[Sigia-l] Edge design

Thu Mar 15 17:03:19 EDT 2007

Hi Antoine,

Regarding the "biodiversity" of delicious, I think it is important to 
remember that the community is self-selected. The purpose is not and has 
never been  to support emergent semantics for any particular selected 
community. By providing a completely open platform on the bleeding edge of 
web technologies, membership quickly skewed towards people who both 
understood the core concepts, and were most able to see immediate benefit.

What del.icio.us shows on a large scale is that tagging -- or 
collaborative/distributed classification systems if your project sponsor 
requires more "formal" terminology -- can surface interesting and useful 
patterns that can supplement pre-built taxonomies/ontologies. So show it to 
the business folks, but then show them IBM's dogear enterprise bookmarking 
project, and the commercial product it spawned (see 
http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=344&page=1)

I do think you have hit on one of the most difficult problems, and one not 
completely unfamiliar to those who worked on the big KM projects of the 80s 
and 90s: how do you incent people to contribute and nuture real communities? 
While I hesitate to call it a framework, Surowiecki tries to define a set of 
four conditions in _Wisdom of Crowds_ that he views as necessary for group 
intelligence to emerge:

. Cognitive diversity: many opinions
. Independence: individuals can freely offer opinions
. Decentralization: opinions are evaluated equally (more or less)
. Easy aggregation: all opinions can be utilized

Rashmi Sinha has given a couple of interesting talks at SXSW and the IA 
Summit on operationalizing these preconditions into system design (see 
http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/06_01/social-tagging.html).

Hope to continue this kind of conversation in Vegas!

Geoff
http://www.enterprisetagging.org/

Geoff Froh
Technical Manager
Densho
1416 S. Jackson St.
Seattle, WA 98144
US
(v) 206.320.0095
(f) 206.320.0098
(w) www.densho.org

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Antoine.Valot at ins.com>
To: <trrobert at gmail.com>; <sigia-l at asis.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 9:33 AM
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Edge design

> To pursue the analogy, allowing environmental changes means that you
> allow for self-destruction. Patterns of use can eventually kill
> usability. For instance, delicious had the potential to become a
> near-universally useful tool, but the preponderance of CSS/AJAX
> designers on delicious means that when I show it to business folks,
> their answer is "this is a site for web designers. I'm not a web
> designer."
>
> In this case, the web2.0 crowd has burrowed deep into this ecological
> niche, and saturated it. The reef is overgrown with rounded-corner
> algae, which are slowly choking other life forms. The reef might be
> killing itself.
>
> Ecological models sound attractive, because of their organic growth and
> self-organizing characteristics, which makes them adaptable and close to
> effort-free... but let's remember that evolution is essentially a dumb
> process, favoring chance, timing, and immediacy over value. Survival of
> the fittest doesn't mean survival of the best. There are many good
> articles and blog posts out there that don't follow the "12 ways to do
> XYZ" pattern, and therefore don't win the delicious/dig popularity
> contests.
>
> So it feels to me that power will come from an ability to nurture and
> influence natural organic systems to maintain balance. Biodiversity is a
> very delicate balance, and while building online communities or
> taxonomies that grow organically has proved relatively easy to do,
> building balanced, diverse, rich ecosystems of thought will likely
> require much more sophistication.
>
> Antoine Valot  |  Senior Information Architect / Business Analyst  |  BT
> INS  |  Cell: 303.995.5618  |  Email: antoine.valot at bt.com
>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
> Behalf Of Todd Roberts
> Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 7:26 AM
> To: SIGIA-L
> Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Edge design
>
> One way to think of any interface is as an edge between two things -
> between two people, between a person and a data repository, between
> two data repositories, etc. The idea of the interface as a reef is
> interesting and perhaps provides some ecological support for
> user-created/altered interfaces. (I'm sure someone is doing research
> from this approach and I'm just behind the times ;)
>
> What would be more viable - a reef coated in epoxy to freeze it at a
> certain point in time, or a living reef that can adapt to changing
> conditions? The prior may have been the optimal reef when it was
> frozen, but over time it would fall victim environmental changes. The
> living reef can continuously alter its structure to fit the needs of
> the environment (within some set of parameters, just as no interface
> can be infinitely altered).
>
> Accordingly, interfaces that are not frozen in place by the creators
> should be more viable than static interfaces. Within the boundaries of
> flexibility, the interface could change as the environment changes.
> E.g. del.icio.us is not bound by a controlled vocabulary, so it
> remains useful even as lingo/terminology changes over time.
>
> Are there examples of interfaces that would suffer from such
> malleability? Even in the healthcare-related system I work on, which
> on its face would seem to require pretty rigid input, there are
> inefficincies created by said rigidity. Concepts change, workflows
> change, and these changes are a big pain to deal with in the fixed
> system we have.
>
> On 3/14/07, Andrew Boyd <facibus at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> an idea for discussion.
>>
>> One of the principles of Permaculture is that biological systems are
>> richer along edges - where the nutrient rich current hits the reef, or
>> the land meets the sea.
>>
>> Is there any application of this to design? Can we create "artificial
>> reefs" for information to grow upon? Is the flood of tagging into a
>> rigidly hierarchical taxonomy a real example?
>>
>> Cheers, Andrew
>> ------------
>> IA Summit 2007:  Enriching IA
>> Rich Information, Rich Interaction, Rich Relationships
>> March 22-26, 2007, Las Vegas, NV
>> www.iasummit.org
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