[Inquiry] Inquiry: Nature Of Collaboration

[elijah wright]

> 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.

yes.  as long as the data is google-able, things are out in the open.
this is a good thing about both the WWW and usenet news.  this is a
problem with solutions like shared IMAP mail folders, which are convenient
but not as open as one would like.  (I don't think google is capable of
searching them, cause they run on a protocol it doesn't understand...)

> 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.

*nod*  but what to do about the signal-to-noise ration?  groups without a
chief killer-of-non-content seem to tend to fill up with rubbish fairly
quickly.  and asking individual users to deal with spamfilters and other
machinery makes the group less useful to each one of them. (especially if
they don't have a clue about how to use them, which is often the case...)

> 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.

right.  and the 'touch' is something that is not understood by very many
people.  i consider my own understanding of it to be fairly rudimentary,
but know that it is quite a bit more sophisticated than the Average Bear
in the world.

> 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.

is this the same program that you sent me a copy of several years ago?  i
can't remember, and never got around to doing anything with what you sent
me.

elijah