I think a real important thought that has been missing in the last 30+
e-mails is that the objective is developing knowledge by collaborative
cooperation.
..
I mean one thing the DKR/OHS must give us is a simpler way
for one or a group to take all those last 30+ messages, glean the
important parts, organize and consolidate these important parts, then
republish the refinement to those who wish to study the topic outside
the relative chaos of an e-mail type system. The new item includes
references to all the previous items so that someone could go back to
verify proper extraction, but most importantly, maintain the link with
underlying facts or assumptions in case they change, requiring a change
to the new node, This is how we can evolve knowledge about a particular
topic.
.. I think we must take the approach that the DKR/OHS will be employed by a
group of people with a purpose and that the main purpoe will be
gathering and processing information about a specific problem, not just
surfing around looking fo interesting stuff to add as various
categories. Anyone will be able to use a personal DKR/OHS for that
purpose. And they will probably be doing this under the guidance of some
sort of management, working in a relatively closed environment on mostly
propriietary problems, and having a budget of time or money which may
set some bounds on the project. And, they will be counting on this tool
we are thinking about in order to achieve success.
.. Anyway, how do these glorified chat rooms deal with the problem of
helping with the task of generating and maintaining open source
software, the first task we agreed to tackle. Perhaps we should try a
more convenient and useful tool than this e-mail, but I think that we
should start to build something right now that at least gives us some
easy methods to process piles of data like this e-mail forum into a
presentation we can use. It is way too early to think we will block
ourselves by taking some initial approach that later must be scrapped.
This will give us some experience in what this thing has to do - augment
the abilities of someone or a group that needs to get a job done where
part of that job is sorting through a vast universe of information and
generating useful content that describes a problem and suggests a
solution.
.. Best Regards,
Joe
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