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TendYourProject

This is freeform; I need to describe a set of ideas that I have difficulty labeling.

  • We’re piling into the Internet.
  • The ProjectSpace is developing.
  • The basic atom of development on the Internet seems to be the project, not the organization.
  • Material-world factors have traditionally made it the organization that was the focus, and not the project. So, things are a little different here.
  • People “come in” new.
  • Question: What are people coming in to?
    • a group-identity?
    • a state of consciousness?
    • a realization of a new environment?
  • People come in, and look for people to play ball with.
  • Playing ball, or answering a question, or completing a project?
  • Answering questions, completing projects: Abstract both into: “Project.”
  • A project has an organizer.
    • It can be software.
    • It can be a person who’s divying up tasks, recognizing questions, and so on.
  • “Emergence” is roughly a two step process:
    • People sit in a circle, and talk with one another.
    • Someone feels something should be done, and takes responsibility for organizing, ordering, focusing, and so on.
  • People can help fit things into a pre-made structure.
    • People can tag URLs and such, in the pre-made structure of del.icio.us.
    • People can contribute chapters to a book that someone else is structuring, vetting, and so on.
  • Help alone, as lesser contributory effort, collected together, does not emerge something new, on it’s own. An organizing principle is required.
    • There are exceptions, but they are rare, and not to be depended on.
    • Taking responsibility for shepherding something is to be depended upon.

Now I introduce EvolutionarySpirituality. Put on your memetic protection glasses, should you be so inclined!

http://lifeboat.com/images/memetic.hazard.warning.thumb.jpg

  • I imagine and want that we are creating something new, a new space, and a new vision and a new way of what it is to live an adult human life.
    • It wouldn’t have been possible before technology.
    • The evolution of technology (soft & hard) has granted us freedoms, assets, computational capabilities, communicative capabilities, and so on, that allow us to transition to new ways of living and being.
  • I imagine too that we can, and are, developing ways of bringing people into this new way of life. I read the Hacker’s manifesto when I was younger. I have read ESR’s Art of Unix Programming. I have read the texts of programmers before who have talked about how to get engaged in the OpenSource projects, and so on. I have read the Linux Movement ~1998-2000’s texts of getting involved, staying involved, working, laboring, promoting, building, and so on.
    • This goes way beyond just writing software, and defines a general pattern for living, working, and operating within the Internet world.
  • I imagine that part of this is building a shared sense of projects, ways, calendars, questioning, as well as a constructed ethics of participation and so on.
    • A big part of this ethics is: “People do only what they are compelled to do.”
    • We are developing an articulated ethics over when to fork, when not to fork, when to thread, how to ExpandSpace?, and so on.
  • I think that part of this vision should be training our sense, and articulating our sense, of how we want building projects on the Internet to work, how commitment should work, and how all these things should fit together with our daily and work lives: GeekHealth, and all.
  • Of course, I imagine this working within the framework of EvolutionarySpirituality, and with LifeMap?, and so on.

What seems most like, in the old religions, to match what I am describing here, is Hinduism.

Stylistically, artistically, Hinduism isn’t really my favorite religions. Blue Gods with four arms? I never found it very attractive. But, this isn’t about what stylistically I’m thinking about.

Instead, I am thinking about how Hinduism is sort of a religion without a center. There are hoards of Hindu groups, with all sorts of different beliefs, and all sorts of different lifestyles and creeds and so on. Somehow, magically, it’s all “Hinduism.” Likely I’m just ignorant of the religion, but regardless: It’s the image of lots of little groups that makes sense to me. When I look at EvolutionarySpirituality, I see the same thing: It looks like Hinduism to me, except in a scientific worldview of the cosmos, and our lives within it.

At any rate:

  • Take your question, take your project.
  • Stick with it. Assume that the collective, the HiveMind, will not do it, unless you do it.
  • Perhaps better: Assume that your passion for your question is the HiveMind operating through you.
    • It’s not that “the HiveMind” doesn’t do things: It clearly does. Specifically, see WikiPedia. Countless the pages, countless the efforts. There it is, you can go see it, you can go read it.
    • But it’s through all those individuals heeding their calling, and sticking with it.

I think that, if the EvolutionarySpirituality worldview has an instruction for our lives, it is this:

Find what is most important to you, and fulfill it.

I think it goes beyond just a suggestion, to almost a commandment: If you are not enthralled by your project, if you are not powerfully dedicating your life to your niche, if there is something you feel that you’d rather be doing, then there’s something wrong, and you are not fulfilling the pact with the universe, your society, and your own life.

Now, again, different people, different lifestyles.

And the commandment can be interpreted differently: I know homemakers that spend much of December preparing for Christmas, making beautiful ornaments and decorations, putting up the tinsel, hand crafting artifacts for display, and so on. But, this too is a fulfillment of the commandment: We don’t all have to be contemplating a big question all of the time, and I do not want to live in a world like that.

But I think it’s important to choose something, at some point, and to stick with it, and to see it through.

Switching Tasks

There appears to me to be an ethic of switching tasks.

“When can I stop X, and shift instead to Y?

This assumes knowledge of why it’s dangerous to be shifting left and right, perpetually. You start something, and then you go back the other way, and the thing isn’t finished. Contributions to projects where there is an active organizing principle, they are like turns of a bicycle wheel: You turn x3, and end up going forwards x3. Other things are all-or-nothing, though. Being that organizing principle, for instance.

Once you have an organizing principle, you can sort of “hang” micro-efforts off of it. But that major principle has to be there for it to happen. You have to have the Wikipedia software, and the admin community, and so on.

This Page Will Never Evolve

Pages on wiki do not just “evolve.” People have to take care of them.

There may be a tiny handful of exceptions, but do not point to them. Look instead at the reality of the majority.

Pages grow and develop when people tend to them. They grow best when one person, or one commitee, goes: “Oh, this is our major project. We compile and collect this here. When we wake up in the morning, the question at the tip of our tongues is, “How is the page? How is it progressing?” It’s our life’s mission to make this page right.”

People who just gather together and find a nice place to talk with each other, they do not spontaneously give way to the kinds of things that the organizing principle does. Yes, Wikipedia seems to prove that wrong, but the best pages are those that are tended, and the technology behind Wikipedia, and the administrative society behind it, is responsible for it working, and serves as the organizing principle.

This page will not evolve. This page will not be refactored. This page will not be refined and retuned over the ages. I am not paying much attention to this page, in a year or likely even a month. This is a message, not a document. (DocumentsVsMessages.)

We could negate my prediction, but it would be done just to be spiteful to the principle; It would not actually detract from the principle itself.

Meeting Places Do Not Just Emerge Things

Meeting Places do not just emerge things. Well, that’s not strictly true: Sometimes, they do. Some times, conversation is focused because of some pressing need. And individuals in the meeting can become organizing principles, and organize the labors coming from the passions of the others.

But the meeting place itself, and the fact that friends are communicating, does not mean that something will happen.

It is extremely unreliable. We should not celebrate meeting as a source of action. Meeting should be celebrated and honored, rightly so, but, not as a source of action.

Instructions

If you don’t have clarity on what you’re doing, and what question you are asking, and you’re just sort of floating out there, hoping that something will happen, I would think that the best thing to do is:

You can switch a project or a question in the following situations:

(Questions are really projects, and projects are really questions. See: ThePowerOfQuestions. A project answers a question, resolving a question is a project.)

You cannot switch a project or a question in the following situations:

I believe very strongly that you should plan on working on your thing for at least 10 years. The resolution may come in 1 month, the resolution may come in 10 years. Everything may change such that your thing is obsolete, and the project ends because it is no longer relevant. Regardless, you should plod on. (Unless it dies, due to obsolescence, or whatever.) Experience gained in one domain transfers to another. The experience that matters is the self-hacking that makes it possible to have stick-to-itiveness, and so on.

This isn’t to say that you can’t occasionally explore other ideas, other questions, have conversations with people, or eat breakfast in the morning. You can do those things. But your focusing, I believe, (again: These are all my ideas, my particular vision of social action, and so on,) should all be against the backdrop of your main effort, your main project, your main question.

And, of course, the less you do other things, the further along you will go in your main project.

Even by writing this post, I am betraying, my LocalNames project.

The lesson of evolution is that accumulation of millions of small, tiny, individually insignificant events chain out to produce something amazingly, miraculously large and important. Attention to detail, because all things are detail, in the end.

Okay. I’m done. I’ve got it off my chest.

I’ve been aspiring to spew this out for ages.

Good you did. They have renovated the outside of the house I live in (Berlin). A narrow yard, no people usually. It’s all yellowish now, more light than before. There was a scaffold outsides, all around my balcony. One day some three weeks ago a worker was painting it. I sat in front of my computer writing as I usualy do - it was early the morning and still warm then and the balcony door was open - and he painted it. Seven stepts away or so. After quite a while I said something and he said something and me again something and later he asked what I am doing. “We’re building the world-communication-machine.” I answered and that was perfectly alright for him. He’d seen me writing and he believed it. So do I.

Wow, there’s a lot of stuff here. Let me just address the beginning. One of the beautiful things about this ParticipatoryCulture? is that it is not controlled. No one at Flickr is saying “OK, everyone today just take pictures of flowers, because that will make the world prettier.” Sure, vision and direction is good and sometimes necessary (at varying degrees), and personal responsibility should be encouraged, but in many circumstances it’s not an organizer that emerges, but common interest, shared values, and specific theories. Often, this does not occur if someone is telling others what to do, or in some cases even providing structure in which to do it.

The more I learn about the wiki space the more clear it is to me that the most valuable impacts are the direct result of leaderless confluence, or at best, Gentle nudging. Somewhere, someone was talking about looking at 10 random pages to judge how much work a wiki needed. Doing this exercise, you can very quickly see that pages are either created by an individual with a driving idea (impact=limited), by an individual reworking a group discussion (impact=OK), or mutually created/reworked to best articulate commonly-understood thinking (impact=great). The same goes for projects. Good ones everyone cares about. Looking in from the outside it may appear that there are key organizers, but for many volunteer projects, these are just people sitting at the intersection of a good idea who have some time and are translating well (at the moment). Try to be the organizer and force something, and you can actually break the idea pretty easily.

So since I obviously believe in this, I’m stuck in a conundrum (like at Collective Problem Solving Wiki). How do you encourage this leaderless confluence? How do you help good ideas emerge without hamhanding them?

  • The basic atom of development on the Internet seems to be the project, not the organization.

I totally see what you mean here, Lion. Yet, I often observe, when I work with people and groups who do not normally work online in ProjectSpaces? like we do, they will focus less on the online spaces, and more on their organization and the people who make it up (CommunityOverProject??). So, they use the technology to supplement their organizational focus.

While, project-focused work (like Wikipedia, Open source software projects, etc) seem to focus more on the output of the project, and less on the community, as you are saying (ProjectOverCommunity??). That is just an aside, as I realize this was not your main point.

As for your main point, I have in the past wondered, as Keith does above, how to go about helping good ideas emerge. And, over the past coupel of years, I have tried to practice SocialSynergy:SynergizeWorkflows and SocialSynergy:SynergizeSocially Building and connecting, and open doors so people can see through walls when possible. Also, learning why people do what they do, so that I can try and tune my transmitter to their receiver when I communicate with them. See through their eyes, etc.

(This is mainly a response to Keith.)

Yes: Our participatory culture is not controlled, except by the “rules” of the meme itself. It seems to have individuality built into it, (which I like,) which includes the commandment: “Thou shalt not be controlled.”

This is why, I wrote above: A big part of this ethics is: “People do only what they are compelled to do.”

And if clarification is needed, by “compelled,” I mean: “compelled by inner direction.”

And yet, there are organizing principles.

Flickr itself, the mechanical software, is an organizing principle. It elicits tags for photographs, and makes photos accessible by tag. In this way, it organizes photographs, and contextualizes them with others.

Without an organizing principle, we just have a jumble. A jumble of media, a jumble of wants, a jumble of (whatever.)

Naturally, we are celebrating ourselves. NoLeader, and all.

The existence of the leader who is wise is barely known to those he leads.

He acts without unnecessary speech, so that the people say, “It happened of its own accord”.

Who created Flickr?

Better yet: Who cares?

And yet, create Flickr, someone did.

Applied Taoism.

Shoot, I have to go… I’ll be back here later.

Urgh…

I have written pages in response, but its too long.

I basically think that aiming for NoLeader is in err, and even the Taoist passage that is the basis for NoLeader says that NoLeader is in err.

Specifically, it says that there are leaders, but that they lead to the illusion of there being no leader.

Regardless of the MetaPhysics:

Stellar projects.

Clear leaders and hierarchy.

Few or No objections, for the most part, from society.

We should not fear or flee leadership.

Even on your wiki, you are a leader. This is a product of politics, and force of interest:

  • You are interested in the project.
  • I am only partly interested in the project.
  • Sam has some interest in the project, I don’t know how much.
  • Mattis has an interest.

But of all of us, you are the most interested.

Therefor, your line of questioning and interest is automatically the lead position. Because there is no inquiry, without your inquiry. Everything else falls out automatically, including deference to your judgements in how things should flow. This is right, proper, and desired.

I mean, I don’t want to be the one spearheading that operation. I’m busy enough with LocalNames and my work projects and some other projects as it is. It’s nice to be able to contribute casually to some other people’s projects now and then. But good lord, I don’t want to be responsible for them!

And so, what I want, is for you to take more responsibility for the questioning: I want you to say, “Yes, this is what I will do. I will make sure that your contributions are not in vain. I will set up a structure for the house. I will architect these things. When contributions are lacking, I will be the mule, and make up for it with my own efforts, as time requires. I will be the slow and armored tank, that nothing can crush. I will be the pin board, that all the efforts attach to.”

When somebody does that, it attracts attention, and it attracts efforts, and so on: Because the people know: “Oh, my time here is not wasted. This effort will be put to good use, because Keith is taking care of it.”

What is irritating is lots of people saying, “Oh, the community will take care of it.” Because then everybodys efforts are lost, and the people may even get mad at one another.

So: Leadership-- Yesss!

This isn’t to say we don’t value things where there are no leaders, and something just emerges. Great when it happens, no? But, we shouldn’t count on it, I don’t think.

Time to sleep; Take care!

This is a good discussion! I realize that I mixed up the concept of manager (organizer) with Leader. By leader, I think I meant the problems with a GodKing type of leader, not with the more laissez faire type of inspirational leader. I also realize by your final paragraphs that what I think we’re both trying to zoom in on (and both getting distracted by lots of other juicy stuff) is this internal conflict about project control. When is too much? How do we be a mule and not an ass (heh heh)? How do we attract good attention and not bad attention (especially when so much of these participatory environments are about attracting attention), and probably my biggest question, how do I build up the project that is near and dear to my heart without it becoming “Oh, don’t mess with that - it’s Keith’s project” (however well intentioned).

And so, what I want, is for you to take more responsibility for the questioning: I want you to say, “Yes, this is what I will do. I will make sure that your contributions are not in vain. I will set up a structure for the house. I will architect these things. When contributions are lacking, I will be the mule, and make up for it with my own efforts, as time requires. I will be the slow and armored tank, that nothing can crush. I will be the pin board, that all the efforts attach to.”

This is really good stuff and needs to be worked back into the Document. Now I want to create/modify a page on how to be a good WikiLeader?, reaffirming with those put in this position that they are not alone in this internal strife and that there are successful approaches, ideas, learnings, and good dialog.

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