[Inquiry] Inquiry: Nature Of Collaboration

[Jon Awbrey]

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elijah wright wrote:
> 
> > i have gone ahead and subscribed the "inquiry" list
> > to the gmane newsgroup hierarchy.  i couldn't see
> > a way to discover the implications of this medium
> > without going ahead and taking a few risks, so i
> > guess we will just see as we go.
> 
> good.  if it isn't as useful as we hope, then it doesn't hurt anything.
> 
> > i only just found out that i had a newsreader in my browser, and haven't
> > quite got the hang of how it works or how to integrate my use of it with
> > my use of the email medium, so let me know what else you know about it
> > all.  at the very least it means that nobody will be forced to have a
> > lot of mail stuffed in their mailboxes if they do not wish to have it.
> 
> i find news a little problematic, in terms of collaboration.
> it was a good solution (great, actually) in the early 1980s
> and 1990s, but definitely has different challenges and
> opportunities than either email or web tools.
> 
> elijah

Right.  I wasn't seeing it so much as the main medium of collaboration
as a way of helping to address a couple of problems that I have seen
take other collaborative efforts down.

1.  The danger of becoming a cult, of retreating to some cloister where
    everybody speaks the same argot and only preaches to the choir about
    all the wonders to come.

To avoid this, it seems necessary to maintain a genuine public interface at all times,
partly to stay honest, as a source of critical reflection and to fund reality checking,
and partly to keep fresh, as a source of new ideas and a pool of creative reflections.

However, viewing a co-lab as a place for "open work" leads to an opposite problem.

2.  The danger of the "one person veto" phenomenon that I have seen develop
    in many of the discussion groups in-&-out of which I have been over the
    past few years.

Work, real work, on real problems, is often very difficult and even distressing.
Now, we can always at least begin by bringing together people who are prepared
to work together, because they already have in common seeing the need to solve
certain problems.  In the beginning, then, everybody in the group "gets it",
not the answer, but at least the question.

I am still trying to understand the dynamics of what I have seen happening.
I deliberately avoided the internet for the first decade of its existence,
and stayed away from bulletin boards before that, so I am looking through
a 3 year window on the scene, but it seems to have recapitulated the whole
devolution of what happened to television, from "ed sullivan variety show"
to "celebrity survivor show" in just 3 years!  most of this is textbook
group dynamics, but I don't think that this medium will live up to its
promise if we don't find new ways to address these issues, and it's
not the tech, it's the touch, as they used say in some circles.

Oh well, just some random thoughts, while I work up the energy
to start re-assembling my old Theme One Program, the main ideas
of which I will try to explain in a way that is abstracted away
from the specifics of Pascal, in a very functional-generic way.

Jon Awbrey

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