User:Sj/Log

Editor's Log

Friday June 30

Erase early and often

There's nothing like something meant to be temporary that stays around forever. The temporary building that stays around for decades, on cement blocks. The whiteboard that never gets erased... for even the first time. The note on a flimsy sheet of paper that stays taped up on a wall for a year.

Thursday June 29

On color and more

Color, sound, smell, taste, touch - none should be disregarded when aiming to inspire or pass on inspiration. The greatest sight is wasted if the rest are disregarded. For many physical objects, only color and touch are present to be changed. For a house full of pepole, all are at issue. Good architects know this; some go so far as to start with the function of the kitchen, source of smells and tastes, and view the rest of the house including the facade and design details,as secondary. On a related note, an education-oriented office without books is like a meal with no smell at all. Today I more than doubled the number of books in the new OLPC offices. Brought in : Tufte (Visual Explanations, The Visual Display of Quantitive Information, Envisioning Information), The Essential Whole Earth Catalog (1986), an EB Propaedia (the original), The New Comparative World Atlas, Life Turns Man Up And Down (street literature from Nigeria), a 1000-plate Times Atlas (1988), Folk Tales For Children from Vietnam, Swahili Proverbs, DeLaire's Esperanto, Fil D'Ariane..., Dyson's Origins of Life, Ziman on Public Knowledge, The Love Book, An Exceptional view of Life (writing and drawings on life by unusual young children), an Old Farmer's Almanac. Also : coffee table material, to supplement the WIRED mags : The Material World and Women in the Material World, and The Faces of Man (finally reprinted last year).

Wednesday June 28

On inspiration

There's little point in having whiteboards if they aren't regularly erased and reused; and little point in having great open office space if that too is unused and people hang out in small spaces without interacting. Ditto for pubs and dance halls. What is it about great parties and spaces that make them switch from using 20% of their potential to using 80%? Perhaps the same could be asked of great people...

Tuesday June 27

Slimmable ideas

Good ideas and projects abound. Finding ways to note, annotate, and review them is an open problem. Finding ways to let people working on them work together and not separately, likewise. Khaled prefers a bit of software that privileges individual ideas and allows discussion of it, to an open wiki. I feel strongly the aggregate benefit of having eveyrone do everything on a single revisioned system with shared messaging and recent changes; but aside from that think the idea of a specialized interface is great. What are simple ways to encourage people who hate wikis to come leave ideas, and revisit commentary later? Ways to integrate mailing list threads with longer lived wikitext? A mail-to-wiki gateway? (vice-versa is already implemented, after a fashion, with the latest eNotif.) Suggestions welcome.

Monday June 26

Step 3 : Communicating dreams

Grand dreams gain luster as they are shared; inspire enthusiasm from a distance as well as up close. Communicating and promoting dreams, asking for detailed advice and help (and not simply approval or shallow support) makes them real. Particularly when changes occur rapidly, leaving the path of change and its every step open helps disparate groups who feel associated to a great Work feel involved, drawn up in the hunt even if at the rear of the pack. Those of you who remember The Beast may recall how much energy was put into keeping an audience of new and old hands alike entranced by and in step with the rapidly changing texture of a complex project with many fronts. Three people devoted a fair chunk of their time to maintaining those centers for community cooperation, planning, and storytelling; without foregoing participation in the production of new ideas and material. There isn't much in the way of detailed visions on this wiki at present; in part because this space is still finding its voice, not because visions for this project have not been articulated. Some of this will change in the months to come, some may even come from readers of this log. But beyond initial vision, sharing dreams over time means conveying progress, successes and failures, needs and desires. I aim to do what I can along these lines; if you are interested in the same, let me know (or just start doing it!).

Step 2 : Chain of tools

It's really too early to start talking about tools and toolchains; when there are regular schedules and connections to be made. But a few can be mentioned from the start: a place to ask questions and find answers; a place to throw out new ideas (Hardware, Software, Pedagogy); a place to suggest useful content.

Step 1 : Applying wiki culture

There is a world of difference between having a tool and knowing how to use it, and between knowing how to use it and making it an extension of oneself -- knowing how that tool sees the world, being able to reinterpret any situation in that context. The expression "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" has both positive and negative aspects. There is utility in being able to see the nail-like aspect of any problem, whether or not there is a hammer handy (in particular, one should regularly be considering how important it is to find a hammer, if one is not). When it comes to wikis - there is much more to effectively implementing an open collaborative content aggregator than having and using one. Content workflows with detailed roles (protection, privacy segmentation, &c), continuing use of other information channels for public sharable knowledge (email, blogs, whiteboards, phone calls, ticket systems) that don't pass through the wiki -- all of these limit the scalability and efficacy of a wiki's openness. For the purposes of OLPC : if we want the public to take an active part in guiding and advising on the project progress, news and photos and updates should come through the wiki first or second, not as an afterthought when someone remembers. Wiki watchlists should be a key part of tracking new ideas. Educators, officials, students, other community members should all be directed to the wiki for sharing their thoughts and discovering what is going on -- withthe caveat that if they can't find what they're looking for, they should ping someone to update the information here. And internally, using a wiki to organize text and project ideas will help accustom project members to that style of formatting and interlinking thoughts. Please leave me comments and tell me what you think.

Day 0, Step 0 : Logging backwards

A day of preparation; setting up the log. Tomorrow will be the first proper day of logging.