Clocking in at the Idea Factory (or the Farm)
Regular readers know I’ve been making noise lately about an idea factory that would seek to leverage (sorry, Ordinal) the skills of anyone who cared to participate in an effort to create any or all of a list of wish apps that had also been created by the community. As previously noted, I had to miss last Saturday’s jawboning session on the topic, but Bill Ward and a couple of other people who were there have been kind enough to send me some notes about what was discussed (including a fantastic handwritten page, from which I’ve clipped the chart above, which you can view in its entirety on Flickr). I’m going to try to tie all those notes together here into a vision of a metaversal idea factory (which I’m still not convinced shouldn’t be called an idea farm — or insert your good idea for a name here), and will try to keep you posted as things develop. Keep in mind that this is my interpretation of the state of things; it seems a fairly complex undertaking, so I may have gotten a few details out of place. In any case, though, it’s a very cool project which I’d love to see take off.
First, a caveat: The idea factory that people seem to be working on sounds like a suite of Web sites for producing and managing open-source projects that goes beyond something like SourceForge by incorporating more tools of social networking and the “semantic Web” and getting more people involved in the development of the ideas themselves. That kind of thing is going to be a long time coming, if it arrives at all, so in the meantime, you’re invited to contribute ideas for projects you’d like to see happen in the 3pedia wiki’s Projects namespace. Just dial over there and create a new project and tell us what you’d like to see. They needn’t be ideas specifically related to Second Life, but should fall within the broader umbrella of something related to 3pointD. With any luck, someone will come along and make some of them happen. (Big props to 3pedia contributor Jimbob Peltaire, by the way, who’s been plugging new ideas into 3pedia seemingly as fast as they occur to him.)
I’ll talk here about a Web-based idea factory system, and base my comments on the notes that have been forwarded to me from Saturday’s meeting. Below, you can read about some of the components currently being contemplated by the people who attended the Saturday meeting: Bill Ward, Jerry Paffendorf, Melody Chamlee, Alvis Brigis and Andy Fundinger. Keep in mind that I have added some of my own ideas to these components (including the funny names). How they eventually get built out is anyone’s guess. Keep in mind, as well, that all of this is just ideas at the moment. If you’re interested in helping to make it reality, my suggestion would be to get in touch with me or one of the people mentioned here, drop in at 3pedia, and see if any work is in progress and how you can help — or if nothing is in train yet, go to town!
Proposed idea factory components:
• Incubator: An idea submission engine that would accept new ideas for projects via email or the Web, and potentially format them in some consistent fashion, perhaps with tags and their creator’s identities attached. Second Life resident Ciemaar Flintoff (aka Andy Fundinger) is apparently working on this.
• Lobby / Driveway: A collaborative social space to help guide interested people toward projects they would find the most appealing, allowing them to drill down into the project list based on things like tags, physical location of those involved, project needs, project “urgency,” type of technology, topics addressed by the project, and/or other criteria. This is essentially a search function, writ large and metaversal. This might also track the stage of completion for each project, and make clear that more than one implementation of a project is possible. The Lobby could also include some kind of visual or semantic network viewer that would provide various angles on all projects in the system, or on a subset, or on how a single project relates to the rest of the projects.
• Acreage Map: A facility for gaining a bird’s-eye view of a single project that might include a project roadmap and highlight critical development needs, among other functions.
• Drafting Table: A place for hammering out the details of a project that would include a view of it in relation to other projects in the system.
• Warehouse / Barn: A resource to allow developers to make themselves available, and allow those working on projects to locate resources they’re in need of. This could include a facility to list technologies that might be of use in creating projects, as well as a repository of open-source plug-ins or similar applications.
• Toolbox: A set of flexible and optional tools for managing projects and facilitating the organization of contributors, should that be desired. The toolbox should be flexible enough to allow various projects to organize themselves however they see fit. The toolbox might include functions like tracking milestones with reminders, shared task lists, and some sort of whuffie system.
• Feed Bag: A whuffie-like points system allowing people to rate projects along various vectors and/or earn points for their work.
• World domination: As Bill puts it, “Lets not fool anyone here, what we really want is a nice parking space in Midtown. If we have to take over the world to do it, so be it.”
Bill also sent along his notes on some “points to ponder” that had come up at Saturday’s meeting, which I’m just going to copy in their entirety below. In fact, there’s a lot to ponder here. I’d love to hear the results of your ponderings in the comments thread below.
The points to ponder that Bill collected:
1. The Semantic Web has been a buzzword for a few years now. The real meat and potatoes of the Semantic part have very real, and very actionable merit. This project can exist without the semantic component, but I believe there are orders of magnitude between the effectiveness of the project with semantic enhancement and without. That said, a lot of energy will be invested in understanding how to apply “knowledge” to the data this project collects. Once the data is mapped to “knowledge” then advanced analysis arises which enables the sort of worldview approach that I hope to offer to the user community. It’s not enough to have Sourceforge-for-ideas, we need to have something that allows ADD-afflicted folks with little spare time the ability to maximize their effective “volunteer” output. Remember, the Idea Factory concept roots in the Metaverse today, but the concepts that we’re introducing are universal in nature. We’ll be able to take this construct out and apply it to other issues. I know other volunteer coordination Web sites exist, but will they be able to do what we’ve discussed here? Do they have the expertise to do it?
2. Momentum. It’s easy to have this initial blast of enthusiasm for a new idea (even in this case, an idea of ideas,) and once the PR dies off, the project dies along with it. We all have “day jobs” and we all have other commitments both within and without those day jobs. We need to nail down some measurable, discrete goals. Achieving milestones toward these goals will help to maintain enthusiasm on our part. Keeping the wider community interested also relies on milestones and deliverables. Saturday night did not involve a lot of talk about the form these would take (nor should it, it’s an initial meeting for us, and while we’ve been playing in the same sandboxes for awhile, we’re still pretty new to collaborating with one another and our styles and personalities.)
3. What’s in it for us? Altruism is a great motivator — to a point. But we’re all looking for credibility, a chance to showcase our talents, exposure to a wide audience (some of us already get this on a regular basis, but everything must be maintained), and a sense of accomplishment in an altruistic task, and one that fits well within our geek-value framework. So as a point to ponder, let us endeavor to be open and overt about our goals and our tolerance for commitment to this project. If you start to feel uncomfortable about something, try and get it out early.
4. Competing projects. In fact, the only competition under way is for PR. If another group of bright minds are working along a parallel track, we may feel that we’re wasting our time. We’re not, and we shouldn’t feel upstaged if MIT, or another Kid from Podunk (read Make Magazine #8) beats us to the grail. The Internet is a HUGE place, and as you see daily with Second Life, people are doing amazing things, and often times we don’t hear about it until it reaches the media. A little digging may reveal that there are huge communities of people working along similar paths. But we are here, and we know about our path — and we should walk it until it’s done. Just my point to ponder, I deal with this anxiety all the time.
Feeds
I too am anxious about this emergence and would love to be part of the ground swell. Here’s my ultimate pipedream: To use Second Life, or what ever the prevailing Metaverse is at the time, as a tool for conducting a ‘Wiki’ or ‘Open Source’ approach to architecture and city planning. In a nutshell, I would love to see a community of people design a ‘tabula rasa’ city, such as Seaside, Florida, through a paradigm of collective authoring. This is the ultimate pipe dream goal and obviously there’s a lot of untested ideas and protocols (a semantic web being one of those) that need to be fleshed out in the interim, but it’s exciting to see a convergence of like minds.
In this light, there’s an ongoing and continually evolving experiment right now on Keystone Bouchard’s SL Architecture Island that is exploring the possibilities of open-design as it applies to architecture. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Architecture%20Island/91/157/33
Through this Wikibuild experiment, as it as been coined, we are exploring and fleshing out the specific measures, protocol, and tools necessary, within the metaverse and in particular Second Life, to make a ‘Wikitecture’ concept a reality. Although in its infancy, the developments will be posted on the following blog:
http://studiowikitecture.wordpress.com/
An ‘Open’ approach to something, at times, as subjective as architecture might be an exercise in ungrounded wishful thinking, but equivalent experiments in the arts, such as De Montfort University’s open approach to writing a novel, as chronicled at http://www.amillionpenguins.com, keep me hopeful.
Perhaps overly simplifying the argument, but the modification of a typical definition of Open Source Software is quite revealing nonetheless in how this paradigm could be applied toward a new approach in city planning:
By making the source code (model) for the software (city) available to all, any programmer (designer) can modify it to better suit their needs and redistribute the improved version to others users. By working together, a community of both users (citizens) and developers (designers) can improve the functionality and quality of the software (city). Filtered through the lens of the “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds”‘Wisdom of Crowds’ the best ideas will eventually float to the top.
Anyways, back to work… there’s my two cent, I’m excited (although anxious) to be part of the community. ;)
Let’s do this thing.
I would like to elaborate on something sort of mentioned by Prokofy earlier and also referred to in point 3 above, which is ownership and credit.
Anyone even tangentially involved in idea-driven industries will have experienced, first or second hand, the situation of somebody coming up with a terrific idea and then somebody else stealing it and taking the credit. This is an accepted part of being a junior media type (if you are a runner the best you can hope for your ideas is that they will get stolen but the thief will put in a good word for you) - once you get past that stage, you keep your ideas to yourself unless you don’t really care about them or you trust the people you mention them to. The latter doesn’t really work well with a large-scale idea space; it means you only get your friends’ ideas, which are usually manageable by traditional means anyway, and probably only some of them.
Any serious idea factory which wants to get contributions from people from many different backgrounds, amateurs, pros - and let’s face it, what’s the point if you don’t want to encourage people who you don’t already know to join in? one might as well just have a virtual whiteboard - needs to deal with this issue and make sure you don’t just end up duplicating the distinctly unfair system that already exists.
Not that I have an immediate solution here. Being able to contribute ideas and tag them with an identity and have a system automatically show your level of contribution to “core concepts”, even if you don’t take part and make a noise past that, is a step, but then it’s easy to copy ideas and submit them as your own in a slightly different form. At the moment, any system is really going to be rated on trust. If I submit ideas here, will people give me credit? Will I benefit from being creative and be encouraged to be so in the future? Or will the people running this thing rip me off?
Good points, Ordinal. I don’t have much of a solution either, except to note that you have to log into 3pedia to contribute, which means that any contributions there are automatically tagged with your username in the page history.
Ultimately, though, such a system probably rests on the trust its users put in the people who run it. But the good thing about open-source systems is that if you don’t trust the people running one of them, you can just go build your own. Hopefully, though, those systems would be able to talk to each other, since fragmentation would do away with cross-pollination eventually.
Also, perhaps an implementation of the system could be used to implement not only open-source ideas but proprietary ones as well? You could create a private project within the broader project space and still have access to the resources there. This would depend on the policies and priorities of whoever was running a particular system, I suppose. But again, there can be multiple systems, and so multiple implementations.
Ordinal, that *is* what I said. And I ask again: who pays? Because the time, treasure, and talent issues have to be paid for, somehow, if not in monetary payments, in kind, or in credit. So if you all pulled together to make the Twitterific Keyword Sorter and Filer, there would be a bright red thread running through it from start to finish that shows ORDINAL MALAPROP. So everybody putting in the pieces in the mosaic has a colour, and the provenance and developing and forking are all colour coded and everyone sees that without, say, the Red Thread of Ordinal Malaprop, the Ultimate Blue Keyword Organizer, which was propagated on a shard off the Pink Twitterific Keyword Sorter, contains a sold red backbone of pioneering Ordinal Twitter work.
There’s a name for these things; my father used to get them even working for proprietary companies that used his work. And that thing is…a patent! Wow! What an old meatworld carbon-based concept, eh? Patents! Not leftoid CCL stuff, but, you know, ownership?
I’m thinking there’s a possibility that as long as the thing you collectively make is so basic and so needed, like a paperclip, no one will mind not getting credit or just being part of the whole gestalt.
But once it becomes something more evolved and complex, someone will want to grab it. Then what?
That’s why I personally would rather see the idea factory actually do more like road mapping and contemplating possible forks and outcomes than actually trying to have a committee knit a sweater that probably one person could knit better.
Theory:
Re: By making the source code (model) for the software (city) available to all, any programmer (designer) can modify it to better suit their needs and redistribute the improved version to others users. By working together, a community of both users (citizens) and developers (designers) can improve the functionality and quality of the software (city). Filtered through the lens of the “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds”‘Wisdom of Crowds’ the best ideas will eventually float to the top.
This kind of discussion crops up constantly, where people develop this mystical belief in this positive floating to the top of all these collective ideas. Except…sometimes a crowd is about as dumb a thing you can get to do a particular job. What James S. meant was that crowd wisdom proves the old adage of “common sense” and is good for *some things*. It’s not good for everything.
I really want the Keystone Cops there to really walk this one ALL the way through and be brutally honest about lifelogging it. Make a thing, do this thing, and really report it out, Prove that it works. Prove that it’s not a mess. It sounds like a mess, merely due to the SL permissions system, if nothing else.
[…] And, I have seen a blue print for Wikimocracy 3.D, (here’s the 2D prototype). Wikimocracy 3D is the kind of big idea through which users will soon be reinventing the “brand” of democracy, and adding much needed value to this tired, misused, work horse. 3Dpointcom and other futurists have been pioneering an “idea factory.” Their post “Clocking in at the idea factory,” features a wonderful hand written plan for a metaversal idea factory by Bill Ward. Click to see the full plan on Flickr. […]