Church of Purple: The IDs the Thing

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Some interesting posts in the blogosphere today that are relevant to Purple Numbers. First, Seb Paquet pointed to Matt Mower‘s recent “Show Anchors” bookmarklet, which displays named anchors on an HTML page. It’s a good hack, and it will hopefully encourage people to do more fine-grained linking, which is one reason for Purple Numbers.    (NW)

Second, Bill Seitz referenced Bob Du Charme’s article earlier this year on the deprecation of the “name” attribute for the new (but optional) “id” attribute in HTML, and asked whether this is relevant to Purple Numbers. It’s very relevant. Widespread use of ID attributes will hopefully make people understand the value of stable IDs for addressing (as opposed to the relative addressing enabled by things like XPointer).    (NX)

Purple Numbers are about two things: Making people aware of fine-grained addressability, and assigning stable IDs to each of these chunks. The former is what most people see, but good UIs will eventually (hopefully) make this feature irrelevant. The latter is the truly important contribution.    (NY)

Church Of Purple    (NZ)

As an aside, earlier this month, what started as an innocent question about blogging on the Collaboration Collaboratory turned into a massive discussion about many things, including Purple Numbers. At one point, I casually threw out the term, “Church Of Purple,” which Chris Dent and I had often used in our private conversations. Woe was me.    (O0)

We have a lot of smart members and some great discussions. The truth, however, is that half of our members are crazy. Peter Jones embodies our group’s split personality, mixing in profound comments with witticisms that usually leave me shaking my head and holding my sides. Peter decided that all good churches require a T-shirt, hymn, and Bible, and he proposed a few candidates for the latter. Chris has already blogged Peter’s Church Of Purple hymn (a merciless parody of Jimmy Hendrix’s Purple Haze). Here’s Peter’s excerpt from the Book of Purple:    (O1)

And lo, Engelbart looked down upon the text and saw that there were unidentified paragraphs, and that the lack of identifiers was a pestilence upon the augmentation.    (O2)

Perhaps deciding that Peter wasn’t being silly enough, Chris concocted a logo for the Church Of Purple, which I have dutifully added to this blog.    (O3)

Out of the silliness emerged perhaps the best example for why we need Purple Numbers, courtesy of Matt Schneider (and also blogged by Chris). Matt recounted an encounter with his then 82-year old father:    (O4)

I handed him a Bible and Hawaii (he’s a big Michener fan). I asked him to quickly turn to paragraph 536 of Hawaii. He looked over the top of his glasses at me. I smiled and then asked him to turn to Psalm 23:4. Light went on.    (O5)

December GivingSpace Workshop

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

There were several interesting presentations at Tom Munnecke‘s December 11 GivingSpace workshop, as well as some worthwhile discussion. Some quick thoughts and tidbits:    (NA)

The workshop began with one of Paul Andrews‘s Improbable Pairs videos. This one told the story of Yitzhak Frankenthal, an Israeli whose son was killed by Palestinians, and Jawad Tibi, a Palestinian whose brothers were killed by the Israeli military. Their tales are gutwrenching, but rather than respond with hatred, the two formed a group called the Parents Bereavement Forum, a support group for both Israeli and Palestinian families personally affected by the violence. Paul filmed and edited their stories masterfully. The video was only about ten minutes, but there was not a dry eye in the audience.    (NB)

Heather Wood-Ion gave a marvelous talk on transformation. An analogy she made that stood out for me was that the mythology in nonprofits centers around martyrdom. Words like “sacrifice” and “suffering” are bandied about. The mythology in forprofits centers around heroes. There, people talk about building legacies. These attitudes explain why nonprofits are so poor at collaborating with each other. There is a sense that martyrdom and collaboration are mutually exclusive. People want to share their stories of suffering, not of what went right and why. (There was some followup discussion about this at the Blue Oxen Collaboration Collaboratory.)    (NC)

Megan Smith, one of the founders of Planet Out and currently a Reuters Digital Visions Fellow at Stanford and an employee at Google, explained the 2/3 rule: Two-thirds of every successful community on the Internet consists of conversations. Successful sites, she said, are good at gardening those conversations. Megan also described a giant LCD map of the world at the Google offices. When someone in the world queries Google, a light blinks at that location on the map. What strikes Megan is that there are entire regions of the world that are always dark, a vivid visual reminder of the digital divide. In addition to being a clear thinker and a dynamic storyteller, Megan also demonstrated a diplomat’s touch, when she very skillfully and transparently defused an exchange between participants that had gotten very heated.    (ND)

Jerry Michalski explained his acronym du jour: MADA (Memory, Analysis, Discourse, Action). MADA struck me as an excellent (better?) synthesis for what Doug Engelbart calls CoDIAK (Collective Development, Integration, and Application of Knowledge). Jerry had the line of the workshop, when he pointed to the conversation map that Megan had drawn on the white board, and said, “All that discussion without memory and analysis is like going around in a giant circle jerk.” Jerry also suggested that business are partially to blame for why we don’t have better tools for group memory. Business of culture, he observed, don’t want us to have a memory. They want us to buy what they’re currently telling us we need. (See also my previous notes on group memory.)    (NE)

Richard Gabriel talked about the Hillside Group and Pattern Languages. He said that the Hillside Group “practices an aggressive disregard for novelty.” Jerry, incidentally, called Pattern Languages “deglazed wisdom.” Jerry was on fire that day.    (NF)

We participated in a Conversation Cafe for the latter part of the workshop. The topic was, “What can we do to create self-organizing systems that discover and replicate positive, scalable, small things?” We broke into several small groups, sat at different tables in the “cafe,” and drew on butcher paper as we talked. Here’s an excerpt from a previous blog entry about one of those conversations:    (NG)

Another great example of the challenges of SharedLanguage cropped up at the GivingSpace workshop in SanFrancisco last Thursday. Six of us were discussing small, concrete steps that lead to transformation, and HeatherNewbold described how MattGonzalez? for Mayor campaign buttons had galvanized the progressive community in SanFrancisco. Four of us knew exactly what Heather was describing, because we lived in the Bay Area and followed local politics. All she had to do was mention the buttons, and we understood what she meant. The other two people at our table, however, had no idea what we were talking about. One was from SanDiego, and the other simply didn’t follow politics.  T    (NH)

Here are the two products of the conversations at our table, courtesy of Fen Labalme.    (NI)

Every time I participate in one of these workshops, I find myself paying close attention to the facilitation itself, inevitably comparing it to other experiences. Shelley Hamilton’s technique shared some similarities with the MGTaylor process, and at one point, she cited Stuart Kaufman’s work, which also inspired Matt Taylor and Gail Taylor. Overall, Shelley did a good job. I especially liked the Conversation Cafe. The one thing I didn’t like was that there was no Report Out session following the cafe. It would have been nice to have had a group session where we summarized our conversations and sought connections between those summaries.    (NJ)

A Walk with Howard Rheingold: Collaboration as Craft

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I had the great pleasure of walking and talking with Howard Rheingold last Thursday. Howard lives in Mill Valley, a few blocks away from some of the many trailheads leading up to Mount Tamalpais. We had exchanged emails a few times and had met briefly after his talk at Stanford in October. I had invited him to coffee, and he suggested a brief hike instead, which I gladly accepted.    (MG)

Winter is one of the best times to go hiking in the Bay Area. We started walking around 4pm as the sun was beginning to set. The sky was a deep blue with a solitary streak of clouds overhead, and the air was cool and crisp. We walked about a mile to the top of a hill, where a rock formation seemed to form a natural bench around the crest. Looking north, we could see the peak of Mt. Tam. To our west were neighboring hills and the Pacific Ocean. To our east was a beautiful view of Mill Valley, where the city lights were beginning to come on. All of this served as a vivid reminder that I had, as usual, forgotten to bring my camera.    (MH)

Nevertheless, I was there to talk, and talk we did. One topic that came up — and a key reason for wanting to talk to Howard in the first place — was my desire to see the emergence of collaboration and community-building as a discipline, a widely acknowledged craft.    (MI)

People sometimes ask me what I know about collaboration that other people don’t. My response: Nothing. The reality is the reverse. There are many, many people in the world today who know significantly more than I or anyone else associated with Blue Oxen Associates about collaboration.    (MJ)

The problem is that this knowledge is scattered around the globe in isolated pockets. These folks all speak different languages — not just English versus French versus Korean, but also geekspeak versus Wall Street versus academia. Even when they know about each other, they can’t always talk to each other.    (MK)

Even worse, there is no group memory. Narrow the field to online communities. A lot of folks in the field have heard of Howard. How many people know what he’s accomplished beyond his excellent books? How many people have heard of the WELL? How many people know who founded the WELL? Going further back, how many people have heard of PLATO? Most importantly, how many people can cite lessons learned from the WELL or PLATO? Online communities have been around for decades. How many people can trace the lessons learned from these different communities over time?    (ML)

Howard told me that one fellow — perhaps one of the most knowledgable people in the field of online communities, with the credentials to match, and someone whom I’ve admired from afar — is working in retail right now to make ends meet. There’s no shame in working in retail, especially when times are tough like they are right now. Nevertheless, this strikes me as the worst kind of cosmic joke. Venture capitalists are spending millions of dollars on fast-talking entrepreneurs selling Social Software, trying to figure out how to make this stuff work (and profitable). There’s someone out there with decades of experience to share, someone who can undoubtedly help make these efforts successful. And yet, he’s currently working in a strip mall, addressing the needs of last-minute Christmas shoppers.    (MM)

Who’s at fault? You can say that this person — for all his skills — is poor at marketing himself. You can say that companies are short-sighted, and that they don’t understand what they need or how this person can help. There’s probably some truth to both of these statements. But, it’s still a travesty. This guy should be a hero to everyone claiming to be in the business of collaboration.    (MN)

That’s the crux of the matter. This is a field that is in desperate need of self-awareness. If we in the business truly want to improve, we need to be aware of our history and our heroes.    (MO)

Culture Clash, Shared Language, and Story Telling

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Speaking of names, a recent Newsday article on Viggo Mortensen, who plays Aragorn in the Lord of the Ring trilogy, notes that Danish people find his name:    (KK)

“Corny?” he says. “Yeah, I know. It would be like being called Oscar. Or Otto. It’s an old name. A really, really old name. And a little bit corny. Like Oswald or something …”    (KL)

Elmer?    (KM)

“Yeah! Elmer. Yeah,” Mortensen says. “I think there’s a comic strip in Denmark, a Dennis the Menace character, and his name is Viggo. He’s all over the place.”    (KN)

Names are a great example of how our different cultural backgrounds can make Shared Language challenging. There are many great examples of brand names gone wrong because they mean something obscene in other languages.    (KO)

When we first started discussing patterns of collaboration at Blue Oxen Associates, I identified casual social interaction as an important pattern, and I called it Water Cooler. Shinya Yamada, a collaboratory member based in Japan, had no idea why I chose that name. Shinya had worked in the U.S. before, so he understood my explanation. He also noted that he had never seen a water cooler in a Japanese office before, and that — unlike in the States — casual social interaction with strangers in the office was unusual.    (KP)

Another great example of the challenges of Shared Language cropped up at the GivingSpace workshop in San Francisco last Thursday. Six of us were discussing small, concrete steps that lead to transformation, and Heather Newbold described how Matt Gonzalez for Mayor campaign buttons had galvanized the progressive community in San Francisco. Four of us knew exactly what Heather was describing, because we lived in the Bay Area and followed local politics. All she had to do was mention the buttons, and we understood what she meant. The other two people at our table, however, had no idea what we were talking about. One was from San Diego, and the other simply didn’t follow politics.    (KQ)

Language itself is not enough. Telling stories is what makes language shared.    (KR)

Why I Have Three Names

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One thing that the articles cited in my two previous entries is that they both mispelled or misarranged my name. This is actually a relatively common phenomenon.    (K9)

For the first dozen years of my life, I went by my middle name, “Eric.” Using one’s middle name is also a relatively common phenomenon. What’s more unusual is that, upon changing schools in the seventh grade, I decided to go back to my first name, “Eugene.”    (KA)

It’s been long enough now that most people know me as, “Eugene.” Notable exceptions include my family, all of whom still call me, “Eric,” and the few people who remember me from way back when. I think my brother-in-law, Isaac, is still thoroughly confused as to what to call me, although he seems to be settling on “Eric.”    (KB)

In my bylines, I use my full name, Eugene Eric Kim. This is partially an acknowledgement of my dual identity, and also a feeble attempt at uniqueness in a world with way too many Eugene Kims.    (KC)

A surprising number of people get confused by the three names and call me “Eric,” even though I introduce myself and sign my e-mails as “Eugene.” This phenomenon has always fascinated me. Do I seem more like an “Eric” than a “Eugene” to some people, or do some people naturally gravitate to the shorter name?    (KD)

These folks often apologize to me when they catch themselves doing this. No need to apologize. I don’t mind at all. You do it at your own risk, however, because on the occasions that you need to refer to me in the third person, your brain will have to context-switch. Freshman year in college, my roommate — who was not yet up to speed on my name situation — complained, “Some nut keeps calling us asking for Eric, and I keep telling her she has the wrong number.” That nut, of course, was my mother.    (KE)