Pachamama Alliance of Oregon

Hi all 

 

What a fantastic robus substantive essential conversation.  Inspiring.

 

I'm just getting into this thread (and I am wishing I could comment on comments and have sub threads :) - is that a suggestion possibility?), so I am slowly moving my way into this conversation and will try to absorb more and more of it and dialogue a bit as I go along.  I feel this is an essential conversation and appreciate deeply that so much thought and care has already gone into the conversation. 

 

Two questions initially:

 

- simplicity and elegance: what would be the first step in the direction of ratings/reputation.  so we don't jump into complexity before we need too.  a design principle I like to use which nature tends to use well is what don't we need to design this, and what's the next elegant step we could take to move in this direction?

 

- Angus, is Ned the next iteration of Omidyar? 

 

Back about 9 days ago, Bowo wrote this:

 

"As for the reasonable period of inactivity, somewhere between six to twelve months perhaps?

And the definition of inactivity being "less then a certain number of edits" for each status (intermediate, expert, jedi) within that "reasonable period" of time?

 

Hmm... this gets complicated already. Maybe we can learn some tried-and-tested methodologies from other sites for our need here, and perhaps invite the right persons to contribute their thoughts?"

 

I have been talking to friends who are developers in the Open Money project (see openmoney.ning.com for more info, but most of the tech and architecture discussions are happening on skype) and with Regenerosity, about this very topic.  What question/problem is this the solution to?  Could someone restate that for me now that some time has passed and alot of great dialogue been flowing?

 

Here's an example from my own personal experience:  I was active for a few months fairly deeply, and then I had to take off to actually finish up a program I was in that needed more of my attention and then some other work that was taking me away.  No one was really tracking this except all of a sudden there wasn't my voice in the mix.  This happens all the time.  I just wrote about this based on my experience within Indymedia where there are the ebbs and flows of participation.  How do we acknowledge the wealth in a system?  Wealth being defined as contribution, expertise, creativity, offerings, time, talent, treasure, etc.

 

In this early stage of designing such a system, I would encourage us to lean into the edge of simplicity and elegance.  I like your suggestion Bowo of people being able to come back in after a hiatus and not have all their points drop.  Some of the numbers feel arbitrary to me however.  Also, is there a reason for a person's "credits" to be diminished over time anyway? 

 

What about other languaging other than points and credits, it feels so much like a banking system (sorry....but I really want us to be inventing new language for this transformational work) :)

 

I also want to plant a seed for how can we tag people?  So metadata for people and their ideas, so you could track the flow from inception to current completion.  I'm not sure if this is clear, but I can feel this...

 

Also, this relates strongly to conversations I've been having with Brad DeGraf and others around on-line decision-making (tapping into the collective intelligence and wisdom of social networks).  He developed a version 1.0 of something he calls "Smartocracy".  I can share more about that and I'll make sure Brad knows about this conversation when he's back from SF.  But with smartocracy, there is value given to those who have expertise generally and specifically, and have a general reputation that people trust.  This is simple reputation system, but more sophisticated in its application.  I can't speak well about it because I'm just getting familiar with it.  But we were talking about how such a system could be put into action on WiserEarth with multiple applications. 

 

Another tangent:  What about ranking and ratings on content such as stories?  I remember a thread a while ago around this - wonder where it is?  So what are the stories different groups identify as important for their issue or area(s) of focus.  We currently don't have this "media component" built into Wiser, but I imagine it will happen.  I would love to come and cull the top stories of the day that were emanating out of Wiser.  These would be more of the solutions, not just the problem-focussed stories.  These would be the stories of healing and success...I know this is a tangent, so I apologize.  But I'm still getting caught up and excited by this topic.  I will continue reading.

 

 

Hello,

I think there are some really juicy ideas and issues raised in this collection:

Collective Wisdom: Library for Community Threads (Specifically about the Community Itself)

http://pods.gaia.com/collective_wisdom/discussions/board/7697

This is specifically the forum where the Zaadz/Gaia Social Networking is reflecting on what they consider to be the most essential conversations that are happening in their community which are about the community itself. This is where the community is putting up a mirror to itself. This community has a head start on Wiser and therefore, there may be some really good best practices and lessons learned here.

I just finished reading (not digesting) the conversation about sharing and measuring wealth in a social network: http://mushin.gaia.com/blog/2008/1/the_value_of_zaadz_gaia_and_social_networks_-_a_controversy. I know Mushin from other circles and this is excellent in particular because of my interest in the role Open Money will someday play in social networks (and everywhere else - http://openmoney.info/sophia/index.html). So how we measure all levels of wealth will be important. Right now we are limited to one form of currency...but just wait, there will be more :) But I digress.

My question is what might there be to learn from these threads and this community?

I completely agree with Benjamin here and this could be how we deepen our ability to have conversations and dialogue with each other and to have it scale for participation of larger numbers. To me this gets at some of the questions around Wiser's identity. Are our conversations leading us somewhere in our efforts to share information, learn, disagree, cocreate and move into wise action? I believe so.

Thanks for raising this!

john, we're on the same page here :)

i posted this suggestion a few days ago: http://www.wiserearth.org/article/dd1890f3c603f719dc559a2e0f0b8b6e/group/suggestions

they are very similar if not identical. so i thought i'd let you know.

cool. is this on the wish list? is there a way to see the flow of features that are in process?

hi again,

i'd love to see the ability to track our private emails by having the emails we send somehow saved. for instance, john coates and i have been going back and forth in some pretty juicy conversations via WE not email and we've both noticed, gee, it would be great to capture some of that...as in having sent emails saved or some other way of tracking them. it's not always necessary, but when a conversation seed starts to sprout into something that will then have germination power in other forums, it's worth keeping and saving and nourishing :)))

thanks!!
sheri

what's the easy process for shifting a conversation to a different forum topic? bowo, you've named a few of those and i'm assuming you might have a good way to do it.

(eek, i just had a bug with my post here: i scrolled up after spending 10 minutes writing and then went to clarify something bowo had written and came up, decided to delete a long phrase and voila, the whole comment disappeared...sad)...

ps - i'd love to see titles for comments :)

okay, 2 quick comments:

1. bowo, we're in complete agreement about using caps for title bars. will do! you've given me renewed food for thought on this and thanks for liberating me so i can still write fast. it would be a shift for me. although perhaps i need to slow down more and write from the grounded place within.

2. i'm delighted that you are interested in this question of how these principles can be translated to WE....on all the levels you mention. precisely! paul's chapter on restoration is a great place to start. i love what he brings out there and would appreciate the exploration around the potential application to WE. i also have some notes on that with regard to this very topic that I can share via email. This is a passion of mine and within wisermexico, we're working in this realm in terms of how we weave together social technologies and architectures of engagement and digital technologies for increasing collaboration, CI and support the evolution of networks (see
This is early stages but it’s been an ongoing conversation for years and we’re getting closer to having spaces and technologies to move on it. Obviously anything we do in WM will be directly affecting WE. This feels like another thread. Bowo, I can share with you a lot of information and resources on this. And John Coates and I have been in this conversation already privately. We could open it up.

Also Elisabet sahtouris’ work is a great resource: http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/LSinetHF.html. This paper entitled Living Systems, the Internet, and Human Future is a seminal piece. She really is breaking some new ground here. I heard her speak at the Planetwork conference in SF in May 2000 and she was profound. There’s a section in this paper on essential features for healthy systems. We want to save nature, but maybe by seeing into nature more closely, we’ll discover more ways to save ourselves.

quote of the day: “are we witnessing the mycelium of our networks becoming visible and transforming into viable structures for action?”

thanks camilla and michael for the responses.

your attentiveness and responsiveness is to me an indication of one of the hearts of wiser right now, that there is a committed group of people nourishing and nurturing the soil of questions, conversations, requests. to me this is one of the features for successfully and artfully "hosting" an online space. john coates and i have been musing around this topic and it's so juicy. what do we know in our onlife world that we can carry over into the online world. why would people want to come back to wiser and make it their second home for making a difference in the world...but wait that's for another forum, i'll focus :)

thanks michael about the tracking tip, i do know how to do that and i actually did NOT know i could do it through the little eye on the right side. cool. i think making sure there are multiple places for accessing features/tools is helpful. and that there's a pattern people can follow.

the quick snapshot of threads....that is my way of getting at how we can easily see what conversations are happening so we can (1) follow (2) jump in easily (3) create meaning that can be shared...

along this line, john just wrote me: "Maybe what WE needs is a variety of ways for groups to converse, and esp to show things so we can see and hear to help illustrate points. and Wise collective action - that's really got to be the goal with this thing." to me this is the heart of what i'm interested in and it's not so much editorial policy but it is one of the hearts of WE. how do we create a space that allows for wise collective action as one of the outcomes?

regarding hiding/trash can/transparency, yeah to all you've said. thanks for really looking at this. i believe that if transparency is one of the fundamental values of WE, then we must be mindfully looking at how easily we slip into old patterns of lack of transparency. i see it everywhere in our world and it is also an indicator of a lack of trust. so thanks for being mindful here and noticing that this "right" is one for all. this will shift things. small things shift creating opening for bigger shifts.

if WE is a culture, how is it different than some of the stuck patterns we currently live in? i think there is something fascinating about why second life is booming....

let me know if you want any help tracking down some other editorial policies. it's been a few years since i was immersed in indymedia and things have changed, but really good work was done around some of these questions and living up to some pretty high principles and ideals in the design and architecture (of course lots of failures and stumblings along the way :)

thanks for the distinctions around selection of editors and comments. distinctions are always good :) you are doing great work. thanks michael and camilla (and everyone else of course!)...

if you are doing to start a discussion around rights of all wiserearthlings, how do you propose going about that? to be inclusive? in the survey was there any question that hinted around this topic? i see it as there being some fundamental core "rights" and responsibilities (are you linking them?) and then there is a clear process for addressing the evolution of the system itself...so it's not stuck in stone. WE is a living system. what are the guiding principles of living systems (a question i ask myself alot...).

elegance and simplicity are two fundamental design principles i love. even with the complexity of a beautiful growing organism like wiserearth, feeling that elegance and simplicity helps people join...designing for the simplicity on the other side of complexity is a great design challenge. i see it happening here and all over these conversations.

michael, i'll continue to think about the snapshot of the threads idea and brainstorm a bit with john and share our harvest...i know this is also an interest of the wisermexico folks on this topic.

hi,

i've been lurking a bit and appreciating everything that's happening here! the energy here is very inspiring.

apologies if this may have been covered somewhere, but it's hard for me to know. in fact, is there something being worked on so that we can track the threads and see a quick snapshot of the threads and the themes and decisions? that's a separate topic i guess :)

i am raising this question about "editorial policy" because i was just on a discussion page and noticed there were a number of comments deleted (one was on the topic of open sourcing the code). what's the current policy for deleting and is this stated somewhere?

as a cofounder of indymedia and having spent 4 years within that media network, the issue of how do we handle open publishing which allows anything to be said with the need for respect, boundaries and a healthy community. so some of the local imcs (seattle imc was one of them) spent alot of time developing a robust editorial policy that balanced all the sides and created transparency to the process.

perhaps this is not as important at this stage in wiser's evolution because it's just a small comment on one thread, but i can guarantee that this will be an issue in the future and it would be wise of wiser to really address this. what is the role and responsibility of an editor when deleting a comment? perhaps this is more relevant to a media/journalism environment, but i see a time when (news and public affairs) "stories" will be part of the wiser environment.

here's one example: http://montreal.indymedia.org/twiki/bin/view/Ontario/WebEditorialPolicy

it's just a template. what we also did in seattle was create a policy where everything that was deleted was not permanently deleted but rather placed in a "trash can". IF people really wanted to go through the trash can, they could.

so i'm curious if this conversation is happening somewhere and if i could join that discussion.

thanks for all the great work.