Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 10:59:50 -0500
| From: | Jack Park |
|
jackpark@verticalnet.com Reply-To: unrev-II@egroups.com |
| To: | unrev-II@egroups.com |
| Subject: | Plan for HyperScope-OHS launch and development |
Rod,
As always, I really love to dive into your web site. You are correct in pointing out that I probably meant to say _against_ rather than _toward_. I probably did.
I recall letting that line of reasoning go without comment when it started.
I do recall the meeting at SRI -- not, BTW: an SRI meeting, but a DKR meeting held at SRI -- in which the notion that there isn't enough knowledge regarding KM; Eric stated something akin to that when he said _he_ didn't know enough about it in one of his Unrev2 posts.
I do not believe that I know enough about KM, but I do not consider myself one who believes that there isn't enough knowledge *out there* on which to begin a learning exercise. In fact, there may be far too much knowledge out there. Sorting through it all is the tough part.
We have choices. We can appeal to the philosophers in search of some *roots* on which to layer our efforts. We can follow other, so called *failed* efforts (Notes, according to your records), or we can just go off and invent our own and see if that *fails* as well. I, speaking personally, am inclined to learn as much about pragmatic thinking by way of C.S. Peirce as I can, with the thought that this might provide sufficient roots to get started.
What is happening here is that we are, IMHO, ignoring the teachings of the one individual who might just know more about the topic than we do, Doug.
Case in point: I suspect that the SRI meetings seduced us into believing that *we* would just start out and design and build an OHS all by ourselves. That effort culminated in the meeting at which folks began to conjecture that there isn't enough knowledge to do KM, even when you were sitting in the same meeting and you had been doing it for umpteen years. Gads.
We continue to confuse the notion of *Open Source Software* with the notion of homebrew software. I do not believe (though I could be wrong) that Doug ever had any notion of homebrew software. His goal, near as I can tell, was and remains to create a body of software that is *Open Source*, and that has a radically different and specific meaning from the notions of free software that is hacked by thousands of individuals the world over, even though those projects do, indeed, result in open source products. It appears, at least to me, that a professionally managed project in which contributors receive compensation for software development is a greatly different project than one managed and built by volunteers.
We must insulate ourselves from ruminations of those who write proposals for research funding and who need to play down some field as a justification for further exploration of it or to bias the thinking of others. I make no statements of fact here, just the sweeping generalization that our biases occasionally can be driven by needs other than those related to purely intellectual interests.
Jack Park
jackpark@verticalnet.com