Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

Shawn Murphy and I have been developing a prototype of an Uplift Pattern Language. It is based on Shawn’s open source Nooron effort, which is heavily influenced by his experience in Zope and Python. I’ve been tinkering with these ideas for some time and it is neat to stumble on some open source software which supports it.

The things which most intrigue me about this are:

1. It is an executable model, built on Stanford’s OKBC knowledge base connectivity approach. If we want to use these patterns to populate an “Uplift Tapestry” display of patterns against geographical locations, for example, someone could write a context matcher comparing the contexts of the patterns vs. the context of the regions on a map.

2. It appears to have a flexible way of attaching arbitrary “garments” over the same information, giving different views.

3. It conforms to REST principles… patterns are exposed as a URLs.

4. It appears to be flexible about adding slots to the patterns. I haven’t tweaked this yet, but these slots need some adjustments to reflect the uplift cascade ideas. For example, to add a “replication method” which describes how the pattern can be made “viral,” a reputation slot to manage the patterns reputation, etc.

This is my first time wandering through this process, and I could use some advice from those more experienced on the matter… please feel free to comment!

Some thoughts on patterns from Richard Gabriel. He is specifically talking about software engineering patterns, but the same lessons could be applied to uplift patterns:

“How do you produce generative patterns? You don?t – you find them. They are in systems written by virtuosos, they are in systems that are a dream to maintain. If a great programmer comes to you and says ?hey, look at this code I found,? that?s where you?ll be able to mine generative patterns. Someone invented or developed the code that contains the patterns, but that?s largely irrelevant: It?s that the same solution or style has been used and found habitable. We don?t find a single gold atom, we find veins and nuggets – accumulation. Patterns are discovered because they are well-used, they form a vein that anyone could find.

Great pattern writers are miners, they create nothing except the wonderful explanation – they are writers, they aren?t scientists, or even engineers. CS departments consider them drudges, scribes, amanuenses. Pattern writing geniuses won?t get tenure anywhere, they won?t advise CEO?s. A pattern writer won?t ride off into the sunset with the prize in his saddlebag.”

He also has a wonderful exposition of pattern writing. This theme is not too far from the work of Jonas Salk, who wanted to found the Salk Institute as a merger of science and art. The building has won architectural awards, but the institute itself has morphed to pretty much the hard science side of things…

I had a long phone call with Shawn Murphy, who is developing a system called Nooron:

“Nooron is a self-improving container for self-improving ideas. Nooron is server-side collaboration software which embraces and extends the World Wide Web, as it did to preceding protocols (ftp:, gopher:, telnet:, mail:, wais:). It uses a novel rating system based on user contributable subjective criteria in place of the single tacit criterion of ‘goodness’ other systems use. The resulting hyperdimensional ‘subjective space’ offers fresh opportunities for navigation, information discovery, filtering and presentation. An integrated versioning technology results in Nooron being an information system which aggressively automates the evolution of its contents. The final twist is that by subjecting its own constituent artifacts (Vantages, WorldViews, DepictionStyles, ReviewPanels and many others) to such evolutionary pressure, Nooron becomes a self-improving system. Hence Nooron is a self-improving container for self-improving knowledge.” http://noosphere.org/

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Joi Ito recently published a message from Dee Hock about “Chaordic” thinking.  
I had the pleasure of working with Dee in the early days of his health care reform efforts, with a now-defunct group called the Vvaleo InitiativeHere are some whimsical notes and photos from the 1999 Vvaleo meeting. This was my introduction to the work of David Cooperrider and Appreciative Inquiry, which had a more lasting influence on my thinking.
Some background: I have been involved in health care information systems for 30 years.  I was one of the original designers of both the VA and the DoD hospital information systems.  About 10 years ago, however, I came to the conclusion that there were so many perverse incentives in our health care system that anything I did with computers to make it more efficient would only make it get worse faster. This lead to a bout of introspection, and my simultaneous discovery of the Santa Fe Institute and Tim Berners-Lee as he was just beginning the rapid growth of the web.
Dee has many good ideas and a fresh perspective, and I enjoy talking with him, but I am afraid that I was one of those who he called the “Internet Afficiandos” he mentioned in his letter:
“I have been arguing for a decade that the Internet was fatally
flawed…I gave up arguing such things with Internet aficionados several
years ago, for the vast majority were so intoxicated by their new toys that
they defended its emergence and lack of governance with zealotry bordering
on religious. Do you think many have sobered up enough to raise their heads
from computer screens and enlarge their perspective?”

Calling the Internet “fatally flawed” seems a little harsh. It strikes me that it is one of the defining transformations of the twentieth century. Dee and I clashed on this topic in our health care reform issues. I thought that we needed to start with a concept of an information “space” within which healthy things and organizations would thrive. He wanted to start with governance; the Internet to him was a passing fantasy. The group once produced a two page paper which used the word “governance” seven times, including an annotation that it was not trying to “overgovern.” He wanted to gather stakeholders and do his chaordic thing with them.
The Vvaleo summit meeting in Cleveland was an example of this approach. nbsp;About 200 folks were there, representing a wide range of stakeholders.  I soon realized that these were the very people we needed to disintermediate.  Asking them to “streamline” themselves and jumping off the gravy train was not going to happen.  Of course, we need new forms of governance as we scale things up, but as our industries are driven by perverse incentives – their metrics collide with their goals – we are only trying to get out of a hole by digging it deeper.
Tim Berners-Lee started with an entirely different attitude. From his book, “Weaving the Web,”
What was often difficult for people to understand about the
design of the web was that there was nothing else beyond URLs, HTTP, and
HTML.  There was no central computer ?controlling? the web, no single
network on which these protocols worked, not even an organization anywhere
that ?ran? the Web. The web was not a physical ?thing? that existed
in a certain ?place.? It was a ?space? in which information could exist.”

This idea has lead to billions of pages of information being posted worldwide, and entirely new ways of finding things, buying things, finding people.  It is the simplicity of these initial conditions, not elaborate forms of governance, which made the web the globally transforming technology that it is.  Had Tim gone to world leaders to ask permission to create a world wide web, or to blue ribbon experts to “organize” the web, or to database adminstrators to “normalize” information on the web, it would have never happened.
Dee has written a book and lectured tirelessly. But after a decade, he has yet to create a successful “chaordic” organization.
The Commons pours out torrents of words, but where are the actions? Perhaps he should stop throwing rocks at the Internet, come down off his (lonely) pedestal, and use the Internet to his advantage.
Yes, from his perspective, the Internet is “fatally flawed.” The Internet will never be Dee-centralized. I continue to be an Internet afficiandos, and will continue looking for those simple initial conditions which can trigger beneficial effects for humanity.