Notes on Preproject History

This post is just to give context for the project as it stands now that the beginning of its actual functioning nigh.

The first semester of the project was spent purely trying to understand the scheme of the problem I was trying to solve. I did not actively engage in developed collaborative systems as I expected that would be similar to my implementation of the project in the second semester. Instead, I spent my time reading on and understanding the notions of the service system behind collaboration tools. This meant looking at a large number of systems and tools and trying to find some sort of set of standard attributes which would be representative of collaboration tools in general. Though this was not a completely futile exercise it did not lead the the enlightened understanding of the world of collaboration I was hoping for. It did lead me to realise points of engagement and helped me eventually put together a ontology for design collaboration.

In addition to sole searching design collaboration I spent an excessive amount of time trying to understand acceptance and the market for the kind of tools I though I may eventually propose. The acceptance I was interested in was not to see how to get people to use the tools, however, but to try to find a rational for how to engage the market of design. This in many ways proved quite fatal to my work as it inspired me to try to give reason to any form of interaction that would appear in the final system. At this point I was looking at creating things like collaborative design driven support systems, collaborative design pyramid schemes, a collaborative design language to surpass global boundaries, an IDEO like design structure that would work in a collaborative context and even a scheme specifically designed to help engage designers in difficult situations around the world. The actual business model, so to speak, of the design scheme I hoped to implement was completely undefined and eventually this lead me to depart from a specific structured outcome later in the project

At the start of the project, I laid out a set of milestones for each semester. In the first semester, I hoped to do a number of research practices which would help me improve my understanding of collaborative systems and methods. After a preliminary understanding was achieved, I would go into looking at a few specific methods of interacting to trial theories about project distribution. Eventually, I planned, I would have a best practices document which would then help me work in the second semester. What happened in reality was quite different but I think it was to the project's benefit.

After spending some time researching the general practice of collaboration I realised that there was quite a lot of specific detail in all sorts of areas that could be quite interesting to the project. In the context of web based collaboration alone, I found there were countless interesting papers and previous projects on how to deal with almost any aspect of sociological engagement. At the same time, some such systems were even starting to be represented in web services and software systems for distributed local use. This finding was slightly daunting, as I though it indicated that my target sector was already crowded.

Around the time I was getting sunk by the overwhelming popularity of collaborative systems all over the place, there was a week long project swap. I reviewed the project of one of my classmates: a project on the matter of creating customised knowledge bases with a chronology independent information value and research management. As part of my review, I offered some samples of methods and systems to deal with the necessary problems. In particular my work in this regard involved the disambiguation of a workflow to deal with the associated problems. This was quite interesting to me and allowed me to start thinking of contexts for information systems. Specifically, I advocated the use of tools like Google Reader and RSS information syndication. In addition to this, due to the nature of the other project, I became more familiar with the intricacies of business models and added a business concept to a design idea. The classmate also reviewed my project and came back essentially suggesting I needed to niche my project more to gain better context value. I did not disagree but I still did not have a good answer for this issue.

With a world full of companies like Google, YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo there is never a lack of free online information management resources. RSS is one such technology that companies like the afore mentioned are continuously generating systems to give less technology minded users more power. Now days anyone can create relational databases that can control hundreds of thousands of variables and most computer users do so every day with products like Google web-search and image management systems.

The internet is the ultimate breeding ground for social systems and for this reason it is very important to consider the implications of one's social profile. With this in mind, we can imagine that services using the internet as a playing field can offer greater interaction and opportunity than those localised by physicality.

As the project went on, it seemed to evolve on the business model level and, as I mentioned before, it went though a series of ontological models which eventually resulted in the conclusion that an approach could be considered to be a good one which valued interest and centred on academic interaction. I proposed to use no specific tools but instead to engage the complete market place of tools and their various assets currently available on the internet. My aim at this point was to provide a system to reduce interaction costs and create a benefit system around network of friends structures. I think it is important to note that, as I presented the project in my final presentation at the end of the first semester, I discussed two distinct driving forces:

1. I have a lot of globally distributed connections I would like to work with; and
2. while there is a severe gap between the first and third worlds when it comes to percentage of internet users, the actual number of users is not that dissimilar.

My view was that there are a lot of people worldwide who would benefit from a good cross-cultural collaboration system. I note this not because it was a great realisation, but because when I found myself starting to work on designing the practical side of things for the second semesters work, my impressions of need changed quite substantially.

In addition to taking a strictly humanitarian approach to the project, as the semester came to a close I began to give context to the scope of method I expected would be helpful to the project. I had spent some time looking at the work of various very large and rigourous collaborative groups which were using the Compendium Institute's tools of Compendium and the Issue or Conversation Mapping techniques they advised. I found this work to be specifically interesting, not because it solved the problem of collaboration but because it reduced the complexity of some of the aspects of collaboration. The Issue Mapping structure because the context of discourse I thought would be appropriate for the implementation of the project.

From Economic to Open Source to Interest Driven Resources

In this project I have moved quite far and realized many things about systems involving distributed working agents. One thing that has been a continual bother has been the driving force of the community. Early on I thought a good businesslike approach would be close to ideal, but I quickly found out this is quite troublesome. I am a long time negativist towards Open Source so I shied away from that notion and started thinking about a non-economic way to drive interest while not relying on a specific ownership paradigm. The resulting system is what can be called the Interest Driven Resource model in which actors take part out of passion and passion alone. Experience and value added repercussions are also significant to users but the core instigation is completely interest or passion.