Webs Of Thinkers And Thoughts

Triggered by Mike Caulfield's Jul'2015 posts (emphasis on curating, connecting, annotations) plus others' responding/riffing, want to start over without even assuming wiki.

Context/goals

Make it easier for people to improve their Sense Making as a way of Augmenting Human Intellect

Forces:

Thinking Out Loud helps with Sense Making (How Will Keeping A Notebook Help You Hack Your Life).
Thinking Out Loud is often more effective when thoughts are gardened into a Web of Associative smaller thoughts, esp when recombined in varying combinations. (Generative, Why Use A Wiki For Your Notebook)
Thinking Out Loud helps with Sense Making even if it's just Rubber Ducking.
Thinking Out Loud is even more effective when it draws helpful insight from humans (Connectivism, FeedBack, Scenius).
Some comments (Annotation) are specific to a sentence/paragraph, others apply to the entire page. (This is less of an issue with shorter atomic pages, but still an issue.) (Paragraph Addressable)
Each person's Sense Making is unique to them, and changes over time, and is not necessarily coherent/complete/consistent at any moment in time. (Coherence, Auteur Theory, Society of Mind)
But people can still generate their own Sense Making in parallel with others having different contexts/focuses/goals. (Coalition, Coordination)
Sometimes multiple parties work on a cluster of ideas in the same short period of time. Other times one person discover's another's older cluster and gets inspired to do their own digging using that cluster and other resources.
Sometimes multiple people building a single shared cluster of nodes is very valuable.
- easier "discovery", less concern over "missing" a good version of the node
- faster refinement of a node by multiple editors
- Increasing Returns from Critical Mass of reading and editing
- non-NPOV example: WikiWikiWeb
- but a Critical Mass-value node costs more to run as a service, and draws more Bad Faith Players
Most people sharing interests will never have a formal relationship (e.g. be doing Team Work) tied to those interests. (virtual community)
People will choose different tools/spaces/services for their Thinking Out Loud, and won't even stick to a single tool/space even over the short term.
- and migrating to new/similar service often involves losing history, or having history imported to new URLs.
Some people will spend time/money for tools/services, others will just use what's free and popular.
Part of Thinking Out Loud is keeping a history of things that one reads (Personal Web Archive). More value is added to a history node by adding: personal summary; Excerpts/HighLights; comments/reactions/arguments. (Commonplace Book)
Nodes which you read/save may change or disappear afterwards. On the other hand, your saved excerpts/etc may give you 80% of the value of the original. On the other-other-hand: others would benefit from the original to make their own gloss; and, your future self is a different person, and re-reading the original can be "news".
If nodes are changing in the process of Sense Making, then re-reading will be frustrating unless you can at least have the option of viewing how the document has changed since last viewing.
- There can also be value in showing paragraph change-records inline with the comments on that paragraph.
If you share an interest with Person B, you probably won't share all interests with Person B. Still, the odds of being interested in a given node generated by Person B goes up.
If you are interestedly reading a node by Person C, a comment/annotation by Person B is even more likely to be of interest. (interest graph)
When reading a node, it's good to discover reaction-nodes created by Good Faith Players, esp Person B.
Many Bad Faith Players (spammers) will inject their own nodes into attention spaces/streams to pull attention to a commercial offering (or phishing process).
Many Bad Faith Playerss (trolls) will inject their own nodes into attention spaces/streams to derail attempts at shared-by-others Sense Making.
It's easy for a Bad Faith Player to pretend to a different/new person, much harder to pretend to be a known Good Faith Player.
Some people would be able to spend more time Thinking Out Loud in Public if they could Make Money in the process (creator economy)....

Solutions:

Everyone Needs Their Own ThinkingSpace, Digital Gardens, Tending Your Inner And Outer Digital Gardens,
DigitalGardenStandards: PageName as URL (for TwinPages); RSS/Atom feed
TwitterMention for WebMention

Edited: 2022-09-08 21:09:45.904760 | Tweet this! | Search Twitter for discussion

Bill Seitz