>> Would there be value in a platform for us to; capture all the ideas and >> initiatives, distil them into groups, reduce them to a handful concepts to >> explore, and finally focus all our efforts on.
I believe so, for all definitions of "platform". >> "Back in 196x, we considered this, but elected to go with that, because of >> some reason," or "we did this, going forward you should consider something >> else." In my imagination I can see as many opinions as there were people in >> the room. Yet the language suggest the initiatives were reduced to a >> handful, and then pursued with vigour. Just think of what we can do by >> following the same pattern, and we have the added benefit of doing it as a >> virtual, distributed team. If it can be kept objective (in the judgemental sense) and open-ended, at least five valuable artefacts could be produced from this kind of research: a historical perspective on the important dialogues that occurred, analysis of what was chosen/rejected as interesting and why, hindsight on which turned out to be interesting (or not) and why, a synthesis of what should be current understanding, and a proposal for a platform (or family of related platforms, in the architectural sense) based on that understanding on which to work and then stand while starting the next round of dialogues. With the caveat that lots of important ideas can be found in vastly unrelated territory, and that focussing our attentions on what we might prefer to be the good ideas is itself a very bad idea, here is one potential source of information for the historians: http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/Dynabook/Maxwell-DynabookFinal.pdf >> Invention receives no attention, and innovation (even when incorrectly >> understood) receives lip service in the press, but no current-day vehicle >> exists to to nurture it. +360 > I can imagine a c2.com like wiki that is specifically focused on fundamentals > of new computing, with a similar mixture of documentation and discussion. > >> Why not use a wiki to collaborate and organize thoughts and information? >> >> >>> I am willing to start a database of ideas and initiatives if there are at >>> least a few in the fonc group that agree in principle. If a wiki is the kind of "database" you had in mind, please feel free to make use of: http://vpri.org/fonc_wiki If a straw-man position statement would be useful to start the process reactively, I would have time to make one tomorrow. Regards, Ian _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
