The Story of Glormf: Lessons on Language and Naming

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)

“Low-Focus Thought” in Knowledge Management Systems

David Gelertner wrote an essay called “The Logic of Dreams” (a chapter in Denning and Metcalfe’s Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing), where he discussed the creative process. Gelertner suggested that there are two kinds of thought: high-focus (analytical, logical) and low-focus (free association). The former we understand well (according to the Gelertner); the latter we barely comprehend.    (TI)

Low-focus thought is the story of weak ties, not just in the context of Social Networks but of ideas in general. It’s a story that is told over and over again. A poet smells a rose, and is reminded of his lover. Friedrich Kekule dreams about a snake biting its tail, wakes up, and solves the structure of benzene. Grace Hopper remembers an old play from her college basketball days and figures out a memory-efficient algorithm for her A-0 compiler.    (TJ)

Gelertner was interested in implementing low-focus thought in Artificial Intelligence software. I’m interested in facilitating low-focus thought via Knowledge Management systems.    (TK)

In the past year, my tools and processes have revealed a number of unexpected connections. For example, last August, I blogged two interesting articles about Marc Smith and Josh Tyler. The following morning, I happened to be rifling through some old articles, and discovered papers written by Smith and Tyler that I had previously archived.    (TL)

Old-fashioned tools and a little bit of karma led to these discoveries. I wanted to eliminate one of the stacks of papers on my floor, which was how I accidentally came across the Smith article. Later that morning, I was searching for an email that a friend had sent me earlier, and it just so happened that the same email contained the reference to Tyler’s paper.    (TM)

These discoveries were largely due to luck, although the fact that I keep archives in the first place and that I review them on occasion also played a role. I don’t want to oversell this point, but I don’t want to undersell it either. Many people don’t archive their email, for example. Many groups don’t archive their mailing lists, a phenomenon that baffles me. More importantly, many people never review their old notes or archives, which is about the same as not keeping them in the first place. All of that knowledge is, for all intents and purposes, lost.    (TN)

Good Knowledge Management tools facilitates the discovery of these weak connections, and make us less reliant on luck. Blogging is great, because it encourages people to link, which encourages bloggers to search through old entries — both of others and their own. This is an example of tools facilitating a pattern, and it’s one reason why blogs are a powerful Knowledge Management tool.    (TO)

I’m excited about the work we’ve done integrating blogs and Wikis using Backlinks and WikiWords, because I believe these tools will further facilitate low-focus thought, which will ultimately lead to bigger and better things.    (TP)

Blog-Wiki Integration Turned On

Long-time followers of this blog have undoubtedly noticed my habit of smooshing seemingly harmless words together. I often do it with people’s names — for example, Eugene Eric Kim. Some of you may have guessed why I did this, but most of you probably figured my space key was broken.    (GB)

Starting today, my reasons should be more clear. Notice that “Eugene Eric Kim” is not only improperly written, it is now also a link. Browse through my older blog entries, and you’ll notice that all of the smooshed words are either links or are followed by a question mark link. This is blog-Wiki integration at its finest.    (GC)

Why I Turned WikiWord Integration On    (GD)

My purple plugin for Blosxom always had this WikiWord feature, but I kept it off until today. The main reason for this was that I wasn’t sure how I wanted to use it.    (GE)

I already use several Wikis quite actively — the Blue Oxen Wikis as well as a private one for my personal notes. I try to use the Blue Oxen Wikis for my ideas on collaboration whenever possible, so that they would become part of a collective repository of ideas rather than a personal one. Even though a personal Wiki is publically editable, the individual’s name can act as a kind of branding. Because this blog acts as a work log (my occasional food entries aside), my ideal would have been to integrate this Wiki with the Blue Oxen Collaboration Collaboratory Wiki. Unfortunately, that feature is not available.    (GF)

At minimum, I knew a personal PurpleWiki installation would be useful as a support glossary for this blog (more on this below). Nevertheless, I decided to write as if I had Wiki integration, but to wait a while before actually turning it on. This wasn’t hard for me: using WikiWords is practically second nature. Most of my entries ended up chockful of WikiWords, leading many to question my competence with the keyboard. These questions reached critical mass recently, and so I decided to turn the feature on.    (GG)

More importantly, I decided how I wanted to use my new Wiki overall: as a support structure for this blog, and also as a place for publishing essay drafts, design notes, and other random thoughts. Stuff I publish there will be implicitly labelled, “Work In Progress.” This will serve as a disclaimer that will make me more comfortable publishing my half-baked ideas, while also encouraging others to contribute while the ideas are still half-baked.    (GH)

WikiWords Versus External Links

Suppose you are writing in a Wiki or WikiWord-enabled blog. Why would you use a WikiWord instead of an external link?    (3T)

For a more concrete scenario, consider a link to Blue Oxen Associates. You could either create an external link to http://www.blueoxen.org/, or you could use the WikiWord Blue Oxen Associates. I see several advantages to the latter:    (3U)

  • Easier to remember. Is it blueoxenassociates.com or boa.net? WikiWords are human-friendlier link names.    (3V)
  • Enter the link once. If your Wiki page includes the appropriate external link, and if that link changes, you only have to update the link once.    (3W)
  • Annotation. I often create Wiki pages to organizations that contain an external link and the contact information. Having the contact information on the Wiki page saves me from having to search the external site for that information.    (3X)
  • Backlinks. If you use a WikiWord, you inherit your Wiki’s Backlink functionality, which allows you to find other interesting and relevant pages.    (3Y)

The primary disadvantage occurs when the Wiki page simply consists of an external link. In this case, you force the user to click twice instead of once to get to the relevant information. I believe that this is offset by the other advantages of WikiWords.    (3Z)