Typescript 2024-01-14

09:24:23

09:24:23 From Brian There is sort of a longer scale pattern of how humans have leverage and advanced technolory and it parrallels with energy liberation and untilization. Pre dating fire, but then using fire and enabling agriculture based society, then oil, then electricity, etc...we might be in another one of those paradigm changes of how we expand our brains with "internet" and all these small communities interacting with each other.

09:25:25 From Jeff Miller "Member of Technical Staff", famously, a one-title org at Bell Labs.

09:26:47 From Jeff Miller financial incentives and habits keeping BSD Unix from being Linux a few years earlier Insulin and Salk vaccine, both, famously.

09:27:19 From Brian https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/30/255-michael-muthukrishna-on-developing-a-theory-of-everyone/ isMichael Muthukrishna that kind of talks a bit about how humans have scaled with energy over time

09:28:06 From Jeff Miller Luxury Design - Apple, post NeXT.

09:28:08 From Marc Pierson Ackoff on Bell Lab experience: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/148192220

09:29:23 From Paul Rodwell Yes, was thinking of Bronowski talking about the effect that going to Japan to record the effects of the bomb, and going on to Salk.

09:29:33 From Brian On one axis, there is is writing to think and writing for an audience. On another axis there is the "top-down" design the book vs the "bottom-up" gardner approach. I don't think that one is better/worse and see both styles used very successfully.

09:30:19 From Jeff Miller a felt sense of sharing inspiring work, related to the project of writing a book? - a line of reflection from Eric

09:31:29 From Brian This seems like some sort of "campfire" where people show up regularily and talk. When there is a schedule/routine, then if it's a group you want to be part of, you start to adopt the norms/pressures/etc of the group.

09:31:49 From Jeff Miller "Use this as a meaning-making environment" - from Thompson Morrison - reflective practice, "name it, write it", not simply note taking. "As soon as they name a signficant observation, they're hooked."

09:32:02 From Pete Tweet threads sometimes are sometimes really good popularizers of something .. get at people's feelings. Other social media is good. Links to Wiki / Websites / books / podcasts / Youtube videos from those social media posts are important parts of modern distribution of ideas.

09:32:31 From Jeff Miller reflection, realization, naming, writing a beautiful wiki page; "your future self is delighted" when rediscovering the page

09:32:32 From Brian Yeah, wiki gives depth and expanse to conversation.

09:32:48 From Eric Dobbs _Feeling_ the inspiration of writing a gift to your future self. Recipe: 1) Reflect on the insights from the day. 2) Name that insight. 3) Write a page to capture it.

09:33:49 From Jeff Miller inspiration from Dick Gabriel (Dreamsongs; poet and Lisp programmer) for beautiful structure, six paragraphs three links

09:34:24 From Eric Dobbs Thompson explaining the origin of the haiku form in his garden pages. Haiku, the poetic practice, is the simplest form of powerful meaning.

09:35:34 From Jeff Miller the Markov Monkey creating meanigful paths as a consequence of the structure of a wiki haiku based FedWiki instance

09:36:15 From Pete Poetry / beauty of writing as important structural part of knowledge transfer (whether humans driving through links, or Markov Monkey, AIML or just Google search index consuming it). "Thompson Structured Wiki Text" - TSWT instead of "markdown"

09:37:32 From Jeff Miller "a structure of simple abstraction allowing for organic unfolding; therefore, how we write in wiki matters, to allow that fractal unfolding"

09:38:31 From Paul Rodwell wiki of Tree Bressen patterns - http://tree.tries.fed.wiki/

09:39:16 From Pete Graphical view of writing provoke emotions that pure words may not.

09:39:18 From jan d what was her name again?

09:39:22 From Jeff Miller Thompson reflects on the image of the bundle diagram of interactions among wiki sites as a compelling visualization, sparking recognition .

09:42:02

09:42:02 From Jeff Miller http://wellspring.fed.wiki/view/wiki-purpose and "Wiki Wisps" capture of the bundle diagram.

09:42:59 From Brian Alan Alda ends each podcast with 7 quick questions, one of which is "What gives you confidence?" For me, when I have a model that captures the complexity beyond sufficiency, then I have confidence. It sounds like there is something similar happening here with text. That the model is giving some confidence when there. There is tension reduction and confidence on the "right" path, or how to correct if something isn't quite in place.

09:44:25 From Brian If people can "own" and "monitize" their content, then that will be revolutionary too, and maybe there is a way with wiki to enable that.

09:44:51 From Jeff Miller "writing in smaller chunks that are reusable" Pete's reflection on the last 10 years of Federated Wiki and evolving writing styles manifest knowledge structure as somewhat the opposite of large language model source texts

09:47:00 From Jeff Miller "looking AT the technology" (Galileo as a lens-maker) / "looking THROUGH the technology" (what do people see, imagine, and understand?)

09:47:32 From Brian "Forgetting" is a critical part of growth too, so remembering everything at scale, isn't utopia either. I've also noticed that I'm running across topics that I think Marc would be interested in, and then I search his site and it's already there. So the positive is that I learn what Marc already though, but I don't follow up with the conversation that might have happened, where he would get to revisit and update his thoughts, so it has a chance of staying more stagnent...

09:47:55 From Jeff Miller http://wiki.c2.com/?BluePlane

09:49:10 From Jeff Miller from Thompson: *imaginative* feeling is part of what we seek, and part of what we crush out of young folks

09:49:42 From Brian I think evolution prefers assimilation and not accommodation, so it follows that as we age, we get more "rigid" Our biology is predesposed that way.

09:50:18 From Jeff Miller refactoring is not a thing which evolution can do, because it requires reconceptualization :)

09:51:48 From Jeff Miller C2 wiki -- required too much gardening and clean-up; a mechanism which can work for Wikipedia, not so much for an exploratory, reflective writing space getting the boundary right is a challenge; the notion of a collective voice of the wiki is difficult to cultivate

09:53:14 From Jeff Miller where Federated Wiki redraws the boundary to protect against overwriting

09:53:59 From David Bovill Ok - got to go for lunch - a friend has cooked. Had my hand raised - but hopefully will be able to come back and enter the conversation later…. Have headphones on so will be overhearing....

09:54:30 From Eric Dobbs http://npl.wiki/polycentric-region.html This urban pattern from Mehaffey feels a relevant metaphor to our conversation.

10:00:41

10:00:41 From Jeff Miller Thanks, Eric. Mehaffey's Polycentric Region pattern looks close to the first few from A Pattern Language, amplifying a specific set of beneficial consequences from distribution of concentrated and separated gatherings of different sizes.

10:02:19 From Brian It's the "Indiana" code style...

10:03:40 From Paul Rodwell Connected with Alexander’s forces - maybe worth listening Brian Marick short episode again… https://podcast.oddly-influenced.dev/episodes/excerpt-christopher-alexander-s-forces/transcript

10:04:40 From Jeff Miller Eric relates the interesting properties of wikis in conversation (Wiki Wisps) to stories and thought vectors through the pages within a well-structured wiki

10:05:47 From Brian When the diagram is too dense, or too sparse for your taste, then you can "refactor" the pages to know where content needs to be organized or links added.

10:06:16 From Jeff Miller Eric reflects seeing spare or sprawling diagrams in wikis he has created, versus the emergent structure from Thompson's disciplined page structure, visible at scale in the overview diagrams.

10:07:39 From Jeff Miller http://wellspring.fed.wiki/view/creative-breath/thompson.fed.wiki/story-vector/view/wiki-purpose/view/stories-unfolding Thompson reflects on the clustering seen in the Supercollaborator graph, seeing clusters pop out. Is there meaning in the clusters? When looking closely, a meaningful story shows up.

10:09:24 From Jeff Miller (interestingly Google's early sense-making for words in context were also called "clusters" -- conceptual clusters, emerging from wiki search when different pages have different contexts for a particular word)

10:10:36 From Jeff Miller "a sapience engine, a memory machine, a meaning machine, an epistemic [...], a story machine" Can we make the machinery of story making transparent, via the wiki? - Thompson

10:12:08 From Jeff Miller "Beauty unfolds from beauty", the theme of the second book. What happens if we commit to creating beautiful things? Beautiful code? (Greg Wilson, as editor of the book "Beautiful Code", ended up with a wide set of varying stories, but had hoped that it would be more inspirational than it ended up being)

10:13:36 From Jeff Miller I appreciate Ward's code as gemlike expression of a working concept - understandable by inspection and demonstration.

10:15:39 From Jeff Miller think / reflect / name / write / clarify (an approach shared with writing beautiful, elegantly clear pages); "a program a day, similar to a poam a day"

10:16:18 From Brian Quality is directly related to time spent on task, and from starting from a huge quantity of options. A "flow state"

10:18:01 From Jeff Miller Eric reflects: part of the exercise of a poem is to condense feelings and concepts down into a beautiful, generative expression of a few words (Eric: add anything I missed!)

10:19:44 From Jeff Miller Hi David B, welcome back. The Tale of Genji certainly has a notion of competitive poetry - "top this!" but also there's a notion of refinement and being high-class there

10:22:56

10:22:56 From Jeff Miller though "The Tiger" ends up as one of those naive clear hits in poetry (not Blake, but "Yes YES the tiger is out")

10:23:11 From Eric Dobbs I love Shuhari; http://wander.dbbs.co/-shuhari.html

10:23:33 From Jeff Miller I could hear Shu-Ha-Ri tiptoeing in a few minutes ago.

10:26:59

10:26:59 From Jeff Miller David Bovill reflects on his work with shared knowledge, early inspiration from Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, in the context of working on a collaborative game for medical students; later work with wikis in the creative arts, game development and dance; about feelings and expressions, sometimes projected into physical space with live performance and dance.

10:27:01 From Thompson Morrison Here’s another page: http://wellspring.fed.wiki/shu-ha-ri.html

10:27:25 From Jeff Miller The learning experience in the classroom of bringing things to life. - (David B)

10:30:10

10:30:10 From Jeff Miller David Bovill asks: What is the nature of the person attracted to this sort of lifelike sharing or creation? Who finds it more natural, who finds it more difficult? (to DB's experience in classrooms with folks more or less attracted)

10:32:14 From Jeff Miller David Bovill asks: Participatory and regenerative communities have tendencies toward flourishing and then getting messy. Could you say something more about beauty -- not just the inspirational attraction, but the necessity to keep things pure enough to reproduce the pattern? The tendency to sprawl rather than maintain a beautiful structure.

10:32:15 From Brian Beauty comes when there is sufficient "float" in the system where people can reasonablly choose to invest in it. Communities have a challenge when the initial thing that formed the community has become "stable" and the members decide on what the secondary thing is, and those often have opposing interests.

10:33:37 From Jeff Miller Brian Marick's podcast has a set of podcast episodes about the growth and fission of creative communities which might relate to the life cycle which David Bovill is reflecting on. (Sometimes a context change resulting from success or outside forces)

10:33:46 From jan d Beauty, defense and coherence: Reminds a bit of Alexander’s points about conservatism in non-modern architecture (that it is both self-made and conservative as in rejecting a lot of ideas as well)

10:33:47 From Jeff Miller maintaining fidelity

10:36:27

10:36:27 From Jeff Miller Marc reflects on a structure and boundaries which maintain beauty (to David Bovill's point). Maybe it's less about the personas who are attracted to participatory creative learning, and more about how those personas are cultivated as a set of habits of thought and writing which are generative in the Federated Wiki structure and ecosystem? Marc reflects on how an individual can shift personas, perhaps with Thompson Morrison's experience guiding the wiki authors in the book creation work.

10:38:04 From Jeff Miller Eric reflects on Thompson's process of being patiently present until the people working with wiki realize the value in a convincing way, "Not only did I do this, but the people I'm working with were inspired by this work!" lighting the fire

10:39:21 From Brian dancing

10:39:36 From Jeff Miller Eric reflects that once the experience of "aha!" is seen, that step motivates carrying the experience forward and defending it against the mess which David Bovill highlights as ways in which creative collaborations can get lost in a mess.

10:40:07 From Brian Samething can happen when working with dogs or riding horses...when the multiple bodies act in unison with common goal and movement and little or no resistence.

10:40:40 From Jeff Miller dancing is a metaphor for very close sensitive collaboration which Brian Marick explicitly brings in, using his experience studying and dancing Tango with his wife Dawn (who also brings a lot of the biological system metaphor expertise) "riding horses" -> Kerry's reflections

10:41:31 From Brian Maybe to David's question, in some sense, I'm prepetually seeking the "aha" flow state. It's always in the back of my mind and I've never been able to shake it, since feeling it the first time. It's not always front and center, but it's always present.

10:43:35 From Brian In programming, it's when I've refactored the data structures and code into something that is simple (and maybe profound). For example, when I have a majority of `pure` functions and limited number of `impure` functions that articulate exactly what they are doing.

10:43:35 From Paul Rodwell child like curiosity

10:43:49 From Jeff Miller "You will discover a powerful connection between two abstract concepts and YOURSELF" -> Thompson's reflection on rediscovering creative potential as a driver for continuing to show up, because it can bring you alive. Psychological safety is essential to bringing out your tender true self.

10:44:06 From Marc Pierson TENDERNESS

10:44:54 From Pete "Adults" should embrace this more, instead of training it out of us :-)

10:45:35 From Brian All depends on what the objective is and what the values of entities within the "boundary" are.

10:46:16 From Thompson Morrison A tender page leaning into tenderness: http://wellspring.fed.wiki/tender-self.html

10:46:44 From Jeff Miller Reacted to "In programming, it's..." with ❤️

10:46:54 From Paul Rodwell https://guitarcraft.com/differences-of-opinion/

10:46:56 From Marc Pierson There is a sequence of tenderness: collaboration, coordination, cooperation, co-design, co-identification.

10:47:00 From Eric Dobbs I listened to this episode of Oddly Influenced this morning before our call. Also fits our conversation today. Game designers work by composing the potential agency of the players. I love Jessitron’s paraphrase, that the interesting nugget is that we humans can even choose what sort of agency we take on, like choosing which character to play in a collaborative board game. Useful as a metaphor to help participate in work teams, or for managers to try to design for their teams. https://podcast.oddly-influenced.dev/episodes/interview-jessica-kerr-on-games-agency-as-art

10:47:44 From Jeff Miller oh right, Dramatic Identity?

10:48:15 From Pete I don't equate 'tenderness' with reticence / self-editing -- although it is easy to 'raise shields' and be cynical or disengage.

10:49:43 From Pete You can still be a bit challenging / "take the piss out of each other" , but only if people feel safe.

10:50:58 From Jeff Miller (a discussion of patterns of defensiveness and safety in different cultural contexts of interaction)

10:52:03 From Pete "Stealing" vs. "Sharing" is point of view about economics around surviving in society. "Intellectua Capital" vs. "Sharing ideas"

10:52:37 From Jeff Miller ability to express disagreement as a sign of a psychologically safe context

10:52:49 From Brian groups have norms, those norms can involve "conflict" or discussion...but you aren't violating the norms...That same action might not work in a different group with other norms.

10:53:00 From Jeff Miller a favored interaction style which may be hard to get inside of

10:53:25 From Pete Use of Creative Commons license for fedwiki is party of pushing poeple towards 'sharing' not 'monetizing'

10:53:43 From Marc Pierson Fear has to become discussable.

10:53:49 From Eric Dobbs Chatham House rule is another example of creating some safety in a community.

10:54:35 From jan d Freeman

10:54:38 From Jeff Miller https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327681947_Games_Agency_as_Art "Games are the art form of agency".

10:55:04 From Paul Rodwell a systemisation of armour

10:55:43 From Eric Dobbs Oh… the psychological safety insights were deeper in this other podcast from this week. Colette Alexander: “being in a band is a deep expression of disagree-and-commit… if you’ve been having a fight backstage just before going onstage, and still you put on the show.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPxWJPM1b-g

10:56:49 From Brian And the observation of it. Need role models.

10:56:51 From Jeff Miller Jo Freeman, the power and decision structure tends to be hidden in formally egalitarian contexts. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm (insiders and outsiders; friends and "just members")

10:57:43 From Brian Sort of "activation" levels, related to the cascades concept. Some individuals might need a level 1, others a level 3, etc...so as more people are "tender", then the people with higher thresholds eventually particpate.

10:58:47 From Brian That is the way my previous boss selected his team that I got to be on for about 10 years. Pretty amazing experience.

10:58:56 From Jeff Miller Thompson points out that "tenderness" is a deliberate choice of words, in preference to "vulnerability". Creating the possibility to feel, but being safe rather than vulnerable.

11:00:04 From jan d need to leave! See you on next Sunday, I think👋🏻

11:00:11 From Brian Bye Jan! Thanks for the links.

11:00:24 From Jeff Miller Marc observes than in working with Kerry, if "safety" and "fear" were present in their systems diagram, when consulting with working groups, you need a conversational construct which lets people ask "why are we afraid?" "how can we make things safer?"

11:02:31 From Jeff Miller David Bovill reflects on members of creative communities who may struggle with expressing feelings which are intensely challenging for them - or experiencing expressions of others' feelings.

11:03:00 From Brian Great point David.

11:04:21 From Brian Sounds like the employees are ripe for starting their own business without the boss...lol

11:04:22 From Jeff Miller A structure in a collaborative community must consider supporting neurodiverse members, so that they can participate and not be excluded.

11:05:24 From Jeff Miller (Jo Freeman again, consciousness of structural choices for working together)

11:06:11 From Brian That is why "clicker" training can be so effective. It's present enough to reinforce, but not to distraction/disruption.

11:08:16 From Jeff Miller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clicker_training "a bridging stimulus, with precise timing"

11:10:37 From Jeff Miller (discussion of the rhythm of having an engaged audience, or an engaged set of folks in a conversation)

11:12:09 From Jeff Miller Paul reflects on recorded presentations where the presenter is live online in the chat, to be able to participate with audience thoughts and questions. (I've seen that used by Clarion West and Writing The Other writing workshops) (recording with simultaneous participation)

11:13:12 From Brian MST3K...

11:13:19 From Pete :-) Love MST3K from waaay back

11:14:04 From Jeff Miller Eric reflects on "Interrupt Us!" series at CU Boulder, with a movie theatre / stage, and Roger Ebert on stage with control over the playback. The audience can interrupt and reflect.

11:14:23 From Pete https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/cinema-interruptus

11:14:25 From Jeff Miller Maybe harder with music than with cinema.

11:15:06 From Brian Portland symphony used to do a symphony and a lecture, where the 1st hour was a lecture on the composer, the piece, parts, influential politics, and then there was the intermission and the the 1hour piece would be performed.

11:15:32 From Jeff Miller Paul's demonstration to David B's earlier question about galleries and images.

11:17:10 From Jeff Miller all the images in the Image plug-ins saved space; a responsive layout which reflows to the window shape/size

11:18:24 From Jeff Miller Dragging an image from the gallery into a FedWiki factory item, and the factory recognizes the URL for the image source The image gallery as a new standard view available in Federated Wiki, currently in Paul's workspace; maybe there will be a footer with "this image used on these pages".

11:19:26 From Brian I was wrong, thanks for correcting that.

11:20:56 From Jeff Miller Seattle Symphony has done similar "a composer in context" presentations, enriching the experience for the audience who might not all be familiar. Often aimed at family attendees.

11:22:58 From Jeff Miller (a pop-up of a Graphviz diagram can be used for navigation, but not editing) right, drag and drop journal history?

11:24:11 From Jeff Miller "I don't want to fork the entire page, can I drag and drop just a paragraph / item on a same-named page?" workflow for keeping a local page appropriately up to date

11:26:00 From Brian Have a great week all.

11:26:38 From Jeff Miller Marc considers two pages with the same slug / name, and how to make one of the two pages the primary and complete page -- it's difficult to do. Paul points out that there was a recent before-Christmas update which may be present in Ward's wiki space, and the update may help with sync'ing up pages. inspectors are fun! (I have been doing a recent front-end project in the browser)

11:27:50 From Paul Rodwell https://spike.wiki.rodwell.me/view/spike/view/internal-link/tests.spike.wiki.rodwell.me/internal-link

11:28:05 From Jeff Miller making sense of the discussion by typing it it helps me make sense of it too, Marc! got into it after-the-fact when compiling Silicon Valley Patterns Group notecards into a summary, where each card helped me recall ("a placeholder for a conversation") what was being talked about.

11:31:11

11:31:11 From Jeff Miller Eric demonstrates a new inspector, and an attempt to use a static webserver host, in comparison with the standard wiki approach -- is this a reference implementation (the standard Node-based FedWiki server) versus alternate implementations. Eric considers being able to poke at the parts of the site which are of interest, like a tool for choosing the neighborhood.

11:32:55 From Jeff Miller Eric imagines throwing sites away from the neighborhood as a use for the tool. There's a lot which is interesting in the neighborhood, but the way in which a neighborhood grows organically can be awkward, since the back button doesn't remove the new sites added.

11:34:23 From Jeff Miller Eric's demonstration is an Observable notebook which can poke at a Federated Wiki in various ways. favicon, sitemep, sitesearch, welcome - standard page fetches in the inspector.

11:35:30 From Jeff Miller Observable operates in an HTTPS context and so disallows fetching and using HTTP resources, generally, because of mixed content security limitations. Sitemap inspector example:
* is it present?
* is it valid JSON?
* (later: is it consistent with other data...)

11:37:22 From Jeff Miller "The state machine for each of these buttons is an async generator function" async function* stepwiseLoad(url)

11:38:59 From Jeff Miller yield OK result from first HEAD request
yield URL (and blue is all-done, like favicons)
yield light-blue if JSON
yield dark blue for a successful JSON fetch

11:40:12 From Jeff Miller a tight and appropriate code expression of Eric's wiki inspector state machine in Javascript

11:41:31 From Jeff Miller Marc demonstrates an OPCloud diagram for the course under development, "Systems as a Second Language", highlighting a diagram of "Story Crafting" as an overlaid technique used for the other techniques and approaches in systems dynamics work. "taking working systems understanding from a deficient state to a sufficent state via community modeling work"

11:42:41 From Jeff Miller The sufficient understanding can be put to work by community action groups.

11:45:15

11:45:15 From Jeff Miller David Bovill has a demostration with AstralShip wiki and a LiveCode environment for running a local wiki using -- dozens of individual wikis created in the last couple of months -- here's the server object, here are the logs of the server which is setting up routes and doing work -- as a wiki dynamically loads, you can see here a menu of the locally available wikis (a pull-down menu of multiple wiki instances locally available) (Jeff laughs at the URL interception for arbitrary code execution)

11:46:56 From Jeff Miller David B shows custom code adaptations to set the size and colour and style of the wiki in the Electron client running locally. "As a design space, I can bring in command-line visualisation of live video and use the full screen; because I decided to write my own server, it helped me understand wiki and give me more control over it."

11:49:38

11:49:38 From Paul Rodwell demos will find a way of breaking

11:51:10 From Jeff Miller Some of the dynamically styled properties of the local server; I'd like to bring some of the tools available locally into a browser context. When I click on the flag of a not-yet-existing page, I'd like the server to provide support for it in the browser, via the page flag.

11:53:00 From Jeff Miller (David B's vision for a friendlier wiki, "Create Page Dialogue" should show up when clicking the flag of a missing page, using the slug and also pulling in external context if relevant, like WIkipedia) (also Openverse Thumbnails as supportive context for a new page)

11:58:58

11:58:58 From Jeff Miller Openverse for audio and podcasting resources relevant to wiki page authoring

12:02:01

12:02:01 From Jeff Miller "an English language isomorphic to the OPM diagramming language" Marc says - anything that is an object will be a green box; anything that's a process will be a blue ellipse; finding a way of making these tools correspond to a story which you can move back and forth from diagram to text.

12:05:12

12:05:12 From Jeff Miller http://www.aristobit.com/exo/