

Communication and Collaboration -- The Big Upgrade - DaniFong
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/12/communication-and-collaboration-big.html

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swombat
Responding to the disqus comments by DaniFong...

 _That's a beautiful way to phrase it, Adam. But I am tentative; I'm not sure
just how far the analogy extends. I think that modeling civilization as a
'human-like' intelligence or deity is probably a pretty loose approximation.
For one thing, both humans and deities (as usually conceived) have that
ability to hold their attention on something.

Indeed, in many meditation disciplines, practitioners are called upon to focus
their attention on a single thought or object. This is supposed to heighten
awareness of the world and one's self -- it is thought to be one of the most
fundamental aspects of intelligence. And though it may seem like society can
focus its attention on a single event, its interpretations are so diverse, and
its focus so fleeting and diffuse, that it seems that the attention of a
society and the attention of a person could be fundamentally, irreducibly,
different.

I just read your post 'Elephants all the way up.' To cop an analogy from
physics, there are many situations where the behavior of a collection of
particles becomes sharply different as the scale or energy or number or
density changes. We would call these 'phase transitions.' It seems to me that
though large groups have many of the elements of a human-like sentient being,
either in scale, type, or connectivity._

Or perhaps the lack of attention is an inescapable flaw as long as the rate of
communication is so slow. Perhaps our collective attention will improve as our
communication tools become more instantaneous and pervasive. Or perhaps
focused attention is NOT a characteristic of the "greater-brain" - after all,
it is fundamentally different, like the anthill is different to the ant.

I certainly think that tools like Friendfeed bring us in that direction
(though I can't seem to be bothered to actually use it yet... twitter works
fine for my purposes). Although, I do think that we'll have to wait until
Friendfeed version 20 before we get to the "super-mind" stage (on the good
side, with the current rate of innovation, that shouldn't take more than a few
years!).

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tdonia
the appeal of this idea is as old as the web itself - early browsers were as
much for editing content as displaying content. [1] this is an important idea
to keep in mind when thinking about the growth of a new medium - having the
tools to manipulate that medium widely accessible gives the medium a better
chance of encouraging interesting content. [2] the central argument against
all this mind melding is that the most interesting content isn't necessarily
the smartest content[3]. Which isn't to say that it can't be[4].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb>

[2] The merits of impressionism aside, it would have been an improbable
development without (relatively cheap) tubed oil paints.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_paint>

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias>

[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo_journalism>

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xzx
I think the whole idea of editing blog posts leads to a rehash of wikipedia.
Why would I want to meaningfully edit someone else's opinions (pg's
corrections aside) ? And if the person is stating facts that can be
collaboratively edited, then you get a wiki article.

~~~
jerf
I've pondered the idea of a moderated Wiki, where edits come in more-or-less
as patchsets which the owner can apply or not apply. This was a while ago, and
I'd say my idea is totally trumped by hosting Wikis on git, such that changes
really _are_ patchsets, complete with a massive infrastructure to support
dealing with patchsets. Wrap a decent web UI around the basic idea, enhancing
the git workflow to better support the idea of "submitting" a patch out of the
blue, and you _might_ have something powerful. I believe such projects are in
progress.

(For git, substitute your choice of DVCS.)

The point of this being that if you pick and choose patches deliberately, with
of course the opportunity to modify them as you go, then you can end up with
something collaborative that still has a strong editorial voice. That might be
something new. It'd have to be very open and easy to use to work at all, but
it might.

~~~
DaniFong
Do you have a link? I've been looking for something like this.

~~~
siong1987
pbwiki.com?

~~~
DaniFong
More specifically I was interested in a hosted interface that uses git as the
backend.

~~~
siong1987
<http://github.com/blog/272-github-pages>

You can create a repository to collaborate a post with your friends. Whenever
you want to publish the post, just push it to the <http://yourname.github.com>
repository.

~~~
DaniFong
Very cool, thanks!

