HyperScope Release Party Thanks!

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Thanks to all of you who came to the HyperScope Release Party on Tuesday night, and many thanks to Jack Park and Adam Cheyer of SRI for hosting, and to Jeff Rulifson for picking up the first round of drinks at Oasis. Some photos are up, with more to come and hopefully some video as well. My presentation is also up, HyperScope-enabled of course.    (L5I)

The past few days have been wild, with the blogosphere chattering about the release. I’ve said all along that we wanted to initiate a conversation about bigger and better things. Well, that conversation has started and then some, so now the onus is on me and my team to respond. Give me a few days to catch my breath, and I promise, I’ll have plenty to say.    (L5J)

My friend, Min Jung Kim, wrote a really nice post about the party, about the Bay Area, and about faith. I’ve been saying for a very long time that I’m a closet-optimist. A few years ago, I dropped the usual line, and someone responded, “You don’t seem to be too far in the closet.” Working on things that you care about and working with people who also care about their work, these things have a way of outing you.    (L5K)

The most gratifying thing about working on the HyperScope and all of Blue Oxen Associates‘ other projects is that the folks we work with care about the bigger picture. It’s not about creating a nifty piece of software. It’s not about throwing great events. It’s not about writing cute essays. It’s not about helping any single organization. It’s about bettering the world we live in. When you’re around people who truly believe that, it’s intoxicating and it’s motivating.    (L5L)

WikiMania 2006, Day One

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Day one is over. Brain is overloaded. Very tired. Attending conference during day/evening, then working late into night — bad. Law school dorms with no air conditioning in Cambridge in August — also bad.    (KWO)

Still, much to share. And amazingly enough, I will — at least a bit. There’s something about this conference that actually gets me to blog, rather than simply promising I will. Besides, I’m going to set a new record for responsiveness to Tom Maddox, even if it is via blog.    (KWP)

It is incredibly surreal to be back at my alma mater surrounded by post-college friends and colleagues. What makes it even more surreal is that folks from all facets of my professional life seem to be here, not just Wiki folks. I mentioned having my fingers in a lot of pies, right? Well, all those pies are unexpectedly well represented this weekend. It started yesterday when I discovered that Chris Messina and Tara Hunt were on the same flight to Boston, and culminated at dinner with Greg Elin (whom I first met at the FLOSS Usability Sprint, and who invited me to join him for dinner), Daniel Perry (a lawyer who’s been an important contributor to recent Identity Commons discussions), Tom Munnecke (first introduced to me by Jack Park when I was just starting Blue Oxen Associates), and Doc Searls (who needs no introduction). Also at the dinner: Ellen Miller, Micah Sifry, David Isenberg, Britt Blaser, and Yochai Benkler. Quite a contrast from last year, when I was hanging with grassroots Wiki peeps every night. I’m not complaining, though. The conversation was fascinating, even if we didn’t talk much about Wikis.    (KWQ)

Keeping with this theme, I didn’t hear much about Wikis today, other than my interview with Ward Cunningham. I kept my questions pretty basic, as a lot of folks there had never heard him speak, but I managed to slip in a few probing questions for myself. I asked Ward about the evolution of Wiki culture, and I specifically mentioned the culture of anonymity that he strongly encouraged in the early days, but that seems mostly absent in today’s Wikis. Ward seemed resignedly ambivalent. I asked him about what makes a Wiki a Wiki, and he was decidedly agnostic in his response: anything that facilitates a permissive spirit and mode of collaboration. I’m not sure whether he was being political or whether he truly feels this way. My guess is a bit of both, but I’ll press him on this if I get a chance later this weekend.    (KWR)

I showed up late to Larry Lessig‘s keynote, but I was unconcerned, as I had heard him give his Free Culture speech before. It’s excellent, but he recycles it often. Sure enough, he was doing the same speech, and I started tuning out. Fortunately, my brain was paying partial attention, or I would have missed what may end up being the most intriguing development of the conference.    (KWS)

Larry started talking about the interoperability of licenses, and how it was silly that the FDL and Creative Commons BY-SA licenses could not be relicensed interchangeably, even though the two licenses were equivalent in spirit and intent. He then proposed an interoperability clause as well as a neutral organization whose purpose would be to classify equivalent licenses. His talk was followed by a really good panel discussion between him and Eben Moglen. This stuff is really complicated and important, but it looks like Larry and Eben are serious about working together towards a common solution. Apparently, Jimbo Wales deserves a lot of credit for getting these two to cooperate. Did I mention that I love this community?    (KWT)

Quick hits:    (KWU)

  • I shared a flight and T ride here with Chris Messina aned Tara Hunt. (Chris was presenting on Bar Camp.) Chris extolled the virtues of Voodoo Pad, which apparently has autolinking features a la my Markup Free Auto Linking Wiki idea.    (KWV)
  • Was excited to see two of my roommates from last year: Kurt Jansson, a German doctoral student and president of the German chapter of Wikimedia Foundation, and Juan David Ruiz, a Chilean lawyer.    (KWW)
  • Saw Erik Zachte in the morning, who does awesome Wikipedia work. Erik immediately told me about two cool projects I had never heard of: FON and Wikimapia.    (KWX)
  • Caught up with Rory O’Connor after my session with Ward. Rory’s a filmmaker who came to last year’s Wikimania to make a documentary on Wikipedia. What I didn’t know was that he was so inspired by the proceedings, he decided to release all 13 hours of his footage under a Creative Commons license to encourage folks to mix their own documentaries from the event. Check it out, and mix away! There’s some interview footage of me somewhere in there, and I make a cameo in Rory’s 11-minute rough cut, in the background of Jimbo’s interviews yukking it up with John Breslin.    (KWY)
  • Somehow, I got recruited by multiple Wikipedians to help with the lightning talks due to my process expertise. My expert advice: “Move those chairs into a circle, and be firm with the time limit.” Yes folks, this is why I get paid the big bucks.    (KWZ)
  • Briefly got a chance to chat with Tim Starling about the OpenID integration in Mediawiki. Tim explained that they’re going to unify the user databases across all the different Wikimedia properties. This was further validation that Yoke‘s identity proxy approach is useful. Of course, one of these days, I’m going to have to actually write down what that approach is, so that I can convince people of its utility.    (KX0)

The Story of Glormf: Lessons on Language and Naming

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Jack Park recently asked about Link As You Think on the Blue Oxen Collaboration Collaboratory. I’ve written several blog posts on the matter, but there’s not much else out there. This was a great excuse for me to tell a few vignettes about Shared Language and the importance of names.    (KMO)

Glormf    (KMP)

This is Glormf, courtesy of the uber-talented cartoonist, Brian Narelle.    (KMQ)

(KMR)

Fen Labalme coined the term (originally spelled “glormph”) at an Identity Commons retreat in July 2003. We were strategizing about next steps, and we found that we were all struggling to describe what it was that we were all working on. Although we all had different views of the proverbial elephant, we were also convinced that we were talking about the same thing. In an inspired moment of clarity, Fen exclaimed, “It’s Glormf!” Much to our delight, Brian was listening to the conversation and drew Glormf for all of us to see.    (KMS)

Glormf’s birth lifted a huge burden off our shoulders. Even though Glormf was mucky, it was also real. We knew this, because it had a name and even a picture, and we could point to it and talk about it with ease. The name itself had no biases towards any particular view, which enabled all of us to use it comfortably. Each of us still had a hard time describing exactly what Glormf was, but if anyone challenged Glormf’s existence, any one of us could point to Glormf and say, “There it is.”    (KMT)

We had created Shared Language, although we hadn’t rigorously defined or agreed on what the term meant. And that was okay, because the mere existence of Shared Language allowed us to move the conversation forward.    (KMU)

Ingy’s Rule and Community Marks (KMV)

Ingy dot Net‘s first rule of starting a successful Open Source project is to come up with a cool name. I like to say that a startup isn’t real until it has a T-shirt.    (KMW)

Heather Newbold once told a wonderful story about how Matt Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign buttons galvanized the progressive community in San Francisco and almost won him the election. As people started wearing the green campaign buttons, she described the startling revelation that progressives in San Francisco had: There are others out there like me. A lot of them. I was amazed to hear her speak of the impact of this recognition, coming from a city that has traditionally been a hotbed of activism.    (KMX)

There’s a pattern in all of these rules and stories. I struggled to come up with a name for this pattern, and the best I could do for a long time was Stone Soup (courtesy of the participants in my 2004 Chili PLoP workshop). I loved the story associated with this name, the parable of how transformational self-awareness can be. But, it wasn’t quite concrete enough for my taste.    (KMY)

I think Chris Messina‘s term, “Community Mark“, is much better. Chris has actually fleshed out the legal implications of a Community Mark, which I recommend that folks read. Whether or not you agree with him on the details, the essence of Community Marks is indisputable: Effective communities have Community Marks. Community Marks make communities real, just as the term “Glormf” made a concept real. That’s the power of Shared Language.    (KMZ)

Pattern Languages and Wikis    (KN0)

Pattern Languages are all about Shared Language. Much of Christopher Alexander‘s classic, The Timeless Way of Building, is about the importance of names. In his book, Alexander devotes an entire chapter to describing this objective quality that all great buildings have. As you can imagine, his description is not entirely concrete, but he does manage to give it a name: “Quality Without A Name.” Call it a copout if you’d like, but if you use the term (or its acronym, “QWAN”) with anyone in the Pattern Language community, they will know what you’re talking about. Shared Language.    (KN1)

Ward Cunningham was one of the pioneers who brought Alexander’s work to the software engineering community. He created Wikis as a way for people to author and share patterns. Not surprisingly, an important principle underlying Wikis is the importance of names. Regardless of what you think about WikiWords, they have important affordances in this regard. They encourage you to think of word pairs to describe things, which encourages more precise names. They discourage long phrases, which also encourages precision as well as memorability. The more memorable a term, the more likely people will use it.    (KN2)

Ward often tells a story in his Wiki talks about using Class-Responsibility-Collaboration Cards to do software design. One of the things he noticed was that people would put blank cards somewhere on the table and talk about them as if there was something written there. The card and its placement made the concept real, and so the team could effectively discuss it, even though it didn’t have a name or description. (Ward has since formalized leaving CRC cards blank as long as possible as a best practice.) This observation helped him recognize the need and importance of Link As You Think, even if the concept (or Wiki page) did not already exist.    (KNG)

Open Source: Propagating Names    (KN3)

One of Blue Oxen‘s advisors, Christine Peterson, coined the term, “Open Source.” In February 1998, after Netscape had announced its plans to open source its browser, a few folks — Chris, Eric Raymond, Michael Tiemann, Ka-Ping Yee, and others — gathered at the Foresight Institute to strategize. At the meeting, Todd Anderson complained that the term, “Free Software,” was an impediment to wide-scale adoption. After the meeting, Christine called up Todd and suggested the term, “Open Source.” They both loved it. But, they didn’t know how to sell it.    (KN4)

So, they didn’t. At the followup meeting a few days later, Todd casually used the term without explanation. And others in the room naturally picked up on the term, to the point where they were all using it. At that point, they realized they had a good name, and they started evangelizing it to the rest of the community.    (KN5)

Names change the way we think about concepts, and so propagating names widely can shift the way people think about things. This is what happened with “Open Source.” This is what George Lakoff writes about in Moral Politics.    (KN6)

The mark of a good name is that people naturally start using it. A name can come from the top down, but it can’t generally be forced onto people.    (KN7)

Tim Bray on Purple Numbers

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I’ve long been a fan of Tim Bray‘s work, and although we had never crossed paths before, I had always assumed it would be instigated by me making some comment about something he had done or written about. (A few months back, I emailed him about ballparks in the Bay Area, because we seem to share a love for the sport, but that doesn’t count.) So I was surprised and pleased to see that Tim had made first contact and had (temporarily, as it turned out) implemented Purple Numbers on his blog. Not surprisingly, this is starting to generate some talk in the blogosphere. In particular, see:    (1G9)

Chris has done an excellent job of quickly addressing many of these issues. I’ll just toss in a few thoughts and references here and will look forward to more feedback.    (1GE)

Stable, Immutable IDs    (1GF)

Several people have pointed out that the IDs need to be stable. In other words, as the paragraphs move around or as new ones are added or deleted, the IDs stick to their original paragraphs. This was a fundamental motivation for Engelbart’s statement identifiers (SIDs), which we have renamed node identifiers (NID).    (1GG)

Both Purple (which needs updating) and PurpleWiki handle this correctly. You’ll notice that the addresses are stable on my blog and on Chris’s, as well as on all of the PurpleWiki installations (e.g. Collab:HomePage, PurpleWiki:HomePage). It’s because we use plugins for our respective blog software that call PurpleWiki‘s parser, which manages NIDs for us.    (1GH)

By using PurpleWiki to handle the purpling, blog content has NIDs unique to both the blog and the Wiki, which allows us to do fun stuff like transclude between the two. We get a similar effect with perplog, the excellent IRC logger written by Paul Visscher and other members of The Canonical Hackers. For example, check out Planetwork:Main Page and the chat logs over there.    (1GI)

Mark Nottingham noted that even if the NIDs are stable in the sense that they are attached to certain paragraphs, the paragraphs themselves are not semantically stable. This is a point on which I’ve ruminated in the past, and we still don’t have a good solution to it.    (1GJ)

History and Other Worthy Projects    (1GK)

I’ve written up my own brief history of Purple Numbers, which fills in some holes in Chris’s account. In it, I mention Murray Altheim‘s plink. Plink is no longer available on the net, because it has been subsumed into his latest project, Ceryle. Everything that I’ve seen about Ceryle so far kicks butt, so if you’d like to see it too, please drop Murray an email and encourage him to hurry up and finish his thesis so that he can make Ceryle available! You can tell him I sent you, and you can forward him the link to this paragraph; he’ll understand.    (1GL)

Matt Schneider is the creator of the PurpleSlurple purple numbering proxy, which will add Purple Numbers to any (well, most) documents on the Web. PurpleSlurple deserves a lot of credit for spreading the meme.    (1GM)

Mike Mell implemented Purple Numbers in ZWiki for last year’s Planetwork Conference (see ZWiki:ZwikiAndPurpleNumbers), which in turn influenced the evolution of Purple Numbers in PurpleWiki. Mike and Matt have both experimented with JavaScript for making the numbers less intrusive.    (1GN)

The latest version of the Compendium Dialogue Mapping tool exports HTML maps with Purple Numbers.    (1GO)

In addition to Murray, Matt, and Mike, several other members of the Blue Oxen Associates Collaboration Collaboratory have contributed to the evolution of Purple Numbers, especially Peter Jones, Jack Park, and Bill Seitz. In addition to his contributions to the technical and philosophical discussions, Peter wrote the hilarious Hymn of the Church Of Purple and excerpts of the Book of the Church Of Purple.    (1GP)

Finally, many good folks in the blogosphere have helped spread the meme in many subtle ways, particularly those noted connectors Seb Paquet and Clay Shirky.    (1GQ)

Evangelism and The Big Picture    (1GR)

Okay, that last section was starting to sound like an award acceptance speech, and although none of us have won any awards, one thing is clear: The contributions of many have vastly improved this simple, but valuable tool. I’m hoping that momentum picks up even more with these recent perturbances. I’m especially heartened to see experiments for improving the look-and-feel.    (1GS)

I want to quibble with one thing that Chris Dent said in his most recent account. (When we have distributed Purple Numbers, I’ll be able to transclude it, but for now, you’ll just have to live with the cut-and-paste):    (1GT)

When he [Eugene] and I got together to do PurpleWiki, we were primarily shooting for granular addressability. Once we got that working, I started getting all jazzed about somehow, maybe, someday, being able to do Transclusion. Eugene was into the idea but I felt somehow that he didn’t quite get it. Since then we’ve implemented Transclusion and new people have come along with ideas of things to do that I’m sure I don’t quite get, but are probably a next step that will be great.    (1GU)

There are many things I don’t quite get, but Transclusions are not one of them, at least at the level we first implemented them. That’s okay, though. Ted Nelson felt the same way about my understanding of Transclusions as Chris did, although for different reasons. (And, I suspect that Ted would have had the same opinions of Chris.) I mention this here not so much because I want to correct the record, but because it gives me an excuse to tell some anecdotes and to reveal a bit about myself.    (1GV)

Anyone who knows Doug Engelbart knows that he complains a lot. The beauty of being an acknowledged pioneer and visionary is that people pay attention, even if they they don’t think much of those complaints. When I first began working with Doug in early 2000, I would occasionally write up small papers and put them on the Web. Doug would complain that they didn’t have Purple Numbers. At the time, I recognized the value of granular addresses, but didn’t think they were worth the trouble to add them to my documents. I also didn’t think they were the “right” solution. Nevertheless, because Doug was Doug, I decided to throw him a bone. So I spent a few hours writing Purple (most of which was spent learning XSLT), and started posting documents with Purple Numbers.    (1GW)

Then, a funny thing happened. I got used to them. I got so used to them, I wanted them everywhere.    (1GX)

A few people just get Purple Numbers right away. Murray was probably the first of those not originally in the Engelbart crowd to do so; Chris followed soon thereafter, as did Matt. The vast majority of folks get the concept, but don’t really find them important until they start using them. Then, like me, they want them everywhere. Getting people past that first step is crucial.    (1GY)

A few nights ago, I had a late night conversation with Gabe Wachob (chair of the OASIS XRI committee) on IRC. (This eventually led to a conversation between Chris and me, which led to Chris’s blog entry, which led to Tim discovering Purple Numbers, which led to this entry. Think Out Loud is an amazing thing.) Gabe knew what Purple Numbers were, but hadn’t thought twice about them. I had wanted to ask him some questions about using XRI addresses as identifiers, and in order to do so, I gave him a quick demonstration of Transclusions. The light bulb went off; all of a sudden, he really, truly got it.    (1GZ)

Richard Gabriel, one of our advisors, is well known for his Worse Is Better essays (among other things). I think Purple Numbers are an outstanding example of Worse Is Better. They fulfill an immediate need, and they cause us to think more deeply about some of the underlying issues. I’d like to see Purple Numbers all over the place, but I’d also like to see a group of deep thinkers and tinkerers consider and evolve the concept. It’s part of a larger philosophy that I like to call The Blue Oxen Way.    (1H0)

This last point is extremely important. Chris has thankfully been a much more enthusiastic evangelist of Purple Numbers than I have, and in the past he’s called me “ambivalent” about Purple Numbers. That’s not so far from the truth. It’s not that I’m any less enthusiastic about Purple Numbers themselves — I am a card-carrying member of the Church Of Purple, and the current attention and potential for wider usage thrill me. However, I’m cautious about evangelizing Purple Numbers, because I don’t want people to get too caught up in the tool itself and forget about the bigger picture. It’s the reason I didn’t mention Purple Numbers at all in my manifesto.    (1H1)

At the Planetwork forum two weeks ago, Fen Labalme, Victor Grey, and I gave the first public demo of a working Identity Commons Single Sign-On system. We were tickled pink by the demo, which to everyone else looked just like any other login system. The reason we were so excited was that we knew the system used an underlying infrastructure that would eventually enable much greater things. The demo itself, unfortunately, didn’t convey that to anyone who didn’t already understand this.    (1H2)

I’m probably a bit oversensitive about this sort of thing, and I’m constantly seeking better balance. But it’s always in the back of my mind. When I talk to people about Blue Oxen Associates, I usually spend more time talking about the sociological aspect of collaboration rather than the tools, even though I have plenty to say about the latter. Can Purple Numbers make the world a better place? I truly, honestly, believe that they can. (This is a topic for another day.) But when I see groups that excel in collaboration (or conversely, those that stink at it), Purple Numbers are usually the furthest thing from my mind. Much more important is the need to identify and understand these patterns of collaboration (of which tool usage is an important part).    (1H3)

OHS Launch Community: Experimenting with Ontologies

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

My review of The Semantic Web resulted in some very interesting comments. In particular, Danny Ayers challenged my point about focusing on human-understandable ontologies rather than machine-understandable ones:    (5D)

But…”I think it would be significantly cheaper and more valuable to develop better ways of expressing human-understandable ontologies”. I agree with your underlying point here, but think it’s just the kind of the Semantic Web technologies can help with. The model used is basically very human-friendly – just saying stuff about things, using (triple) statements.    (5E)

Two years ago, I set out to test this very claim by creating an ad-hoc community — the OHS Launch Community — and by making the creation of a shared ontology one of our primary goals. I’ll describe that experience here, and will address the comments in more detail later. (For now, see Jay Fienberg’s blog entry, “Semantic web 2003: not unlike TRS-80 in the 1970’s.” Jay makes a point that I want to echo in a later post.)    (5F)

“Ontologies?!”    (5G)

I first got involved with Doug Engelbart‘s Open Hyperdocument System (OHS) project in April 2000. For the next six months, a small group of committed volunteers met weekly with Doug to spec out the project and develop strategy.    (5H)

While some great things emerged from our efforts, we ultimately failed. There were a lot of reasons for that failure — I could write a book on this topic — but one of the most important reasons was that we never developed Shared Language.    (5I)

We had all brought our own world-views to the project, and — more problematically — we used the same terms differently. We did not have to agree on a single world-view — on the contrary, that would have hurt the collaborative process. However, we did need to be aware of each other’s world-views, even if we disagreed with them, and we needed to develop a Shared Language that would enable us to communicate more effectively.    (5J)

I think many people understand this intuitively. I was lucky enough to have it thrown in my face, thanks to the efforts of Jack Park and Howard Liu. At the time, Jack and Howard worked at Vertical Net with Leo Obrst, one of the authors of The Semantic Web. Howard, in fact, was an Ontologist. That was his actual job title! I had taken enough philosophy in college to know what an ontology was in that context, but somehow, I didn’t think that had any relevance to Howard’s job at Vertical Net.    (5K)

At our meetings, Jack kept saying we needed to work out an ontology. Very few of us knew what he meant, and both Jack and Howard did a very poor job of explaining what an ontology was. I mention this not to dis Jack and Howard — both of whom I like and respect very much — but to make a point about the entire ontology community. In general, I’ve found that ontologists are very poor at explaining what an ontology is. This is somewhat ironic, given that ontologies are supposed to clarify meaning in ways that a simple glossary can not.    (5L)

Doug himself made this same point in his usual ridiculously lucid manner. He often asked, “How does the ontology community use ontologies?” If ontologies were so crucial to effective collaboration, then surely the ontology community used ontologies when collaborating with each other. Sadly, nobody ever answered his question.    (5M)

OHS Launch Community    (5N)

At some point, something clicked. I finally understood what ontologies (in an information sciences context) were, and I realized that developing a shared ontology was an absolute prerequisite for collaboration to take place. Every successful communities of practice had developed a shared ontology, whether they were aware of it or not.    (5O)

Not wanting our OHS efforts to fade into oblivion, I asked a subset of the volunteers to participate in a community experiment, which — at Doug’s suggestion — we called the OHS Launch Community. Our goal was not to develop the OHS. Our goal was to figure out what we all thought the OHS was. We would devote six-months towards this goal, and then decide what to do afterwards. My theory was that collectively creating an explicit ontology would be a tipping point in the collaborative process. Once we had an ontology, progress on the OHS would flow naturally.    (5P)

My first recruits were Jack and Howard, and Howard agreed to be our ontology master. We had a real, live Ontologist as our ontology master! How could we fail?!    (5Q)

Mixed Results    (5R)

Howard suggested using Protege as our tool for developing an ontology. He argued that the group would find the rigor of a formally expressed ontology useful, and that we could subsequently use the ontology for developing more-intelligent search mechanisms into our knowledge repository.    (5S)

We agreed. Howard and I then created a highly iterative process for developing the formal ontology. Howard would read papers and follow mailing list discussions carefully, construct the ontology, and post updated versions early and often. He would also use Protege on an overhead projector during face-to-face discussions, so that people could watch the ontology evolve in real-time.    (5T)

Howard made enough progress to make things interesting. He developed some preliminary ontologies from some papers he had read, and he demonstrated and explained this work at one of our first meetings. Unfortunately, things suddenly got very busy for him, and he had to drop out of the group.    (5U)

That was the end of the formal ontology part of the experiment, but not of the experiment itself. First, we helped ourselves by collectively agreeing that developing a shared ontology was a worthwhile goal. This, and picking an end-date, helped us eliminate some of the urgency and anxiety about “making progress.” Developing Shared Language can be a frustrating experience, and it was extremely valuable to have group buy-in about its importance up-front.    (5V)

Second, we experimented with a facilitation technique called Dialogue Mapping. Despite my complete lack of experience with this technique (I had literally learned it from Jeff Conklin, its creator, the day before our first meeting), it turned out to be extremely useful. We organized a meeting called, “Ask Doug Anything,” which I facilitated and captured using a tool called Quest Map. It was essentially the Socratic Method in reverse. We asked questions, and Doug answered them. The only way we were allowed to challenge him or make points of our own was in the form of a question.    (5W)

That meeting was a watershed for me, because I finally understood Doug’s definition of a Dynamic Knowledge Repository. (See the dialog map of that discussion.) One of the biggest mistakes people make when discussing Doug’s work is conflating Open Hyperdocument System with Dynamic Knowledge Repository. Most of us had made that mistake, which prevented us from communicating clearly with Doug, and from making progress overall.    (5X)

Epilogue    (5Y)

We ended the Launch Community on November 9, 2001, about five months after it launched. We never completed the ontology experiment to my satisfaction, but I definitely learned many things. We also accomplished many of our other goals. We wanted to be a bootstrapping community, Eating Our Own Dogfood, running a lot of experiments, and keeping records of our experiences. We also wanted to facilitate collaboration between our members, most of whom were tool developers. Among our many accomplishments were:    (5Z)

The experiment was successful enough for me to propose a refined version of the group as an official entity of the Bootstrap Alliance, called the OHS Working Group. The proposal was accepted, but sadly, got sidetracked. (Yet another story for another time.) In many ways, the Blue Oxen collaboratories are the successors to the OHS Working Group experiment. We’ve adopted many of the same principles, especially the importance of Shared Language and bootstrapping.    (64)

I believe, more than ever, that developing shared ontology needs to be an explicit activity when collaborating in any domain. I’ll discuss where or whether Semantic Web technologies fit in, in a later post.    (65)