Source Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugwlfil8Q0RVb6cCKn94AaABAg
2:07:38 In the meritocracy, just stating the goals are worth nothing. If you're the new kid on the block, people rather trust the ones who have been active in the community for some years. We can discuss if that's a good or bad thing, but the new guy isn't prevented from making his own stuff and see if it has merit, that's exactly the same what the old guys in town did to get where they are.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgwET7AhP7JKWj_m_mN4AaABAg
2:06:37 Well, if the track record (in entirety or partial) is public, it's not very difficult to trust somebody to do more of the same, and it's also an aspect of identity publicly constructed. Difficult to have with scattered, proprietary, non-public, legally restricted systems, not a major issue in the libre-free software world to even think much about. The problem is more that you don't have time to look into their track records to establish the trust, as you weren't there with them and have difficulty to find out if it's fake or real, but you can at least look at it and they can't fake the real thing, so...and you certainly can't be with them in it on a global scale with limited time and different interests.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugx-tdVeTn-0X-LEo-p4AaABAg
2:05:37 Interesting. The meritocracy has different "peer reviews" and doesn't need that kind of trust, from security/privacy principles, it's designed to still work with and demand as least of it as possible. What do you need trust for? Is it for somebody investing time/money, or do some work at all? What if portions are made available quite frequently and in a bootstrap way to be usable on a small scale, even if there's no trust that development will continue to the large scale? Is it to ensure that people don't walk away, and does this matter if others join to continue the mission? For me personally, I don't want to rely too much on trust because once it's established, there would be more disappointment if expectations shouldn't be met. I find it much safer to trust the larger, anonymous community than any given individual because I see what all those good people are doing collectively, no matter who drops out and joins in, as long as they're fighting for the same cause. It's not that there's a lot of reason to form more close bonding with any participant because there are many, very different, and they all have their own lifes that probably aren't alignable with all the others. But this might just be a rendering of my own social defect here ;-)
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgyMo5MAmP-vqS6d8vt4AaABAg
2:04:38 Do you guys know what StackOverflow is doing as "Developer Story", for hiring? I never understood why GitHub didn't do something similar, imagine if the libre-free software world would have an address book that's not just the FSF website, of people offering their skills and declaring their interests/needs, that would be immensely powerful (maybe).
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugx9rHS7qpjYhNiu9oF4AaABAg
1:49:54 It's already worthwile if it helps those who are using it in contrast to those who don't benefit from it.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgwzovMbkrSEpfvraIF4AaABAg
1:35:06 It's not so much that one would claim that the non-physically enacted thought wouldn't "exist" (while it sounds like that you want to say that it its existence depends upon showing some manifestation some time later), those are different questions I guess, but of the category of aspects that might be intended, imagine if there's a single tree in a single forest on this planet, who is so special because of supernatural reasons that it can fall and falls without making a noise, both in a case where nobody is nearby as well as a case where somebody would hear it for the other trees. How would you tell the difference, did the tree really fall, what a tragedy to be unable to learn about this event. We could go in many other territories with the question, just to pick some more: imagine, all trees are falling without noise, and just those make a noise when somebody is nearby to hear it. Is there really hearing, or noise, or falling? What's the relevancy of the event if it isn't observed, if it doesn't relate to something else to become a meaning, and how many events are there, unwitnessed, seemlingly irrelevant (or are they actually relevant, is the entire observation and relation to the human the irrelevant part?). How would you ever knew if a tree that lies on the ground fell before, as opposed to one that just magically appeared in that position, and would it matter? What about the human assumption that all trees on the ground must have been fallen to get there, and then would you even need to hear it fall and observe the event to know that it did happen, isn't the hearing irrelevant anyway? For the many trees that fall every day, who cares, and is there more caring for those who are heard in the process? Isn't it a tragedy for a tree to fall without being heard, and how does that help a tree that's falling while being heard, would that be an improvement of quality? And on and on and on.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgwMX1nMnU6iEw-X6Dx4AaABAg
1:34:20 Here's another philosophical question for you guys: can the butterfly effect exist and if so, does it actually exist?
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgzxVs5rH8BMt9Fe4tJ4AaABAg
1:33:05 Don't say "of course" too fast, that's not an appropriate way to deal with the question philosophically.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgwtOGv7sXLij1-Jlg14AaABAg
1:28:06 A glossary capability is pretty generic, it can be used for different purposes. If there are words in common usage, a group could come up with a collective glossary to explain outsiders and words that contrary to common usage, these words have special meaning and history associated with them in that particular group. It can be used to standardize, to eliminate subjective interpretation, for a group, to build an authoritative frame of reference (which needs to be updated now and then), but otherwise people could just play semantic games and reinterpret and claim different meanings for the same word on which you thought to have agreed upon, so you're not even talking about the same thing eventually without noticing it. Within the group, each participant could have his own definition of a word that can be compared to how others in the group use the word, and if the person speaks, it can automatically determined what it means in that context. So it's a tool to either deliberately disambiguate or deliberately create ambiguity (or make it visible where it would otherwise go unnoticed). The individual might want to curate a glossary of the different meanings of his own words to be reminded of those alternatives, or maybe to import the different definitions by the people who had something to say about it, as a reading aid. And then, a particular glossary definition can explicitly be linked to a usage of the term in the text to point out that it is this certain meaning and not all the others, where other uses of the same word can be left vague without explicit link to a definition. In formal documents like the documentation of a standard, sure, keywords are used, they're defined by something that could be described as some form of glossary. People in the know don't have to look them up all the time because their symbolic reading already triggers, but the definition can augment the reading of those who are not familiar with the field.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgzqgWlK2KEOsZlS3Vx4AaABAg
1:11:25 It's not so much if the live audio call goes away, one could as well reference into portions/clips of the recordings, but yeah, how can you mention cryptic links with voice, or indeed search it, because analogue signals are much harder to match as you don't have the same voice of the speaker, and comment and branch off other conversations except for breaking and branching up the recording? The different media have different purposes, advantages and disadvantages, and we would like to use them properly while that's often not supported by current conversation environments. Reading itself is horrible most of the time, but you can rearrange an onboarding setup more flexible, how would you get that into a movie, for example, and keep it updated? With text you can modify small pieces, but video will stop to fit together, or it's endless cutting, etc. Is the (shared) conversation space meant to pull in and combine flexibly the other 8 artifacts in a coherent views/renderings, a meta-artifact?
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgxkLD2plRsbSTQyZbp4AaABAg
1:10:16 How? Manually, in software?
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugz7FndkBF-lgpklaOR4AaABAg
59:45 That's the model how libre-free software gets developed, it's called a meritocracy (look it up in the Wikipedia). It has advantages and disadvantages, but it allows the flexible formation of Zweckgemeinschaften (purpose communities not agreeing on all the other matters) if something is presented in a convincing way or is generally accepted because people can see it has merit if they get behind it in contrast to other suggestions, and if it gets support, if people still believe that it is a good thing, more will join or otherwise abandon it or start an alternative with even more merit, etc. The barrier of entry is very low and isn't focused on predetermined roles or formal credentials or entitlement, but on who can carries out the actual work, who is doing the investment. Lorenz Sell (Sutra) suggests co-creation as an improvement or alternative.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgxYKs3b7EHbVxO4EIV4AaABAg
47:54 That's http://kfjournal.org/wp/index.php/2015/10/19/8-artifacts-to-seed-a-project-team/. How would one ever be able to find it without Sam explicitly describing where it is located?
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugyu_QcQuI2KNGtQ5AB4AaABAg
28:26 The basic Internet infrastructure is designed for that connectivity, and we got a great deal of benefit out of it, unprecedented in human history even. What people build on top of that, is mostly the opposite, they artificially centralized it again and deliberately prevent users from connecting their own stuff, from which a few too got a great deal of benefit out of it. They're also very clever and understand digital, they make it appear to be connectable, where it isn't really, or only connects on their terms.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugzgg4HTuTk2LhiM0L54AaABAg
23:04 Sure, it doesn't need to be your own domain on your own server necessarily, not a lot of people can get one running for themselves, and then we don't trust DNS too much, and servers or the content on them can go down, but what we might want to do, is to virtually connect resources together, like this: whenever somebody publishes something in his/her place of preferrence (that's supported by the system), then we manually or automatically register it as being material that belongs into the library/repository/shared memory, so people can reference it and use it in various ways, including making their copies for backup and preservation, and if the original source goes away or changes, we have a mechanism to redirect, by dealing with arbitrary, abstract IDs that can be resolved to an remote online server, a file on the local computer, a different server than the original source, a database, or if none of that was registered as an alternative or resolving failed for several alternatives for these, the client could still post a request to other clients that have a copy locally, if they don't want to help to provide the resource, and provide his own materials on request or something like that. Depending on the properties and features you want from the system, issues have to be resolved, being it copyright, personal rights or demands by law based on jurisdiction, but in trusted, small groups, I don't see why this should be impossible.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgxTJTHbcIDTbPJ1xcZ4AaABAg
23:04 That's https://benking.de. An index page like this should just be a rendering or ViewSpec, because it's less structured and less useful than a WordPress resource, but if it's XHTML, the text can be extracted (and then we need to think about the formatting for the web, because if a client that's not a browser downloads it, web rendering doesn't make a lot of sense, and if it's a browser, it can't pull in resources from other servers except if Heiner hosts it on his own server, where we're back in the copyright discussion). He uses Creative Commons with the Non-Commercial clause, which makes it non-free, because you want enable use in a commercial context and not discriminate it (as long as the essential user rights are conveyed). It's also the 3.0 version compatible with the Wikipedia, where one might want to use 4.0 (legal improvements, prohibits DRM), and one might also consider a path to automatically upgrade licenses, about which Creative Commons isn't much concerned about unfortnuately.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgyGzqevOexUezjupct4AaABAg
22:41 That makes perfectly sense, we could start doing it in a bootstrapping way from tomorrow on. There's one important question of policy for me though: I don't see a point in curating material that's useless to me because of legal restrictions, just as my comments here are already a huge waste of time, as the content they're referring to can be removed from withunder me at any time, so there's no point in writing them in the first place. As copyright and licensing is a big issue for most people, I don't know how the GCC wants to go about their own materials. One way would be to only link/transclude stuff and virtually combine resources from their different original sources, but, you know, that only helps for reading, no way to legally print it, re-publish it, make derived works, translate it, etc. One way to go about this would be to do it similar like the Wikipedia, but not everybody will be fully aware of the Creative Commons BY-SA, and still each publication needs to be revised for legal clearance, or another option could be to do it selectively, that people can declare which parts are published under a libre-free license, and the remaining rest is just for passive consumption. I'm against asking people to libre-license their stuff for the wrong reasons because they will only be disappointed, I'm fine with actively working only with those who do join their contributions into the collective commons, and the rest would be treated agnostic of its legal state only passively, on the users own responsibility.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgzMI0-Ns3OSuFXQ-RR4AaABAg
22:23 That's https://soundcloud.com/samhahn/tracks
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgzLQFn5mLOTqi0vSZF4AaABAg
22:18 We would have to investigate how Google and Soundcloud cooperate. They tend to be more friendly than other sites. kfjournal.org is WordPress, but not under our control, so if there are problems with that particular instance, we might still be able to copy/scrape it off, as you as the author at least retained the legal permission to use your own work, I hope.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugzua6ynTCPw99smIh94AaABAg
21:33 That's not anarchy, those "some people" are of those who are pretty confused.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugy5_3WGHFGALEvqRAd4AaABAg
21:21 I can work with WordPress in some cases. It's libre-freely licensed software, so you could have your own or get a service provider to host it for you, but there are also technical problems with it, which we could collaboratively try to learn about and avoid/fix them. Plain text files or XHTML on a web server would be a good start as well ;-) It would be good to do an analysis what people do right now (where do they publish, where/what do they read?), because, there we're already asking ourselves if that material is lost or can be recovered, in an attempt to making it available for discovery and consumption again, or do we just write it off?
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugya3CMfRt04NLK6zaB4AaABAg
19:37 I see it like this: it's fine if people publish whereever they want, BUT: it either have to be a place from which we can easily get/retrieve their publication, or they have to make it available in some other form, be it by copying and pasting it, via an export, sending it via e-mail manually every single time. If it isn't retrievable/accessible to whomever comes to the group or just watches it as an outsider, what if he hasn't a Facebook account? What if you want to perform a software function/operation on content on a site you don't have access to, only the original author? In the end, it's also an important goal to allow/support publication at many different places, but there are certain services and formats by certain vendors who deliberately artificially make that impossible, so they should be avoided, they go on a blacklist, they decided that they don't want to play nicely and only fool and exploit and deprive their user. If someone decides to use his crappy site or software or format, fine, but it's not that the others should be punished for it, that user himself/herself has to compensate for it, because, you know, who else will care for that content to get it into the group context if not the original author himself/herself, and by neglecting to do so, it'll just become irrelevant, as all the other things we tend to produce on the many sites that just fade into obscurity, while there's at the other hand this amazing interconnected library one could spend hours in exploring it. So yeah, it doesn't matter that much what place/site it is, as long as there's a path to migration to a better world.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgxnSDpFA9vQHbUwDuZ4AaABAg
15:17 Berlin is an option for me of course, but I can imagine why London might be important, don't know yet if that's supposed to be on my schedule as well eventually. It's also leaving the EU now, to a foreign country with questionable policies. On the other hand, I thought the computers and networking allows us to work together without ever meeting in person, so I'm not sure why this should be super important, to the contrary: I think the computer and network liberates me from having to travel to places.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgxFZXHBg6cUlo-yC-d4AaABAg
10:43 If there's, let's say, an onboarding process, and each new participant is talked personally through it, once a hundred people join, there's just not enough time to do the same thing over and over again, and if you delegate, who's onboarding the onboarders and how to keep them updated, etc. Instead, onboarding information could be sent out automatically (even with video to still create the impression of personal communication), and if something remains unclear, still a person can be contacted. For re-occurring or well defined interactions, software systems can help a great deal with reducing the workload of the human and free him/her for other things, so more can be done in less time and not being wasted on things where it doesn't matter that much.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgytRiLtBjSFR9_qVR54AaABAg
6:47 That's https://wordpress.liquid.info
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgzQ2kaOfPpx7r6GBE94AaABAg
6:52 Side note: I listened to some Internet invention anniversaries as Doug Engelbart, funded by the ARPA and subsequently node #2 on the ARPANET which would develop into the Internet for his vision of networked computing, too was pretty much involved in this, and I think there are around 5 "fathers of the Internet" who contributed parts to it, Vint inventing TCP/IP. There's also the joke that the Internet has many fathers, but only one mother, who is Robert "Bob" William Taylor. He was responsible to manage the research projects, both the ARPANET as well as Doug Engelbarts group, and he has a few lessons to teach about how he got those groups to collaborate.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgxpZEYYG6Fi_QALbAF4AaABAg
6:27 I was more active in that group at the beginning, but somehow they decided to build for the web, using the big, already existing software packages they've built for years, which are monolythic, and glue them together via an interoperability protocol, dismissing a capability infrastructure/standard. They also decided against bootstrapping their own activities and instead want to bootstrap on a much higher, different level, to bootstrap their publication and analysis and rendering of concepts/topics, they want to build the web of knowledge, which is more aligned with what the semantic web wanted and failed to do and the linked data effort (it's the semantic web under a new name) again tries to do, based on the AI hype. It's about exactly identifying the meaning of a thing and exactly defining the relations between them, so an AI can do reasoning, which I doubt that it can work for problems with language, context, interpretation and so on, and even if they get 70% or 99% of it working (Doug@50 being pretty much a Linked Data Platform project with clients connected to it), I still care more about the tools a human would need to explicitly do the same manually, be it as a fallback or for correction, or if these services are not available as they tend to end up as a dependency and not a capability available to everybody. Except for a server (I'm not much in favor of having functions at a server as a dependency, servers should be primarily for storage in my mind), the other components remain proprietary to this day, and even if they would be libre-licensed, who knows if they would be useful as they're built on top of other proprietary dependencies, so there's not much I can work with anyway. What I tried to offer was rejected on the basis that it is libre-licensed. Then, we made the mistake to use Slack as our communication provider (which is fine at first to get things going, makeshift provision as long as a better alternative isn't built or found yet), but it turned out that the gratis account plan for Slack limits messages for reading to 10k, and I refuse to pay for proprietary non-self-hostable lock-in services with only a single vendor, and especially the fact that Slack didn't inform about this up-front but tricked me into reading and writing on their site, only to extort money for that capability from me later once I'm already invested and don't want to loose the messages and contacts, so it was obviously a mistake to enter a service with such business practices to begin with. They also use voice calls (up to four days a week for a short period) as the primary way to discuss things, which is the usual mess you're already familiar with, but even worse than the ones of the GCC, as sometimes technical things need to be discussed, hugely complex backgrounds and past time/money investments behind the participants, recordings only occasionally available and non-public, so you can't reference them and they're not worth to be curated, people competing for airtime. Documents scattered on Google Doc which you can't organize and where you can't discuss well. Initially I naively thought that for the 50th anniversary of Doug Engelbart's great demo, we would try to at least get ourselves the capabilities Doug had built in his time (not retro-computing of course, but a translation of these capabilities to modern computing), but the solving of complex, urgent world problems won over the text tool system capabilities, so now they're doing a much more difficult thing, what Doug probably actually wanted to do but wasn't able to in his time, while the most basic, primitive and easier text capabilities remain abandoned for more than 50 years now. Still, if they can pull it off, it has the potential to really contribute a lot to the urgent, problem solving, and if a Silicon Valley investor might get attracted to the solution on demo day, even more so. I still try to connect with them at the side, but there's no time and/or interest, and nothing was achieved around those lines for the entire year 2018. But it's an amazing effort, they made quite some progress, there are various documents in various stages that were made publicly available you could look into in case of interest.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugw6jmDr5lBmz6yVp5d4AaABAg
6:31 That's https://doug-50.info
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugy5UTVne9aGAschEUh4AaABAg
5:46 I'm on GNU/Linux, and not just any of your usual distributions, but the ones that are 100% libre-freely licensed software, so installing Zoom or Skype would defy the purpose, and you guys don't have Ekiga (it's the SIP protocol after all). Sometimes I can use Skype, if not on a machine of my own. Also, I'm a little bit worried because of discussing complex things in a voice call, as the advantages of voice/audio come at the expense of many disadvantages, like the linearity and lack of structuring, usually not having a record and if so, such one isn't processable as the transcripts need adjustment, calls in real-time face problems like scheduling on a round planet with time zones, etc. etc. But maybe we can arrange a call, if there should be the need to.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgyPbb2dZ0pcgOy-79J4AaABAg
5:19 So here's what I do: I listen to audio/video recordings passively pretty much like radio in the background while doing other work, focusing a little more if I hear something more interesting and a little less if it is about other topics. On the older recordings, I only commented rarely on, because I don't have the time to waste as some of it is obsolete and it's unlikely that anyone is going to revisit them other than for this kind of "entertainment" listening and learning about the group process and individual participants, out of historical interest. It's also a difference to just passively listen to them or to actively comment, which takes away quality computer time that could have been spent writing other things as well. With the transcripts, I try to curate them, fixing the text to some extend, but not tagging speakers for example as we lack the tools and model. The material I listen to at first are Sam's public videos and older recordings on Soundcloud, only recently I discovered, that a lot more unlisted videos are accessible via the playlist (don't know if that's deliberately so or just an accident because YouTube adds it to these playlists as the configured default upload setting), so I'm going through these, and then plan to continue with the ones that ended up on Tammy's or Glenn's YouTube channel. I fail completely to keep track of what I've already listened to, to connect or curate those things in ways that make it useful, so I guess I only communicate with another rare listener/reader who goes through all the material some day in the future to study it, but I think it's more likely that for some reason, the material gets lost and not preserved, so the time/effort investment is wasted right away, which is why I will only do it once, as of now. Like a researcher, I run through a shelf in the library, processing every book in it to be aware at least that it exists and what's roughly in it ;-) If you seriously study a subject, think of how many hours in the month/week you would invest to become with the subject/material, it being the activity of an outside observer. I'm far less reading any of your text materials, as this would require active quality time in front of the computer, which is already a problem with the Sutra thread, I would rather consume that while waiting for the bus/train, be it in printed form or on an e-ink device, with text-to-speech to be explored, but I'm a little bit suspicious about the latter.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugxxb4Wwy_dJ4qHpxLF4AaABAg
4:03 That's part of the problem, don't know or have a solution yet.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgyUAGEyd1lVgI2wbw94AaABAg
3:45 That's https://gcc.sutra.co/pods/9sff1
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugy4UNAv4s6tAhNHIEN4AaABAg
3:18 It's not that every group needs to use all of the artifacts necessarily, they're "capabilities" (functions?) to be plugged in or to be removed again ad-hoc.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=Ugz0wBMXYqC6nwdyOhp4AaABAg
1:28 I hope that's not of my few things I'm cooking into the soup, the human systems side and development of Collaborology and governance models should take whatever time it needs, as it's important and likely part of the solution, but my tool systems side nonetheless could co-evolve in parallel at the side to support these conversations, needing some of its own discussion as well, but shouldn't divert capacity from the larger group.
Comment Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWnbwRql4U&lc=UgzHdoOzPqvrXmMH_R14AaABAg
2:19:20 Oh, that will happen automatically unfortunately because of people dynamics. If some people derive more value from their identity wallet or build a better track record than others, the others will feel discouraged. There's the option to make those things non-public, secret even to the other members, but then how to establish trust in a group if you can't check and verify.