Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 05:22:08 -0700

From:	Garold L. Johnson
	dynalt@dynalt.com Reply-To: unrev-II@yahoogroups.com

To:	UnRev II eGroup
	unrev-II@yahoogroups.com

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Subject:

OHS needs to be personal

In thinking about the nature of collaboration and knowledge organization, I have come to the conclusion that an OHS has to be usable by a single individual for personal knowledge organization and thinking if it is to be truly useful.
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In composing this email, for example, the tool that I have is a word processor. While the merits of this particular word processor can be argued, it still fails to be a knowledge tool in any sense that we would use the term.
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I can't (easily) reference other information I might have, or other emails in this discussion.
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While there is an outline mode, it is rather primitive and doesn’t provide any support for accessing other information.
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If I make use of all the tools available on my machine, I can begin to structure a document in some way(s) that might actually make it useful, but it is far from an easy task.
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If I were attempting to formulate an entry into an OHS with this tool, I would have to go to some extraordinary lengths to generate something that would be useful in that context, if indeed it could be done at all.
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On the other hand, if I have to use a different tool to collaborate via an OHS than I use to organize my own thoughts, ideas, and information, then there is a barrier to collaboration that I think is unnecessary.
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Therefore, I believe that for an OHS to be successful in the sense of being well and continually used, it must scale from my personal use up to whatever larger collaborations I support.
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I want to be able to use the same tool that I use to support knowledge collaboration to manage my own personal information on my own personal machine without requiring external servers or any other infrastructure. I should be able to synchronize the various places that I create information – home, work, a laptop, a PDA or palm computer, etc.
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Since I use elements of the same tools and techniques for organizing my own knowledge, which is of interest and use to me, that I use in collaborating with others, I have no barrier to collaboration. Any document that I produce using the tools can be entered into the OHS directly, preserving all of the connections that I allow, without having to change methods of work to do it.
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Partly this is just because I don’t want to see our desire to build a tool for collaboration end up being web or email only and still be stuck without tools to support my own thinking and information organization.

Thanks,

Sincerely,

Garold (Gary) L. Johnson
DYNAMIC Alternatives
http://www.dynalt.com/