (info sci) and linked-data can be hard to get your head around if you don’t have fairly recent software engineering familiarity. Here is the best explanation I’ve seen in a while:

    Open Ontology, by Paola Di Maio

    While different definitions for ontology exist, it can be said that Ontologies are conceptual and semantic frameworks representing models of the world, as well as explicit and complete knowledge representations of a model of reality, expressed using different formalisms and artifacts. When trying to understand what makes up an ontology, different authors have different views. Mike Uschold et al. say that an ontology may take a variety of forms, but it will necessarily include a vocabulary of terms and some specification of their meaning, such as definitions and an indication of how concepts are interrelated, which collectively impose a structure on the domain and constrain the possible interpretations of terms [9]. Particularly in Web based environments, an ontology delimits the boundary of the system’s knowledge and functional domain, and serves as conceptual and semantic reference for software development. In practical terms, entities and attributes, classes, objects and properties, as well as data models, data schemas, metadata and vocabularies and their extensions, when ‘normalized’ all contain information that models a view of the world, for the purpose of a given system, and constitute the representation of such domain, in short, an ontology.

    The expression ‘open ontology’ is not new, and it is used generically to reference ontologies which are in the public domain, and sometimes to ontologies that have been developed using collaborative processes.

    In our work, we have come across the need to define and qualify, at least to some extent the degree of ontology ‘openness’:

    To be ‘useful’ (fit for purpose) in complex loosely coupled scenarios, where the cooperation of diverse and geographically dispersed agents is required, it is necessary for the ontology to display at least the following properties ….

    http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Ontology

    p2pfoundation.net

    While different definitions for ontology exist, it can be said that Ontologies a…See More
  • Helene Finidori Sorry I didn’t get to read the whole thread… On ontologies, Shirky’s ‘Ontology is overrated maybe’? Netention? Hat off to Seth! Dante-Gabryell, if you manage to get the ball rolling on transforming the pearl tree of alternative memes into linked data of evolving memes from wikipedia or P2P foundation as we have discussed several times, through a collective, so that an ontology of P2P linked memes actually emerges from our discussion, great!
  • Michael Maranda I have been paying attention, dont get me wrong. I think there is some wishful thinking here in this application of ontologies. Are we trying to make the brainwork automated? What is lost? Is what emerges from these automata folksonomy or ontology? Do we have human intervention in the curation of these ontologies? On what basis? (again, with what purposes? for the latter let me mull your last post a little more)
  • Poor Richard MM, the only place in PeerPoint I had a chance to get into detail about how ontology and linked data are applied is the section on Identity Management. That is ontology/linked-data through and through, and the engineers in the W3C RWW community working group, among many other active software engineers, totally agree.

  • Poor RichardThere may be ways for folksonomy to feed ontology. I’m agnostic about it right now. I recently posted at Y Worlds Working Group Alpha:Greets, tawhuac

    I’m glad you picked up on that P2P fb thread. There’s more on this topic in the Next Net and Global Survival Google Groups, and I’ve also been tossing it around with folks at the W3C Read Write Web Community Group and various mail lists.

    The trouble with folksonomies like you get from diigo or the like is no category/subcategory organization. You might impose this later, perhaps, but after the fact the semantic relationships between tags are not as clear as when you first assign them to a tweet, web page, link or whatever. I may be wrong about this, but it seems important at this point.

    Using Diigo as an example, it has some great features, not the least of which is poping its tagging dialog up in whatever your active window may be and automatically capturing the url, etc for you.

    What Diigo and other similar apps don’t do:

    1. let you access your entire existing folksonomy, alphabetized, in the dialog box or auto-complete if you manually type a tag. So you wind up with many variants of the essentially the same tag.

    2. let you hierarchically group tags into categories or sub categories, and define those on the fly

    3. let you define crosslinks between tags, categories, and subcategories (tags and subcategories may relate to more than one main category)

    4. they don’t publish the data to RDF or some linked-data format.

    What do you folks think?

  • Helene Finidori Actually, I think Shirky is one that knows what he is talking about… He speaks from one vantage point and you Richard probably from another… Anyway Michael… actually I think the ‘application of ontology’ is to enable us to see what emerges and to ‘orient’ emerging data and patterns so we humans can parse it and make sense of it… I see this as a help to navigation, exploration and discovery… Of course we have human curation in the process… it’s the whole point… bring things to visibility of humans… The negation of the black box! Our problem with data and knowledge is access and entry point. You have to know from where to enter and start to navigate…
  • Michael Maranda Thats’ my point in several different posts. yes. But I think we already have much of the tech at hand, and I think we are inflating the value of concepts like the semantic web. I see myriad projects starting with very similar aims, and overlap, and a bit too much attachment.
  • Michael Maranda (last response was to Helene Finidori primarily)

  • Poor RichardHelene, I agree with your points about ontology, but have to strongly disagree with you about Shirky’s.  In 10 or 20 years with strong AI in the reach of the open software community (as opposed to the military), our computers would be able to crawl the web and learn language and infer meaning the same way a child does, perhaps. At present, projects like IBM’s Watson rely on ontologies and expert systems.

    “The sources of information for Watson include encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, newswire articles, and literary works. Watson also used databases, taxonomies, and ontologies. Specifically, DBPedia, WordNet, and Yago were used.[20]” (Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_%28computer%29 )

    Also see a paper by one of Watson’s architects: Foundations of Ontological Analysis by Chris Welty, IBM Watson Research Center

    http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CD0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cs.vassar.edu%2Ffaculty%2Fwelty%2Fpresentations%2FIBM-02.pps&ei=lbOBUMCjB4Ho8QTC_IHQBA&usg=AFQjCNE-dfzVAXX2II3wtV4M00UyFyjOGg

    en.wikipedia.org

    Watsonis anartificial intelligencecomputer system capable of answering questions…See More
  • Poor Richard Sophisticated search engines like Google can find patterns but they can infer very little meaning aside from dumb correlations without consulting ontologies. Ontologies are models of our knowledge of the world created by humans for computers to use in order to do tasks we want them to do.
  • Michael MarandaPoor Richard what sort of claims is Shirkey making that you find problematic? if best addressed in another thread, please do
  • Poor Richard Part of the reason for common misconceptions and lack of wide understanding about ontologies is the primitive state of development of the tools available at our level to create and apply them. Most people who are not software engineers in the ontology …See More
  • Helene Finidori Ah Richard, I just see you comment on debategraph. Lots of potential in debategraph… some serious work to be done on the interface though…
  • Helene Finidori Richard? Misconception of a potential because lack of tools? Really? It reminds me of 3G bound to fail in 2000 because of lack of adequate device and software -seen from Sweden first hand at the time…
  • Poor RichardHelene, I’m not understanding your point. Have you read all my remarks in this thread?
  • Poor Richard Michael, I’ll confine my critique to Shirky’s remarks about ontology. He basically says all we need is folksonomy (chaotic tagging) and our surprisingly brilliant computers can figure everything out from that. He says for example “The strategy of tagging — free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints — seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.” For one thing, you can’t create meaningful linked data sets from thousands of slightly different tags that mean the same thing, or identical tags that mean thousands of different things. Our surprising computers would choke. Remember, a single system of categorization (in Shirky’s universe a giant global tag cloud) must be shared by hundreds of millions of people. The only way to make sense of that many tags is, unsurprisingly, an ontology. Tags are just words. We already have words. Words don’t solve the problem by themselves. We need dictionaries to go with the words– that’s one of the things an ontology is, a dictionary/encyclopedia for computers.
  • Michael Maranda I imagine some of this is more in the inspirational realm of possibilities. I have the same well grounded reservations per folksonomies. I see more value in the communities of practice establishing these as common assets. I’ll have to follow up sometime on a model that aims to bridge over some of the difficulties.
  • Poor Richard We have the collective knowledge of the crowd, of humanity, in Wikipedia. In ten years the volume of data in such resources will be several orders of magnitude greater. But the present limits of a computers ability to help us digest, cross-reference, c…See More
  • Ethan McCutchen Hi all. As to the question of whether Wagn is “ontology generating”, we’d like to think so. At least, that’s what we’re aiming for. Naming, renaming, denoting, referring, contexualizing… it’s all at the heart of our approach to creating community databases organically.
  • Poor RichardEthan, thanks for dropping in. Does Wagn output any RDF or linked-data or such?
  • Michael Maranda While waiitng for Ethan or Gerry Gleason to weigh in — I believe these outputs are something that can be established via wagneering, or constructing some WQL… but aside from that there is a lot of interesting items in the pipeline that are close to what we are seeking, if not already present.
  • Mark Dilley Wagn is powerful – it has been 6 years since the inception of the idea and I still struggle with it. Wiki+Tagging
  • Michael Maranda And a new release was pushed out today ,, they are moving forward to an exciting model w upcoming 2.0
  • Michael Maranda The Q is more what it takes or what strategies are best, because I think it is not presently built in but can be readily achieved on the new framework. but thats all prob best for a separate thread.
  • Ethan McCutchen We don’t currently have an RDF exporter, though Gerry Gleason is currently working on a general XML export solution.

  • Ethan McCutchen shoot, typing with a sleeping infant on my lap, and his foot just submitted that last response prematurely smileI would say that wagn is more RDF-like in the way it structures data than any other solution I know, so the export is really no significant c…See More

  • Michael Maranda RDF is in XML, so it is really a matter of setting up cards/nesting etc..?
  • Michael Maranda I’m falling more on the side of ontology than folksonomy in this sort of endeavor.
  • Michael Maranda So, it is fair to say we can populate datasets based on our ontologies and we can cobble together export ability fairly easily

  • Ethan McCutchenyes, that’s fair to say.I would say that once we have an XML renderer, it would be very straightforward to build an RDF/XML renderer that inherits from it.

  • Gerry Gleason My theory for Wagn Xml has been that if you put the information into Xml, there is much support for translating to any variation of xml with the same info (I’m talking about XSLT stylesheet, supported by most browsers now). Json is similar, once it is in Json, you can rearrange stuff to any target formatting.
  • Gerry Gleason I picked Wagn to work on because it mixes relational and free format data better than anything I’ve even seen. I’ve been working to add the format rendering, and more recently towards taking data into Wagn in the same formats.
  • Gerry Gleason As I read through more of the background in this thread, I think there is a lot of confusion about what ontologies and semantic web constructions will do for you. I have yet to read anything compelling about ontology in the information systems sense. …See More
  • Gerry Gleason To put it another way, when you talk about ontology this way, you are talking about a solution in search of a problem, and it isn’t really a solution to anything. Dante is pointing to a way forward, creating spaces for the work to connect and interlin…See More
  • Gerry Gleason Another interesting project is Ward Cunningham’s “Smallest Federated Wiki project …See More

  • Poor RichardGerry, Ethan, and interested others, I agree that providing XML rendering is a good thing, but I doubt that RDF can be automatically parsed out of generic XML. ( RDF is a data model often expressed in XML syntax, but also in other types of syntax such as N3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

    en.wikipedia.org

    TheResource Description Framework(RDF) is a family ofWorld Wide Web Consortium(W…See More
  • Poor RichardEthan McCutchen: “I think of it [RDF?] less as an export than as one format of a query result. Wagn has a query language (WQL) which is, to my mind, very much like navigating RDF.” Sounds like a useful feature, but I am also wondering in this topic thread how to parse entire collections of existing content into RDF and linked-data with some kind of overarching ontological framework.
  • Poor RichardGerry Gleason “As I read through more of the background in this thread, I think there is a lot of confusion about what ontologies and semantic web constructions will do for you….Can anyone tell me what successes or results have come from this work?”…See More

  • Poor Richard@Gerry, “when you talk about ontology this way, you are talking about a solution in search of a problem, and it isn’t really a solution to anything.”I beg to differ with you and numerous others who feel this way. I have given a variety of arguments …See More

  • Michael Maranda As long as we’re in FB threads, I feel doomed to repeating.
  • Helene Finidori Doomed to repeating only if you/we, everybody keeps opening conversations all over the place… smilesmile But that’s how we create a diversity of contact points and a diversity of response… so repetition is probably not a feature ‘imposed’ by FB… but r…See More
  • Helene Finidori And that’s what we need to deal with and manage… conversations that are scattered and asynchronized vbecause this is how we want them to be… open and evolutionary…
  • Michael Maranda Well, part of the repetition is because we are using this threaded space which we cannot curate to our purposes. It should be expected that there will be people new to the conversation in general and in the specific formations here. This space is not set up to receive and orient well. I would argue this is in fact imposed by a carelessness or more pointedly, lack of concern for these issues of groupness.
  • Helene Finidori Yes so we need to redispatch/segment our conversations contents into chunks that can be reprocessed… What I’ve been talking about and trying to get some development done for a while… with to date Markus A. O. Loponen up to the task!
  • Michael Maranda Indeed. And the rationale for such agreements has to be part of the orientation for anyone arriving.

  • Poor RichardHelene Finidorii: “we need to redispatch/segment our conversations contents into chunks that can be reprocessed.”Not a bad problem definition. I am imagining a semantic wiki space that includes additional collaborative functions. Each wiki page migh…See More

  • Gerry Gleason The Open Ontology article is great too. I think we can go further with that and do something necessary. In the space of the metacurrency project, something like what is described here is necessary as a foundation of what we where calling Open Rules, …See More
  • Gerry Gleason BTW, comments are a standard feature in Wagn. It using a special code in the permissions system. If you can “comment” on the card by the permission setting, then a comment box shows up on the botten in the “open” view. Most Wagn’s also will have ru…See More
  • Gerry Gleason If I were automating the migration of a mediawiki to wagn, I would probably turn the talk namespace into +discussion cards attached to the base name as migrated.
  • Poor Richard I discussed commenting above because of our shared experience here on fb with so many parallel and discontinuous threads on related topics within and between groups and also venues outside of fb. The most generic metaphor for this may be micro blogging…See More
  • Gerry Gleason I realize that, and so I would want to have features to ‘pull’ comments from any source and record how and when that is done. I also think we should look to Ward’s SFW for initial protocols for doing that. FB may not like ‘comment pulling’, but if th…See More
  • Poor Richard Midiawiki’s talk space is good but doesn’t feed into a trans-wiki-page stream, does it? I think the only way of aggregating talk from multiple pages is via email notification.
  • Gerry Gleason And don’t get me wrong, I love imagineering and find it to be productive preparatory work, but I really want to be building things. I want to be building things in the gift economy and I do possess important currencies in the design and coding of thes…See More
  • Poor Richard I appreciate your inputs here, Gerry. This is a big, long, conversation. smile
  • Chris Watkins I think we might have discussed Semantic MediaWiki with Michel, and from memory, he liked the idea. Installing it will require effort, though and they don’t have the resources for it.
    We’ve installed SMW on Appropedia (when we started a compendium of m…See More
  • Mark Dilley I think we if we could raise a couple hunded dollars, that would get us upgraded… will ask around

  • Poor Richard Just tacking a link here: http://p2pfoundation.net/Prospective_EcoSocial_Ontology“The Prospective Eco-Social Ontology (PESO) is an approach toward interoperable taxonomic systems for navigation and concatenation of diverse content libraries and topical threads in the realm of “common good” environmental and cultural regeneration work. The idea sprouted from designs for the BrowsEarth content aggregation platform.”

    p2pfoundation.net

    Basic concept: create adaptable shared reference structures and symbology for cr…See More

 

Michael Maranda
Ontology/Ontologies … we use the term in a variety of senses. Some inspired by or in context of programming, some in programmatic approaches to semantics for content. We have the adjacent term folksonomy. We have some philosophical minds among us I am sure, and I’ll let them speak for themselves, and we have social theory and observation as further sources. We also have patterns and pattern languages with roots in architectural theory (Alexander) and with some modification to coding practice. We’d do well to acknowledge the different purposes, strategies and language for each of these, which are somewhat overlapping.

Like · · · Friday at 8:18am near Ann Arbor, MI

  • Kyle Sykes, John Kellden and 2 others like this.
  • Michael Maranda Going to the root of ontology, and very central to my own work which is a blend of most fo the above (making me rather sensitive to the ambiguities of this discourse) leaning heavily upon social theory/observation in response to what I see as gaps that often stem from ideology or slant. Without burdening everyone with the complexities of the full modelof Shared, Layered and Open Stewardship I will highlight one aspect of the ontology of that work, and here I mean Ontology as mode of being – philosophical and social. Looking at social interactions, and the social formations that undergird them I distinguish in pragmatic terms four layers (you may quickly also relate this to Internet architecture by analogy). Also I am employing a coding mentality of “Acts As” rather than “is a” …
  • Michael Maranda What I wish to make clear for design work and for providing a vision and possible framework for coordination and collaboration are appropriate layers of stewardship and the being of different social formations. (I know I open myself to argument, and have had many of them already.)
  • Michael Maranda In short we must make room for a view of layered stewardship from the vantage of different social functions and social formations. Persons – Everybody. Groups, an are with the widest range of social formation from rather informal to incorporated, with attention to a range of nesting operations. Orgs with many subgroups, Organizations of Organizations and groups, etc. And finally Networks/Fields. The question that led me to this begins with the appropriate siting of stewardship and the necessity of openness… that any functional domain requires freedom to find alternate provider for that function and the ability to DIY or form an alternate body when desired.
  • Michael Maranda I offer this in contrast to models that ignore the variety of social formations, reducing us to individuals. Indeed, we are individuals, but we don’t have to lose anything or feel reduced by our participation in other social formations, and indeed we generally retain the freedom to participate in multiple such formations, more so in healthier societies.
  • Poor Richard Disambiguation: My use of the term ontology here is specific to information systems which was my topic. If there is an ongoing problem with ambiguity I can adopt Wikipedia’s format: ontology (information systems). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_%28information_science%29

    en.wikipedia.org

    Incomputer scienceandinformation science, anontologyformally represents knowledg

    e as a set of concepts within adomain, and the relationships among those concepts. It can be used toreasonabout the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.
  • Michael Maranda As I noted sometimes this is a simple and reactive bias. Perhaps influenced by strands of Libertarianism, or at least reinforced by it. Often it is a reaction against injustices and enclosures perpetrated by others or at other layers. We have adopted the general philosophy of “route around” in many such cases where the institutions and groups are not serving well nor serving in a meaningfully inclusive manner. However, we should not deny to ourselves the ability to establish structures as and when we see fit, with the express freedom to likewise take them down when they no longer serve our purpose.
  • Michael Maranda Many is the time I have seen P2P architectures which are solely concerned with how we interact as persons, and with scant attention, and frequently a rejection of the need for instruments for the groups. This is not me calling out anyone here in this group, I a not saying I see it here. But I am hoping that you here also see these issues, and that if we can present a unified theory, it will take my points into account.
  • Poor Richard I dealt with these issues a bit in http://almanac2010.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/organizations/Subsidiarity is relevant, too.

    almanac2010.wordpress.com

    Last updated 10/4/2012 [I probably should have titled this “Hacking the Organiza

    tion”. What follows is not a primer of organizational design but simply a back-of-the-envelope sketch of how a number…
  • David Braden This is an important topic Michael. The whole system (and I mean whole to mean everything) is built up from individual interactions. Humans operate primarily as groups. These are superorganisms operating within the system in the same way that ant and bee colonies are superorganisms. Groups then intereact at these different levels you describe.There are pros and cons to the internal structure of groups from the point of view of the individual. From the point of view of the whole, what is important is what flows from the interactions. Nutrient flows through an ecosystem, the flow of goods and services through a market, the flow of information through a network.The point of groups is how they allow individuals to participate in the flows . . . how they increase or decrease the quantity and quality of interactions . . . how they increase or decrease the volume of the flows.
  • Michael Maranda Yes, thank you David I appreciate your input here. Indeed, the recognition of groups is a recognition of dimensions of our sociality and of our existing institutions and practices. Anything that excludes them will give only a partial picture.
  • Michael Maranda Picking up again from the other thread … what i am arriving at are purposive ontologies. They need to be tied to fields of practice or concern. They become a common asset for those acting in that arena. Certain Ont/ sets help navigate borders of fields or between them.
  • Poor Richard Ontologies encapsulate knowledge and expertise in various domains. It is important for people with the relevant knowledge and expertise in each domain to populate the ontology for that domain, but it is equally important for all the domains to use ontologies that are constructed according to certain common standards so that they are interoperable and form a whole. For example, Wikipedia enforces various standards and requires that data be entered into Wikipedia in proper wiki syntax via the the wiki editor. You can’t just paste any old Word doc into Wikipedia.
  • Michael Maranda Yes. That is clear. The Ontology is a different matter than the syntax for a particular platform/tool. Each Ontology is a standard for content in a domain. Ontologies should conform to interchange standards, and platforms should habe adequate facilities for import/export according to interchange formats.
  • Michael Maranda Certain classes of object will still have their own ontologies some elements being applicable cross-field, and others specific to fields/sub-fields. It is useful to have a place or places (& method) where reference ontologies are declared, stored and shared. Even for given Object type in an Ontology, we may therefore find many versions of that Ontology as a field evolves.
  • Michael Maranda One model for organizing across ontologies groups 5 buckets – each bucket a type of data, where we may find reference to various object/ontology standards of that grouping, convenient acronym: S.C.O.P.E. Stories/Solutions, Conversations, Organizations, People (persons), Events.
  • Michael Maranda You may imagine that for example .. “Solutions” in one domain may require a different data model than in another, and would specify particular aspects for it’s Ontology.
  • Poor Richard Take “person” for example. Tha’ts an ontology (or I probably should say sub-ontology or mini-ontology) that Y Worlds is working on. Obviously person is an object common to most ontological domains of knowledge. The open ontology approach is to have a core ontology that is extensible and to customize it for if each knowledge domain. Or perhaps multiple domains can share a person model that has enough attributes to serve them all with some attributes being unused in some domains. One possible candidate for a core person model is the one needed for basic identification and access control across interacting web applications. One commenter on the hex model wondered what implicit assumptions I was making about a person. Would a robot qualify? Of course it all depends on the context you need the model for.
  • Michael Maranda Indeed, and in so many cases a group, organization or field will have need for particulars about a person-data-object… which are clearly extensions of a core, but even so deserve to be declared as a standard/extension.
  • Gerry Gleason Poor Richard, I don’t think we should explore this further here, but I would dispute this, “Ontologies encapsulate knowledge and expertise in various domains.” as being a claim made by advocates of these formal ontological systems. I’ve yet to say any that credibly deliver on that claim. If you want to debate that further, we should create a different thread for it.
    As a developer and systems expert, I don’t find these systems compelling enough to want to use them in any system I would work on developing.
    From the standpoint of ontology in the sense that Michael is exploring here, this is a question of group personality and choice. If you and your network are developing it, then you will attempt to use formal ontologies and explore a lot of existing projects and code that go that way. I and other have made other choices and you see some of that explored in the links. Formal ontologies are of no help in resolving the high level design questions like this, there is no ontology of ontology to explore it with.
    From the standpoint of actually building something collaboratively in this space, we have to first have a space for those who have made enough investment and commitment to matter in the outcome. If you’re not designing and building code, I don’t care what you think of formal ontologies. I’m not that invested in this specific community but I have a long time association with peer to peer as an open field. If I’m doing development work on this project, I can guarantee it will involve Wagn. If Poor Richard is involved it will involve formal ontologies (at least until he sees the light smile ), and he and I will have to figure out how to come to an understanding.
  • Gerry Gleason BTW, I would say the claim that “Wagn is ontologically aware” represents the fact that Wagn is very effective at creating ontological spaces, at naming things in a natural way. That means you just encode your ontology in the wagn namespace and rely on its own namespace semantics. These semantics also make the content available as RESTful resources. The Wagn namespace is a hierachy of potentially nested resources.
    I think it would be relatively easy to implement ontologies on Wagn as it is, we just don’t have a clear use case or any demand for it.
    With Wagn, you don’t need a lot of semantic translation, you can just name things how you want. Names and semantics are only formalized for Wagn development, for Wagneer and developers who are extending Wagn and naming things in a global space of reference.
  • Helene FinidoriI’m wondering if the very constitution of a ‘pull-platform’ around social objects with graphs of relationships and visualization of what emerges does not de facto create an ontology… Because what we are after is having visibility on what is ‘out there’ in an evolutionary way -i.e as it emerges, on many dimensions.What is important I think is not to get lost into making too abstract/finished/closed images of reality. We need to concentrate our efforts in getting a clearer image of evolving reality that WE can interpret to take action.I think to try and get back to various streams of conversations here and there, that folksonomies have the downside of loosing the gems in the noise. And that things emerging are not necessarily visible in plain sight. Pre-established or as-we-go ‘declarative’ ontologies (like you describe Michael somewhere… require a shared discipline and might not be able to capture emergence in real time (otherwise we would have clearer pictures by now). Capturing relationships is probably the way to go, through linked data. But hybrid solutions are interesting because they provide the markers from which the holes can be filled by the reality of what is unfolding…
  • Gerry Gleason Poor Richard, thanks for the link to your P2P article. Haven’t read all of it yet, but wanted to comment on this: “A PGICI would have to be funded by the end users, and it SHOULD BE. But there is thus far no working business model for a crowd-funded public project of such size and scope. Projects of that size and scope are the province of governments and global industries alone, with perhaps a few philanthropic examples in the public health and humanitarian sectors.”
    That may be true, but I have a different response to it. So? P2P is pretty new, the Internet and Wiki and … all very new. Social media, etc.
    All it says is that we will have to first search for new forms of organization, new organizational processes. Much of our work will be explorative, experimental, tentative, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have much to build on. Articles like yours are part of that, thanks, as is the practice and history of cooperative organizations. It is telling is that we need to evolve new organizational forms, new modes of productions. It is a challenge to be sure, but all it good.
    I’m going to finish your article before saying much more, but one thing I do want to respond to. Having leadership and structure does not mean that the organization is not peer to peer. That’s one of the reasons I like the language about “vessels”. I have a sailboat, and when we take it out, I am responsible for everyone on board. In the context of “being on mission”, there will be operational leadership if only for coordination and a single source of clear signals for actions and transitions. The leader is a peer, and each person on a team is following a collective leadership, each has to lead within a particular scope of action. This is based on skills and experience, but most directly on “right placement”, being in position to act and with the knowledge to act rightly. The latter being derived from the former in large part.
  • Gerry Gleason Well said, Helene. That what attracts me to Ward’s “Federated Wiki” (linked in another thread), I would call it a ‘pull-platform’. Like github and similar. Then if you want to build on something from a stream, you just pull it and rely on the backlinks to track the source. If the source takes updates (is not write once, read many), then the source can pull them (and/or be requested to pull them). When you go to formalize part of an ontology, you can pull from folksomic sources. The OED is built this way.
  • David Braden I like your approach Helene. Not being a platform designer, I get lost in the technical language. Being a user of social media I am continually frustrated by the impulse to divide ourselves up into interest groups. New sites attract people, they share that on which they agree, then there is nothing left to talk about and the site becomes inactive.The ontology I would propose is that the world we experience is a single pattern of flows built up from the relationships among the many elements. Any loss of a relationship or any gain of a relationship changes the pattern . . . literally changes the world we experience . . . so we cannot know the overall effect of a proposed change unless we consider the entire set of relationships.
  • David BradenIf you guys can design a place where we can have a discussion across interest and expertise about the way the world works, I am there.Relationships are built from the exchange of value and the multitude of individual exchanges create the flows. Nothing exists unless it fits within the flows. Nothing can exist unless it receives what it needs to live from the flows. What value will your platform deliver to attract participation across interest and expertise?
  • Michael Maranda (Caveat, with visitors since yesterday and through the next few days my bandwidth has been/will be limitied) Gerry Gleason I think I have come to better understanding of what Poor Richard has been communicating. The thread starts out with the Singular/Plural here for a reason… which is precisely what is implied in “ontology of ontologies” … Ontologies are by definition formal. The point that is important is a group needs to achieve formalization on aspects of it’s language and processes (with room for revisiting, of course). Going in the direction of Field – it is important for any number of groups to achieve similar formalizations between them.
  • Michael Maranda Gerry Gleason you say: “Having leadership and structure does not mean that the organization is peer to peer.” I presume you also mean it does not nec. mean that it isnt?
  • Gerry Gleason Yes, exactly. Opens the question about what makes it one or the other, and I think it relates to consent. It is a collective choice to situationally recognize a leader. How does that choice happen? In a hierarchy, the leader is typically appointed these days, but these systems are rooted in power over scarce resources, often resources made scarce by those in power.
  • Gerry Gleason Michael, by “singular/plural”, you mean the individual/group discussion at the top of this?
    If I understand, I totally agree, and apologize in advance if I misinterpreted anything above. I may have missed it.
    Not sure I agree about ontologies, unless we are meaning different things by formalism as well. I know you and I and many here agree that no formalism fully captures any complete reality, but that they are also all so necessary and a fundamental process of human beings as linguistic beings.
  • Michael Maranda Nor any word captured the world, they are but devices.
  • Poor Richard Apropos of this topic I’ll repeat a link on Open Ontology, emphasis on the open, for reference: http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_OntologyI acknowledge that ontology as an abstraction or general concept overlaps much more than information science (my per…See More

    p2pfoundation.net

    While different definitions for ontology exist, it can be said that Ontologies a

    re conceptual and semantic frameworks representing models of the world, as well as explicit and complete knowledge representations of a model of reality, expressed using different formalisms and artifacts. When trying to…
  • Poor Richard Gerry Gleason, I agree that consent is one of the key criteria of peerism. I give others in the intro (About) to this group and in the article you mention, and the literature on this is extensive, esp in the P2PF wiki and blog.

 

Michael Maranda
PeerPoint Revisited
  • Michael Maranda Quickscanned it having read it in past. But thought I would take a more disciplined approach since we are of late in more direct dialogue here, if you will indulge me.
  • Michael Maranda First off the bat – Poor Richard– wondering in light of my discursus under the Ontology thread which you have just read, as to whether you think PeerPoint needs space articulated for a variety of Peer types? namely, that not only are individuals nodes/peers, but organizations/groups would also need tools and conceptwork in the peerage. or point me to where it is addressed in the document. Even if it is addressed, I think it needs more prominence.
  • Michael Maranda PeerPoint — what do you want to do with it, how can we host a PeerPoint discourse, effort and process that allows easier entry? Or do you think it is premature? By this I mean a number of ancillary documents and chunks and a meaningful web-presence centered upon evolving this, attracting others to it, and advancing the field generally.
  • Poor Richard “PeerPoint needs space articulated for a variety of Peer types” I mention this briefly in terms of needing a variety of “on-ramps” and numerous other references to the varieties of different communities of interest or stakeholders, etc, but I didn’t develop it in a focused way yet. Good poiint.
  • Michael Maranda I am not here to pester you on these, but if there is something I can do to help, i will do what i can.
  • Michael Maranda (Direct editing the document is not so enticing to me… helping put an expression of it into a new and more inviting space is more so..)
  • Poor Richard My sense was that a wiki platform was really needed to take PeerPoint forward. I almost decided on referata but then I balked. Not sure why. Maybe I just needed a rest — or a push. smile
  • Michael Maranda Push.
  • Michael Maranda Well, rest also. Health and clear mind.
  • Poor Richard “if there is something I can do to help, i will do what i can.” Please add paragraphs or pages to PeerPoint about this. You seem to have a good picture/map of this.
  • Poor Richard Ooops didn’t see your other comment. Well, if you write some paragraphs or pages I can append them to PeerPoint as well as what ever other venue you want to use. Lately I’ve just been tossing stuff into PeerPoint to rearrange later, once there is a wiki.
  • Michael Maranda Let’s help you settle on and into a wiki then. Is the obstacle energy and time, selection of wiki, domain, hosting?
  • Poor Richard All of the above. Based on what I know at this moment I would go with referata because of the semantic features. There is a hosted site. If you can get a referata wiki up and running it need not be PeePoint specific. It could be P2P or “open collaborative football practice”. There’s a good chance there is an existing referata wiki that has similar topics and would welcome us. That might be ideal, especially if they already have a good use of the semantic extensions, a good site look and organization, and a knowledgeable user community. If you agree with those assumptions, job one would be to search/browse existing referata wikis to see if any would be a suitable “hoem” for our various activities. (BTW I would be using the P2P Foundation wiki if I were not dead set on semantic capabilities. I also strongly favor wysiwyg wikis but referata/mediawiki is not such.)
  • Michael Maranda Not yet familiar with referata.
  • Poor Richardhttp://www.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page

    www.referata.com

    Referata offers hosting of semantic wikis, allowing you to add, structure and st

    ore data so it can be managed, shared, browsed and analyzed in as many ways as you choose.
  • Michael Maranda yes, looking into it
  • Poor Richard I emailed the Referata admins to ask if they knew of existing wikis with similar topic coverage. Their FAQ says there are about 750 existing Referata wikis, but I didn’t fiind a directory of them (which seem pretty slack).
  • Michael Maranda I am ambivalent re referata. I invite you to get to know wagn a bit. I am urging one of the main contributors to the code to log on to fb and engage us here.
  • Michael Maranda Doing my slowread of PP – I am struck by a thought that has recurred many times in these contexts – do we need X to build X? do we need peerpoint to build peerpoint? at minimum we have to model the processes through cobbled and found tech…
  • Michael Maranda We covered very similar ground in Coalition of the Willing working group — folk such as Fabio Barone, Mark RoestCharley Quinton, Chris Watkins, Timothy RaynerGerry Gleason, were heavily involved. Not sure who else in this FB group, offhand.
  • Gerry Gleason First focus on the social processes you are intending to produce. Technology is secondary. General purpose technology will need a lot more work on the part of the participants, but the users will be called on to interpret the ins and outs of a particular technology. Therein is the rub you are up against. You want to be inclusive, but the group has to buy in to the platform. None of the platforms are compelling enough in their raw form to offer a clear path to a solution, so you try to find a good fit.
  • Gerry Gleason In building Wagn we have borrowed the best from Wiki technology, and it is a very good Wiki even if you don’t need Wagn’s unique features. The unique features are what enable us to build Wagn into something more that a content platform, a Wiki with data. By extending it, you can build full on custom apps, and have the Wiki functionality as a content management base for your application. In my view, this is what gives a path from a dedicated community building a wiki database, and an application built to attract a larger community into the collaborative spaces built by the core team.
  • Poor Richard “First focus on the social processes you are intending to produce.” Gerry, I completely agree with you, Michael and others on that. That is already going on in triplicate, though, and its not my area of expertise or personal focus. So I depend on the civilizing influence and social intelligence that you good folks bring to the table. Likewise there is piecewise work on open technology all over the place, but few places for the end-to-end, soup-to-nuts, solitaire-to-enterprise-management scope, ongoing conversation about requirements and specifications. W3C, IEEE, etc handle universal standards in the middle, but end-user needs (from the teenager to the global NGO) and application designs are not handled in such a universal fashion which IMO retards development of the future-class tools and infrastructure we need to battle the kleptocrats and corpoRats.
  • Michael Maranda indeed!
  • Poor Richard PeerPoint aims (how successfully is another matter) to offer low participation barriers and near-term value while simultaneously looking forward to a not-too-distant future when the net is the computer, the web is the OS, and yet every peer node (and its user) has complete control and ownership of how and how much to participate. In that paradigm we also need applications that have deep and mature feature sets and which are all highly intelligent and interoperable. It is fashionable nowadays to deprecate “high design” and hope for emergence. Contrary to popular belief emergence isn’t how we got to this point and that isn’t sufficient to take us forward as rapidly as we need to go to head off global neofeudalism and environmental catastrophe.
  • Mark Dilley Yaron Koren is a main developer of Semantic MediaWiki and runs referata – I like it because I am always a fan of the simplest thing that works. Shall I invite him to this thread or no?
  • Michael Maranda is it simplest because it works?
  • Michael Maranda My criteria: does it do what is desired? and will we be able to extend and interoperate? and with what degree of complexity to do so?
  • Mark Dilley That doesn’t resonate – what do you mean by “it works?”
  • Michael Maranda i mean, it is already operational. Rather a contrast between the ideas we have which are yet vaporware
  • Mark Dilley I guess in that sense. I am a bludgeoner, move to referata for as long as needed, move again, if needed. Does Wagn offer a WikiFarm? if so, that is a different question.
  • Michael Maranda meaning an easy path for install/hosting? (if so, yes)
  • Michael Maranda you can set up a wagn right away on cloudstore http://wagn.org/try_wagnand I think it is free presently (create cloudstore acct)

  • Michael Maranda was about to do an instal to test
  • Mark DilleyYaron Koren – wanted to see what your thoughts were on this thread – might be TL;DR
  • Michael Maranda Problem is it is this thread and a few adjacent … grin
  • Chris Watkins Yep, I’m a bit lost… smile
    I think that Referata makes sense, as it’s using Semantic Mediawiki which has a good sized user base (and is built on MediaWiki which has a very big user base).
  • Gerry Gleason Mediawiki is popular and that is a point in its favor, but it is also more purpose built for Wikipedia. I don’t think it is actually a good fit for many organizations that use it.
  • Michel Bauwens personally love mediawiki, very easy for non-tech people
  • Gerry Gleason I don’t want to underemphasize that. That people who are part of the core group already know it is key. Every platform has a learning curve, and it is often hard for non-specialists to evaluate how well they will like it once past the learning curve.
    Actually, what I mean by “social structure first” is that the information system is being implemented as part of the systems supports of an actual working group. You convene a working group first, then the personalities and commitments of those gathered are something of a starting point. It also means that social network is a consideration. Things like Mediawiki and Drupal or wordpress already have large communities that the development teams have to serve. If the folks building referata are interested enough to come over and join this conversation, that’s a much bigger plus going forward than a wide user base (working alpha or beta release of better is also important as Michael suggested).
    My investment in Wagn means that all I need is a small team of ruby and javascript/css people and I can make it do whatever we can design. Each of those who gather to build this will have similar commitments.
    Finally what I mean is that the social systems design and experimentation is what drives the design. Very few people are deep enough in both the information and social systems to do this work, but I suspect that there are more of those here than we know.
    In other words, there is no better place to convene such a working group than here, not meaning FB, but out of a conversation like this. If mediawiki is what the community is familiar with, then create one for the community now and we can all learn to bludgeon the data there while some of us gather to build the next platform.
  • Gerry Gleason It’s really a side topic, but I want to point out another budding opportunity. With Wagn we are the first vendor to deploy our app with “cloud store” (cldstr in the urls), sort of like an app store for the cloud. It would be a fairly simple matter to set up mediawiki to deploy that way. He already has wordpress, and then we could build “accessories” to extend these app in our community.
    Bottom line for the non-technical is that you can put any app on a hosting farm very easily, then you will be able to choose those apps and accessaries with a web application. What this also means is a marketplace in apps and accessaries, and I claim that this is a perfect space to create a P2P ecosystem that sustains itself on mini-payments in this marketplace. But that is another thread …
  • Gerry Gleason Mark, please explain your practice of bludgeoning data a little for those who’ve never done it.
  • Mark Dilley I do not let my technical inability stop me from building my ideas (at least I try not to) – so I work with what ever is at my disposal , even if it is not technically the exact fit. What I how is for a technical person to come along after me and build tools. This often means I do more work than is “needed” and horrifies technically skilled folks – and it also means I often can get started building my ideas. (is that what you were thinking Gerry?)
  • Mark Dilley In this case – staring with referata and moving when other tools are ready (wagn) – ready in both the social and technical sense. 100 pages or 1000 pages – it just takes elbow grease
  • Gerry Gleason Yes, but I was also thinking that this practice is one of using knowledge of what you can do with basic functions of wiki (linking, naming) and building an information resource with that. Managers and designer may specify a purpose built tool, and that might save you a lot of time, but it is also more complicated and not ready. I think I was hoping for more about the kind of idea that you might pursue that way.
  • Yaron Koren Hi guys – I just saw this conversation. I’m not planning to do any “evangelism”, but if you have any specific questions about Referata, Semantic MediaWiki or MediaWiki in general, I can probably answer them.
  • Gerry Gleason Hi Yaron, I took a quick peek at some of the online info about these tool. Designer to designer, what is the best thing about these tools. To save you time interpreting that from the conversation, I work on Wagn, http://wagn.org/ I’m the #3 committer and closing fast on the inactive co-founder of the project. The other co-founder is Ethan McCutchen.

    wagn.org

    team-driven websitesWagn helps creators work together. Most web teams are badly

    disconnected.  Designers, developers, and content creators go their separate ways for days, weeks, or months at a time.   Separate tools, separate timelines, separate worlds.With Wagn, your whole team is editing a workin…
  • Mark Dilley I read that Poor Richard has his work in a closed system and doesn’t know which open system to use. I advocate for starting with one even if it doesn’t meet expectations yet.
  • Yaron Koren Gerry – I wouldn’t call myself a designer per se, but I’d say the best thing about Semantic MediaWiki is that it lets people easily create structures for collaborative data. You can see the testimonials page also: http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Testimonials
  • Gerry Gleason We have plenty of testomonials for Wagn too, I’m looking for how you would pitch it to a designer/developer to interest them in digging deeper into the details and potentially contributing by applying your tools.
  • Poor Richardre cloudstore:This Connection is Untrusted
    You have asked Firefox to connect securely to cldstr.com, but we can’t confirm that your connection is secure.
    Normally, when you try to connect securely,
    sites will present trusted identification to prove that you are
    going to the right place. However, this site’s identity can’t be verified.
  • Poor Richard Michel comments that mediawiki is very easy to use but other wiki engines have more WYSIWYG editors. In favor of Referata however is potential migration to P2PF mediawiki if they eventually add the semantic extensions there.
  • Mark Dilley What other wiki engines have WYSIWYG editors? Do they play nice with people who are used to the simplicity if inline editing – I.e. not having to use a mouse / Microsoft word style.
  • Poor RichardYaron Koren, bedides the basic semantic extensions, what other semantic tools are included in or compatible with Referata? (e.g. from one of the testimonials: “Semantic Forms, Header Tabs, Data Transfer, and recently Semantic Result Formats, and SRF Ploticus”)
  • Poor Richardhttp://www.wikimatrix.org/

    www.wikimatrix.org

    Daisy Daisy is a Java-based open source content management system, with a Wiki-l

    ike combined editing/publishing frontend. It is ideally suited for structured content management, knowledge management, and complex website management as it has the concept of structured document types. It consists of a …
  • Yaron Koren Poor Richard – you can see here for the full list of extensions: http://www.referata.com/wiki/Special:Version . All the ones you listed are there, though SRF Ploticus no longer exists.
  • Poor Richard Awesome, Yaron. Thank you for that link. That just about clinches my decision to start a Referata wiki. Now I have to decide how to name/brand/position it. I don’t want to make it for PeerPoint or the “Ontological Imperative” only, but something to att…See More

    www.referata.com

    This wiki is powered byMediaWiki, copyright © 2001-2012 Magnus Manske, Brion Vib

    ber, Lee Daniel Crocker, Tim Starling, Erik Möller, Gabriel Wicke, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Niklas Laxström, Domas Mituzas, Rob Church, Yuri Astrakhan, Aryeh Gregor, Aaron Schulz, Andrew Garrett, Raimond Spekking, Alexan…
  • Mark Dilley Poor Richard – Quite familiar with these – what I am curios about is your experience with one. I have not had a good experience with any of these – especially in the realm of going back and forth between wysiwyg and inline editing.
  • Gerry Gleason I will take a look at that cldstr issue when I get a chance. It may just be an artifact of the beta state of the platform, not sure yet.
  • Gerry Gleason The wagn WYSIWYG isn’t bad, just a javascript plugin, the name escapes at the moment (tinyMCE). The lack we feel we need to fill is a link/inclusion editor.
  • Gerry Gleason Sometime I still need to transition to the raw (html) editor to fix things, but it isn’t bad even when you need to do that.
  • Poor RichardMark Dilley, no experience with any of them. Just like the idea. The divil is in the datiels.
  • Gerry Gleason Most of us would rather bludgeon the raw interface than face flacky UI that is supposed to be easy to use.
  • Poor Richard Flakey is bad, but all the early wysiwyg editors were flakey. It sort of caught on nonetheless…. smile
  • Gerry Gleason How good is your javascript? There is a lot of good javascript out there, and a lot of mediocre stuff too. Like you say, unfortunately a lot of marginal stuff is in use and more acceptable than raw to most. My javascript is getting better, but UI isn’t my sweet spot either.
    I’ve observed the good JS/CSS talent is hard to come by, and even harder in open source projects with no lead funding.
  • Poor Richard Gerry, I used to dabble in JS, Perl, Awk, and many, many other things but no longer want to write code (though like you I have to go to HTML to tweak my WordPress editor). I have a hard enough time with English, but I think that’s where I can do the most good.
  • Mark Dilley That is why I like wiki – stick to the language I know
  • Gerry Gleason That was partly a joke. I will write JS when I have too, and I’m not too bad at it now. Someone has to make it work well for everyone. I still like to code, but I like doing ruby more than JS. The idea is to make Wagn into a tool where we can write little bits of ruby from some common patterns and never have to really code. This will make Wagneering a little harder than the sorts of Wiki power use that Mark likes, but that is where you get all the semantic features and custom app capacity.
  • Timothy Rayner @Hi everyone! Good to see you out causing trouble Michael Maranda.
  • Michel Bauwens dear Poor Richard, because of my very intensive travel schedule I have not been able to follow the whole discussion and have lost the thread a bit .. would be nice to see a summary accessible via the wiki and blog … my question is: can we semanticize the p2p wiki without funds, i.e. relying on low-entry volunteering?
  • Michel Bauwens or: we crowdfund the effort …
  • Mark Dilley I like community funding the effort! smile
  • Poor RichardMichel Bauwens: “can we semanticize the p2p wiki?” Yes, the semantic mediawiki extensions can be applied to the p2p wiki, but Yaron Koren is the expert on the necessary procedures. If Yaron is willing to discuss this with us, or refer us to the appropriate documentation and/or someone with the know-how, I will email you for the contact info of the appropriate p2p wiki admin person(s).
  • Mark Dilley Yaron helped out on WikiIndex.org – I am also tracking down a friend of mine that upgraded OutHistory.org and wanted to install SMW there, but that was too much for them to grok.
  • Michel Bauwens ok, I’ll be waiting for any news on this …
  • Michel Bauwens for the record the 18k entries have been viewed 20m times, now reaching 26k per day in traffic
  • Poor Richard Awesome, Michel. Semanticizing the p2p wiki might also attract some additional IT development around it (e.g. interfacing with it).
  • Gure Guretxa I honestly think you should have been properly crowdfunding from last year. Never understood the reticence to fund, design, build and present a decent resource! Accesibility and usability (in their broadest meanings) are key.
  • Poor Richard I don’t know about Michel, but I hate making pitches for money. I started working on one to fund a series of small symposia of key intellectuals, including Michel, so they could have some face time together. The working title was “World Justice League”. But I gave it up because as you say — personal reticence. But that’s just me. I don’t know what is stopping others from stepping up to the plate.
  • Gure Guretxa Oh, hey Poor Richard, I was commenting on Michel’s question about crowdfunding and the p2pF site/s in particular. I’d be embarrassed to launch a campaign too, hehe, that’s probably normal. However, surely the foundation could have and can easily make a proposal to the world about needing to upgrade and present the wealth of info in the wiki and blog (bookmarks, other satellite groups, etc) in a much more efficient and effective fashion. Usability is key, otherwise it is messy shelving for geeks who are not particularly interested in making that info accesible and attractive to the world. I would imagine a foundation would need to have an interest in spreading its message and having layers of complexity which would provide value both for new arrivals and experts/academics.
  • Poor Richard I said somewhere before that I’m really surprised that people aren’t shoving money at Michel by now. He needs to unleash some of his charms on some crowdfunding wizards — he must meet them on his many travels.
  • Gerry GleasonIt needs to be funded somehow. We can create something to hold the project and start working on it with a volunteer effort. I know that all of us are already contributing quite a bit to the commons to seed the process, and we are often asking our families to sacrifice a lot to pursue this vision.The financial tools and institutions that are available to us are totally inadequate. Something like crowd-funding probably is the solution, but the tools available for that seem too rooted in the systems of scarcity to support and sustain this kind of work. I worked on the Metacurrency project and still have some hope that those efforts will produce something because we need it. We need an accounting systems for open stewardship of commons based productions systems.
    And just like the information systems tools we need to bootstrap from the tools we have, so that could mean a kickstarter fund or similar to go after a couple of key milestones planning on designing a path to sustainability as one of the milestones.Wall street’s proposition is to give you the opportunity to bet on ideas, if the idea you back can make it to an IPO, you can exit with millions and move on to something else. The people with the ideas are often distinct from the ones selling the idea; getting venture capital, buying the distressed start-up and leaving the idea people out, or any of a hundred methods.Our proposition is sustainability. The investment you make is not looking for rapid growth and an exit strategy, it is looking for long-term sustainability. The goal is that the ecosystems that include these sustainable commons based institutions will thrive. When I invest in the commons I will expect to let my assets sit there for a long time and be undiminished, say when I withdraw some of it to fund my kid’s education or my retirement, but I don’t need it to grow. I need it to provide the environment where everyone in my community thrives and they are lined up to buy my commons shares when I need to redeploy my assets.
  • Helene Finidori The P2P foundation should be (is?) applying for the CAPS EU grant?
  • Poor Richard Writing proposals is intense, and I don’t know if any of the P2PF crew is up for that on top of their existing commitments. Same for crowdfunding efforts. That’s why I’m blowing the ships horn here for some fundraising wizards who are friends of the P2PFto come forward…. smile
  • Michel Bauwens we have done a number in the past, at least 2 of which we won (like the one next year in Germany); Franco Iacomella is our point man on this, but as a true free software person, he doesn’t want to be on Facebook; we are now preparing a project with Comunes via Kune; we have room for more. It is only me who is over-extented, other people in the network might be game … I have time to work on project mid-dec to mid-febr; then march-june is dedicated to the EU project on Mirror Democracy … (in Berlin) and 2 months at home as well … so no room for quite some time
This is a thread from Y Worlds on the subject of folksonomies derived from sets of bookmark tags. I list the major features lackiing in Diigo and other apps in its class:

wga.yworlds.com

An excerpt by Poor Richard: “I am imagining a semantic ontology according to which the key ideas and data of this content could be parsed and tagged to form a distributed database using semantic linked-data structures. This would help transition the collective knowledge base of the research, activis…
Like · · · Share · Friday at 5:00pm
Benjamin Brownell has been designing a simple, universal, open ontology system for “common good” success stories:http://p2pfoundation.net/Prospective_EcoSocial_OntologyUseful open-source tool to consider in this domain:http://www.ontopia.net/
Prospective EcoSocial Ontology – P2P Foundation

p2pfoundation.net

Basic concept: create adaptable shared reference structures and symbology for cross-platform semantic linking and pattern reinforcement in non-fiction story-form media
Like · · · Share · Saturday at 10:51am
  • Michael Maranda, Helene Finidori and 2 others like this.
  • Helene Finidori Is there a visual representation of it? Or an example to picture it?
  • Michel Bauwens he’s in my g+ list .. perhaps you can gmail me and I forward?
  • Michael Maranda Is he on FB? He was an active member of the CotW discussions/ working group. I would have listed him, if I thought he was active on FB.
  • Poor Richard Thanks for these links, Michel. Apropos of this topic I’ll repeat a link on Open Ontology, emphasis on the open, for reference: http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Ontology

    p2pfoundation.net

    While different definitions for ontology exist, it can be said that Ontologies are conceptual and semantic frameworks representing models of the world, as well as explicit and complete knowledge representations of a model of reality, expressed using different formalisms and artifacts. When trying to…

…

 The Next Edge Group

Michael Maranda
Several parallel threads are running on questions that are closely aligned, and if not they end up twisting to invoke the other issues. An obvious point perhaps, but I will follow it with another. We here are not alone, others all around are working on so manny of the same things, or discovering they wish to. Whatever emerges must establish meaningful paths for any and all to get involved in advancing our cause(s).

Unlike · · · Friday at 2:33pm near Ann Arbor, MI

  • You, John Love, Irma Wilson, Helene Finidori and 6 others like this.
  • Arié Moyal How do we map the overlap?
  • Michael Maranda There are several aspects to map, and I think it worthwhile to map in a way that allows any of several starting frames, and not prioritizing one above the other – in part because each is valid, but also because we can gain something from the different angles, not to mention there are different learning/thinking styles. What might some of these mappings take as entry points: people/identities w/interests/passions/commitments; projects; groups/orgs; problems/itches(to scratch); interests/ideas/fields; offers/needs; locations. all obvious and some elements left out, perhaps and surely better ways to frame this.
  • David EggletonE. F. Schumacher: “”For constructive work, the principal task is always the restoration of some kind of balance.”I suggest that naming the “target” balance is a very good way to find allies and colleagues. With such an intention (I’m comfortable with the concept, obviously), people can begin to self-organize in a balanced and balancing way.In my case, the constructive work is moving the slider on the producers….mere consumers continuum to the left, because those populations are way/unsustainably out of balance.
  • Michael Maranda I need to dwell on what you just posted David Eggleton – not grokking yet.
  • Michael Maranda But I do want to add that it is also beneficial to map the spaces/contexts/processes we are all participating in — just as there is overlap in the few threads I observed, we are all in several overlapping groups and listservs etc. We’ve taken up many of the underlying tech out of convenience and as early adopters and for exploration, or even to stake a claim for our ideas and aims… we need to bring these into view and start to build what suits our needs and processes rather than contort ourselves to what has been found. This is not to say that I reject bricolage, but we really need to align through mapping these purposes and social processes among the other things listed.
  • David EggletonMichael, I hoped to provide an alternative to the morass that is problem-solving. Maybe it was out of place, but look at the complexity of your first comment. I despaired of all that getting started, much less done.
  • Michael Maranda That is not to say parts cannot be moved forward. The ideal would be for such parts to be designed in a way that other aspects can be connected readily. And while what I list sounds complex, I think it can be brought to better focus. And fwiw, it may seem more complex than it is.
  • Michael Maranda “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. ” (Helps me – and felt urge to put that interlude into this space)
  • David Eggleton Yes, there is simplicity on the far side of complexity. “Lighting” can put one’s attention on one or the other.
  • Poor Richard In app development and in information curation, access, and quality control we have a “confusion of tongues” like that which plagued the Babylonians when they tried to build the tower of Babble to the heavens.
  • Joris Claeys Started to follow this thread as I got exactly the same impressions as Michael Maranda built his first thought around.
    The intentions are great but this platform will never get you anywhere. You will need collaborative tools or platforms such as The Brain to bring connected thoughts and ideas together or linked or influenced by/from to see the correlations betzeen the different ideas, initiatives, people, markets, etceteras…
    I don’t have the golden resolution here as there are many groups wher eI have seen the same issue rising up, being explored and up not far at all. Living Bridges Planet / SOCAP Network has done some good work in this area with Bert-Ola Bergstrand, Willi Schroll together with many others have realized some results. I still have to study their state of outcome. Perhaps we can ask for their assistance or share their experience on tools and approach. I think both are also part of this group, so perhaps they can take the director seat and tell us smile
  • Adam Johnson I too am trying to get my head around what Michael Maranda is pointing out. I’m perhaps a little less perturbed by the lack of a map, but that could be because I come from a field that it is overmapped and suffers for that. I like the sense of a lack of maps, but a free flow of intelligence to enable interesting ideas to emerge and be grabbed by people. Is that the point being made by David Eggleton? I see the centre for action not being the group where the discussion takes place, but rather the person with whom an idea resonates. So, for me, the goal is less to map (conveys a sense of coordination to me, probably unfairly), and more to infect with ideas. The distillation of the Babel of tongues referred to by Poor Richard then happens when somebody grasps an idea and makes it real.
  • Adam Johnson Anyway, my thoughts. Not without their problems.
  • Poor Richard Hmm.. thinking out loud….It seems to me that most of Michael’s points are the reasons I stared PeerPoint, but Michael has looked at the PeerPoint proposal and isn’t attracted to it. I think we’re looking at the same problem, but can’t get into the same approach. Are M’s concerns getting lost in the clutter and noise of PeerPoint, or does PeerPoint seem pointed in a different direction and beside the point w/r to his map of problems and solutions? Where is the disconnect? This is complingcatered. For one thing, I am focusing on tools and infrastructure to address the needs of activists, collaborators, and social entrepreneurs. Is Michael focusing on the other side of the coin, the people, groups, and objectives? Perhaps I am concentrating on the generic collaborator’s toolkit while waiting for the users to step up and explain their needs in their own voices. I spent a few pages up front discussing the people and the needs, but it may not have been enough to “seed” the participation of the elusive and endangered users lurking out there in their own enclaves of idiom and discourse. I guess my bias may be that the human side of all this gets discussed almost ad nauseum while the engineering side doesn’t get the attention of enough eyeball and brains. But ultimately the two side need to interdigitate. I seem to have failed to set up the right atmosphere for that to happen in the context of PeerPoint. So what are the altourniquets?
  • Michael Maranda Dont put words in my mouth. I am still digging into PeerPoint, Poor Richard. Indeed – I have been pushing in a way to get us started o thinking of what next to advance PP. I want to see PeerPoint and other related efforts put into a space or adjacent spaces so we can determine do they meet our needs – and get clear what our needs are.. and also what degree of consensus we may establish for aligning in a meaningful endeavor. Of course, I think there is something to what you say about 2 sides of the coin. I was mulling that over while driving around town.. I respect the dimensions you have expressed. if you hadnt expressed them (Many) I would have criticised and said why arent they there. But as they are there – tho I am not sayingI have no criticsm of them.. I am free to empahsize elements that are the other side of that coin, groupness, process, space of interaction, space between. I offer these things because I think they are deep relevance to design and coordination in these endeavors.
  • Michael Maranda Funny thinking the two sides of the coin thing … I had a different slice on my two sides… some of which included things you see on your side .. it is like when Helene reacted to your Hex model, and we saw different configurations.. There is too much overlap for us not to be thinking of many of the same things. What is important I think is to be able to express is simple and 30,000 ft view language what we want, and see how different our angles are – and where complementary (and where supplementary).
  • Poor Richard Michael, I couldn’t agree more. Part of my problem is years of built-up frustration that I tend to project onto everyone. I think we’re in the same boat I need to stop standing up and tipping it so much.
  • Helene FinidoriMichael, I’ve missed part of the discussions lately and I’m just discovering this thread. I am yet to talk with Richard about PeerPoint, which converges with the project I am working on with Markus A. O. Loponen, described in March here: http://menemania.typepad.com/helene_finidori/2012/02/engaging-for-the-commons.html when I was postulating for a knights foundation grant. It has evolved with a strong focus on making conversations ‘productive’ and using some forms of machine assisted, ontology as orientation that I think I gave you a hint on… There’s also loads of stuff I put on debategraph… some of it is accessible through here:http://www.debategraph.org/Poster.aspx?aID=40. but it’s been a while since I didn’t touch any of that. There’s also the trial I’ve been gathering on github that could serve to pull the various projects: https://github.com/HeleneFi/The_Project/wiki/_pages. We’ve tried to pull people there with Harlan T Wood, not sure where he is at. Basically I’m operating a convergence between commons P2P, systems-thinking/complex adaptive systems, collaboration/facilitation and semantic/ontology… It’s a bit of a mess (i.e. stuff everywhere trying things out I suppose and looking at what sticks and can get some discussion going beyond the actual FB thread exchange… smile. Here are the links to Markus’ stuff: http://intra.samabase.org/a work in progress. We are trying to develop the project around actual user cases and communities of practice, based on needs.I would be very interested to see what you are up to if there’s a place to look. smile
  • Daniel F. BassillMichael Maranda with over 6 billion people in the world there must be others who share the same vision and sense of purpose as each of us have. Finding and connecting to such people is the first challenge. I wrote this blog article in 2010. …See More

    tutormentor.blogspot.com

    Though training and couching plays a vital role,mentoringhas its own effectivene

    ss because senior level guidance is given to all working class to enhance their working condition and to eliminate work related conflicts in an organization.
  • David Eggleton Assumptions of fuels and electricity sufficient to support nonlocal activities, which I, too, am enjoying, concern me. Have you all settled on something I missed or is there agreement to ignore what’s so uncertain?
  • Sepp Hasslberger I have settled on the likelihood of there being a good chance of a technological jump pretty soon that will make our energy worries a thing of the past. That view matured from a decade and more of observation of the alt energy movement and what’s happening in little ways here and there.
  • David Lawrence Hawthorne This morning I found a post from Tom Mallard on my FB page about a purported plan by FB to implement a fully-paid subscription model for its business. Of course, we could ‘opt-out,’ or find a number of ways to be cultivated into one or another paid tiers. I speculated in my own post, that FB would, as a result, become a nonentity in time, no more powerful than the old “comic book” or “match book” ads. It’s also possible that another entity, could offer a very similar service to FB, and be satisfied with an open-source model. A nation, group of nations, company or group of companies, institution or group of institutions, satisfied by the utility of mapping big data patterns might find good reason to offer similar services ‘free’ to an open market. Imagine a non-governmental enterprise that guaranteed your ‘privacy’ It is the behavior of people, (to paraphrase Drucker), that is the source of all value. Why should we have to pay to behave? To speak? To think? To converse? If “investors” see some value in being permitted to observe these behaviors, they should take the risk, after all, they are willing to harvest the value. If the Middle East needs a post-oil age resource to market, why not mine ‘Big Data’ and earn great public relations ‘soft-power’ credits by ‘protecting individual rights and privacy?’ (Another item for my Swiftian Memoirs wink
  • Ralf Lippold The true value of FB is its non-monetary cost.
  • Joris ClaeysRalf: for as long as it lasts…In the end FB and the non-availability of tools to do something with all the information makes FB a dead-end platform – sooner or later…David: I will be posting an extra-ordinary article on future energy in the coming days on @ eco-sTrEAMS . It will blow many out of our chairs and will make reference to it on the Next Edge once it is out. Suspense smile…So back to the subject, do we come to a conclusionhere on how to make use of teh data and thoughts being gathered and made useful, other then a paid service?
  • Jim Rutt The true COST of FB is wasted time!
  • David Lawrence Hawthorne I wait with bated breath winkJoris Claeys It will be interesting to see how closely aligned we might be.
  • Joris Claeys HopeDavid: I can get to it tomorrow… it should have been out a week ago!
  • Joris Claeys HopeDavid: I can get to it tomorrow… it should have been out a week ago!
  • David Lawrence Hawthorne Don’t worry, I’m only 6 month behind on my book.
  • Michael MarandaDavid Eggleton if you have missed anything it is perhaps in parallel discussions in the P2P group. However, there is no agreement except that there is high likely overlap and probablility that several of us are working on things that are roughly in the same boat. There has been no agreement to ignore any major uncertainties either. (Side note, I will likely be less active next several days as family is in town — but I hope to steal some moments for these discussions!)
  • David Eggleton Thanks for that, Michael. I really wondered if something was agreed upon re energy availability/affordability prior to my debut here last spring. I’m under the influence of Chris Martenson and Richard Heinberg, to name just two of a cohort, and seem unique in that.
  • Seb PaquetHere’s something I wrote a few years ago that feels relevant…In my view, conflict is actually good when
    it arises, because it provides visible points of “creative friction”
    and lets participants each refine what exactly it is that they are
    after. In a way, by hashing out a disagreement, you define yourself.
    Only by showing yourself, what you are into, and what you value, can
    networking work appropriately for you – that is, bring the right
    people and projects towards you. In other words, good self-
    representation leads to good connections.One key issue when working on self-representation is that of language.
    You may be using words with different meanings than others. This is
    why we need conversational spaces, to figure out e.g. if my idea of a
    “Pooled Fund” means exactly the same as *your* idea of “Pooled Fund”.Language is imperfect, but it’s pretty much all we have, right? It can
    still roughly guide our explorations of one another. When ideas and
    goals are verified to line up among a number of people, you’re on your
    way to collaboration. Actually you’ve collaborated already, on the
    task of clarifying that common goal.One idea that keeps coming back to my mind is that of “knowledge
    territories”. We each have a piece of turf we know about and a
    vocabulary to talk about it. It’s great to have a space to each define
    our territories. Once that is done, though, if we adopt a
    collaborative stance, we will want ways of identifying overlap between
    those territories, ways of matching up concepts between us, and ways
    to agree on a shared language. I think that when this is achieved in a
    disciplined way, it becomes easier for individuals to adhere strongly
    to a shared vision or goal and move forward together with confidence.

    (context: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!msg/openkollab/Vfg8VELhC1g/CBPZ-VNIcfQJ)

  • Poor RichardHelene Finidori, thanks for all those links in one comment–I finally made a bookmark folder for all your awesome work and networking.
  • Poor RichardSeb Paquet: “we will want ways of identifying overlap between
    those [knowlege/vocabulary] territories, ways of matching up concepts between us, and ways to agree on a shared language. I think that when this is achieved in a disciplined way, it becomes easier for individuals to adhere strongly to a shared vision or goal and move forward together with confidence.”Good definition of problem space. Any ideas about solutions?Related threads from the P2P group:I hope no one will mind if I indulge in a little visioneering here….
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/145538675490320/permalink/464870363557148/Ontology/Ontologies … we use the term in a variety of senses…
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/145538675490320/permalink/466381613406023/

    PeerPoint Revisited
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/145538675490320/permalink/466406333403551/

    This is a thread from Y Worlds on the subject of folksonomies …
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/145538675490320/permalink/466574893386695/

    Benjamin Brownell has been designing a simple, universal, open ontology system… https://www.facebook.com/groups/145538675490320/permalink/466870136690504/

    Next Edge Thread: Several parallel threads are running on questions that are closely aligned…
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/120497731371323/permalink/362987357122358/

    I hope no one will mind if I indulge in a little visioneering here. I am imagini…See More
  • Adam Johnson I think Seb Paquet has it right on the importance of a shared language, and to me there are two examples straight up.
    The first is a discussion in this group but on a separate thread. I refer to “infrastructure”, and am thinking hard infrastructure like roads and so on (forgive me, I garduated as an engineer and sometimes lapse). Others (most?), at least in this group, refer to infrastructure as the framework within which we can align conversations.
  • Adam Johnson Oops. The second is more meta. Some of the discussions here are using language and ideas that I have the smallest of fingernail-hold understanding. And yes, I graduated as an engineer but I also graduated in cultural studies during the reign of Derrida…See More
  • Mark Frazier Stephanie LeMieux has some intriguing ideas on a hybrid approach to folksonomies and taxonomies (slide 18 onwards) at http://www.slideshare.net/Earley/hybrid-approaches-to-taxonomy-folksonmy

    www.slideshare.net

    Hybrid Approaches to Taxonomy & Folksonomy Semantic T e chnology, 2009 Stephanie Lemieux Earley & Associates [email_address] www.earley.com
  • Troy CamplinThis is why I am trying to set up a Society that brings together all of the different groups working in complexity — CAS researchers, complexity theorists, chaos theorists, information theorists, self-organization theorists, network theorists, spontaneous orders theorists, Austrian economists, complexity economists, etc. We have a blog to start things off, but there will be a proper society eventually:http://spontaneousorderstudies.blogspot.com/
  • Poor Richard Thanks, Mark Frazier. That slide set covered the folksonomy/ontology dichotomy-overlap more thoroughly than I did. It seems most of the little projects like ZigTag have disappeared or been absorbed into Microsoft’s stable like KWizcom. Overall, I think the hybrid approach is a winner–its the way I would go if I were an apps developer. The concepts in slide 18-45 are must-read for anyone interested in the technical side of this discussion.

Finis

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