OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

[N.B. Cross-posted from here.]

Chris: I'm personally hoping for an improvement on the idea of discussions overall, something more innovative and organic.

How about borrowing some ideas from BigThink.com?

I haven't tried it out yet, but what intrigues me about that site is both the emphasis on video content and the system of categorizing content and related discussions. I think pods will probably always have a place here, but having a more open system of content categorization could help bring a lot of discussion out into the broader community more.

Chris: I believe if we're to succeed in our mission of collecting our wisdom and expertise and love and hope for the purpose of achieving higher causes, we certainly need a better tool than a discussion board.

And this brings to mind Google's ”Knol” project.  Heck, even a Gaia wiki would be cool.

[…]

OK, I stuck these ideas into the ol' ponderizer and I've come up with what feels like a paradigm-shifting idea.  I call it “discussion clouds”, which fits the Gaia metaphor to a tee, don't you think? :)

So, one of the problems with blogs and pods is that the two media are essentially separate with no real structural encouragement to bridge the gap between the two. And a problem even within either medium is that you can get parallel discussions going on in separate pods or on separate blogs with no easy way to bring the various ideas together.

In addition to this fragmentation, another problem with the discussions on blogs or in pods is that they tend to be very linear and just sort of peter out when the thread gets too long.  A discussion cloud could resolve both of these problems.  So what is a “discussion cloud”?

Well, I just thought of this about 20 minutes ago, so it's still a fairly embryonic idea, but basically I see it working like this:

The key would be to have a system of topic categories and sub-categories (à la BigThink.com). Anyone could start a cloud based on these categories. Part of the cloud creation process would also be to link any blog posts or knowledge articles (“knols” or wiki articles) that will be relevant to the discussion, as well as to state a purpose for the cloud, briefly (so that it can be displayed at the top of the page when one is “in” the cloud).  The cloud would then “disperse” (i.e. be closed to further discussion) when its stated purpose has been fulfilled (e.g. a new knowledge article has been created on the intended topic or a conflict has been resolved or whatever).

See the metaphor at work here?  The cloud forms out of Gaia's existing “ocean” of knowledge, then “rains” on the community in the form of new knowledge or the achievement of some other goal, and then it disperses, ready for the cycle to repeat into another cloud. And I would imagine that all clouds could end with the creation of some sort of article, if only to summarize the achievements of the cloud and how those achievements came about.

Discussion within a cloud could branch out into all sorts of directions, so we'd need a cloud map that enables someone to navigate within it, seeing how the various branches of conversation interrelate, like a mind map.

Also, when one is viewing the cloud or a piece of it, along one side of the screen there could be a list of the linked articles and blogs (or even pods, I suppose, or other clouds… “perfect storm” comes to mind…), as well as lists of suggested blogs and articles based on the stated categories and keywords.  These additional articles could then also be linked as and when cloud participants find them particularly relevant to the discussion and stated purpose. (Hell, we could even link external articles from around the web to these clouds….)

And whenever you're reading an article, pod thread or whatever, there would be a “Create cloud” button somewhere on the page, so that if what you're reading triggers an idea, you're just one click away from starting a cloud based on it (and whatever else you want to link to it). Others reading that same article or thread would then see that there's a cloud (or clouds) linked to it (in lists of “linked” and “related” clouds) and could check it out.

Damn!  I should be billing Gaia for this idea, but what the heck. (Paypal donations are gladly accepted, though!  ;-)

Offered with love,

~Grey

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

OK, I've come up with another name for these: “Grey Clouds”! ;-)

This would then be shortened, of course, to “gClouds” and we could all pretend that it stands for “Gaia Clouds”.  :P

Cheers,
Grey

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

BTW, clouds could also be “seeded”….

~G

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

And at the risk of overextending the metaphor, we could add one little letter to “pods” and turn them into “ponds”, one source for the creation of clouds…. ;-)

~G

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

doin' my best to seed this thread so it gets noticed, and maybe it bears repeating in the GUI board, perhaps a summary?

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

You mean the ”Forum Discussion GUI” thread? Yeah, that might be a good idea.  I'm also probably going to write up a more organized presentation of the idea so that I can “blog it forward”, so maybe that's what I'll post to that other thread.

And thanks for the support!

BTW, while I'm here, does anyone know of anything similar to this already going on somewhere else on the web? I'm not even sure how to go about researching that.

Cheers,
Grey

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

Good stuff, G. 

I'd say the metaphor is one thing, the mechanism is another.  To rephrase a political adage, we think in poetry and we build in prose.  And I think we're definitely on the same page, in terms of both. 

A vertical thread is not the metaphor that we need.  Something that builds out in many directions, based on what is contributed, and can be filtered to be seen in many possible ways, seems much more likely to allow a single thread to evolve to its full potential (since I think that a thread has a different purpose per each soul involved).  I'm throwing some thoughts up on the GUI post, too. 

Funny, the 'grey' part…  one of the mechanisms I've considered building in the past is called “greyprints” (as opposed to blueprints) - which allows one to specify just part of an implementation or architecture, and allow the idea to accrete based on contributions of others. 

Glad we both agree on the correct spelling of 'grey'  :)

One question, on categories…  What do you think would work better:  categories that we manually setup (ala Yahoo/BigThink), or tags that essentially allow creation of new categories?  Often I think that it's easier to categorize and locate content based on well-structured categories, but I've sort of fallen away from that mode, as the rest of the web seems to have as well…  What do you (or anyone) think?

Keep er coming!

-c

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

Chris: A vertical thread is not the metaphor that we need.  Something that builds out in many directions, based on what is contributed, and can be filtered to be seen in many possible ways, seems much more likely to allow a single thread to evolve to its full potential….

Yes, some apects of the cloud idea can also apply to the pods, for sure.

Chris: Funny, the 'grey' part…  one of the mechanisms I've considered building in the past is called “greyprints” (as opposed to blueprints) - which allows one to specify just part of an implementation or architecture, and allow the idea to accrete based on contributions of others.

Yeah, that's pretty much the same thing I'm thinking of.  You'd link a number of ideas together into a cloud with some unifying purpose, but then it would be everyone involved in the cloud who would decide how exactly that purpose was achieved in the end.

Chris: What do you think would work better:  categories that we manually setup (ala Yahoo/BigThink), or tags that essentially allow creation of new categories?

Well, with BigThink.com for example, it's not an either/or question because they have both. The problem with tags (although they're great) is that language is too flexible. You might get something like “organization” tagging one thing, “organisation” on another, “organizing” on a third, and “organzation” (note the typo) on a fourth, and that's not even considering synonyms. I suppose there are ways to account for that in software, but I would imagine that something will always slip through the cracks. Fixed categories don't have that problem, so it seems to me that having both is the way to go, with categories being the first level of classification and tags getting more into specifics.

Anyway, I'm still pondering things and I'll be back with more….

Cheers,
Grey

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

I love clouds, love connections, and have also seeded, as Sandra has, the idea that you've put forth, Grey.

I think if this can be developed, you should win an IDEA OF THE MONTH contest. You have, in my book…er…seed…er..Gaia.


Where two clouds come together, there'd be lightning! [I think we do need to have a stake in this. Too many free ideas!]

So, prose-writers, can this be done?

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

OK, I've written up a longer version of my idea with a little more “prose” and have posted it to my blog, but I'll include the text here, too, for easy reference. There's obviously some repetition, but bear with me….

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Not long ago, Chris posted a call for discussion ideas in which he said [emphasis mine]:

Chris: I'm personally hoping for an improvement on the idea of discussions overall, something more innovative and organic. I believe if we're to succeed in our mission of collecting our wisdom and expertise and love and hope for the purpose of achieving higher causes, we certainly need a better tool than a discussion board.

That part, “collecting our wisdom and expertise”, made me think about sites like Wikipedia and Google’s “Knols” project and about how cool it would be for Gaia to have some sort of collaborative (and also not) system for creating “knowledge articles” à la Wikipedia or Knols. But this isn’t my innovative idea.

Let’s just pretend for a minute that Gaia already has a “knowledge article” system in place (and in a sense there is, since you can label a blog post to be an article, but this is too limited of an approach to article creation). What we have, then, are three different modes of “community communication” (i.e. one-to-many or many-to-many, so not counting one-to-one communication like PMs and IMs) and sources of knowledge within Gaia: pods, blogs, and articles.

Each of these systems has its own particular strengths, but there are a few general problems or deficiencies, as well. One of the problems in that discussion on any given topic in all of these modes tends to be very linear, stretching down a web page as far as the participants can bear and then eventually sort of just petering out without really accomplishing anything, other than building a sense of community. Not that building a sense of community isn’t wonderful, but it’s only half of what Gaia is supposed to be about, that is “being the change”. We’ve got tons of being, but not a whole lot of change. Communion, but not much agency.

The other problem is that these three modes are very much separate, and even the various conversations within each mode are separate and fragmented. So you often end up with several discussions on the same topic taking place all around Gaia, but with no easy way to bring all the various views and ideas together into “new knowledge”. The various bits are all “out there”, but nothing much is being done with them.

Now, to a certain extent, simply adding a “Gaia wiki” would already be an improvement, because there would be a way for people to work together on filing away our collective knowledge in a manner that’s more accessible to everyone. But a weakness in the standard wiki model is that one person, on their own, needs to write a decent first draft on a given topic, and then there has to be enough interest and attention paid to the article to get it fleshed out and properly edited and updated.

So what we need is something that will: (1) bridge the gap between all of the fragmented discussion on a particular topic; (2) not be limited by a linear mode of conversation; and (3) bring in more change to the “being the change” equation.

Enter “discussion clouds”, or “Grey Clouds” as I like to call them! You can shorten that to “gClouds” and pretend that it stands for “Gaia Clouds” if you want, but they’ll always be “Grey Clouds” to me. ;-)

What is a “cloud”? Imagine that you’ve been reading a couple of blogs (and related comments) and participating in a pod thread or two on a certain topic, and you get an idea for a “knowledge article” or any other sort of project based on these discussions (could even be simply to resolve a conflict or achieve greater clarity or consensus on the topic). Just create a cloud.

I envision that somewhere on any blog or pod page there would be a “Create a cloud” button. When you click on this button, you would go to a page where you can better define your cloud. This would mean linking any other pod threads, blog posts or articles that you know of that are directly relevant to the cloud and, and this is important, setting a “purpose” for the cloud in a few words (so that it could be displayed across the top of every cloud-view page). That’s the change part, and it also helps distinguish clouds from pods in that a cloud would disperse (i.e. be locked to further discussion) once its purpose had been fulfilled. Discussion could continue in the various pods or blogs that were linked to the cloud, of course, but discussion within that cloud would end when the goal is reached. As part of the setup process, you would also kick off discussion within the cloud.

An important part of this would be some sort of “cloud map”, like a mind map, that would show all the interconnections between the various branches of the cloud discussion (and the linked discussions). This would help a cloud participant to navigate within the cloud and to have a global view of what’s going on in there. The branching and interconnections could actually get quite complex, again like a mind map, and the cloud map would help you to visualize these interrelationships and see how consensus could be achieved by integrating all of the various reasoned viewpoints. I would even envision that you could draw in your own connecting lines, annotations, color coding, and that sort of thing to the cloud map to help you keep track of everything. Some of these markups could be global for the whole cloud to see, and others could be personal for an individual cloud participant.

Whenever you’re “in” a cloud, you would also see, down one side of the page maybe, lists of the linked or related pod threads, blog posts or articles and could link related stuff (even external web items) as the cloud discussion progressed. Tagging would be an important part of finding related knowledge to link to the cloud, but I’d also like to see topic categories à la BigThink.com to help zero in on related discussions.

And yes, why not also link other clouds to your cloud and create a “perfect storm” of change?

There’s another aspect of Gaia that I haven’t mentioned and which is more about agency and change, and that’s gPro. So you could also link in gPro products and services that could help out in achieving the cloud’s purpose.

I would imagine that pretty much any cloud could end with the writing of some sort of article or report in order to capture the new knowledge that came out of the cloud (even if just to summarize what happened in the cloud for others to learn from), so this is why some system of collecting, creating and indexing Gaia knowledge articles is essential for clouds to work effectively.

Also, I don’t think that clouds should replace pods, because the two modes have very different functions. Clouds are very much more about agency and change, while pods are almost solely about communion and being. But there may very well be ideas here that could be applied to pods to change the way they work. Like “thread maps” to allow more complex discussions to take place without getting bogged down in an unmanageably long, linear thread. In fact, the whole “thread” metaphor might be replaced. Think of pod “clouds” as those pretty white fluffy or wispy clouds that look beautiful but don’t really “do” anything (and wouldn’t have to ever “disperse”), and the clouds I’ve described above would be the rain clouds (which are, of course, “grey”) that redistribute water for plants and animals to benefit from.

So that’s my “killer app” that I think would truly raise the bar on the Gaia community’s ability to “be the change”. Whaddaya think?

With love,
Grey

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

Grey, or shall I call you Mr. gCloud  :)

Let me see if I've got the gist - I'll set aside the terminology (apologies to the poetry), just will list out the plain vanilla (to think in terms of the software requirements)… let me know where I'm off or not grasping something ~

• Can start a discussion within a category, or a tag/tag-set
• State a purpose at the beginning of the discussion
• People add content (more flexible, even links and blogs and other Gaia content types)
• Can navigate around like a mind-map
• Can draw in new links/interconnections in the map
• Show suggested references for each contribution (internal to the site, or from external web)
• Can start a new discussion based on any contribution
• When the moderator feels the purpose has been answered, the starting discussion is closed (not affecting branched discussions)
• Someone can create an article summarizing what has been discussed

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

Hey Chris,

Yeah, your bullet points sum it up pretty well.

You wrote: I think the 'map' part of it would be hugely hard, and would basically require a new division of the company to build.  I'd love to lead that team :)

So how about start with a Clouds v0.3 without all the bells and whistles, but with some basic discussion branching, and maybe some mouse-over pop-ups that show the first few lines of text?  Oh, and if you could use any telecommuters on the cloud team, I'm in! :)

Anyway, coolness!

~G (or Mr. gCloud! … or to imitate someone else we all know, ~G4Gaia ;-)

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

That's a really good idea - maybe if the discussion spins off, the mouseover/popup could even act as a junction to those conversations.  I like.  That's the simple+beauty in action!  :)

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

I put  it to the team  some time ago that we could do with a think-map facility, so much more in line with the way the mind works, it would be invaluable if it could be used for a group and individuals,  more productive and organised than linear thinking.Group brainstorming with a think map could be amazing with the folks here.

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

The lists of linked and related blogs, etc. could also be implemented fairly quickly, so that, for example, blogs could be linked to threads (and vice versa) and displayed in one spot, rather than having to scroll through the whole discussion to find them.

~G

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

Seeding this thread :-) Not only for the idea but watching it unfold and maybe even be put into action. Great.

Sandra

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

Quick note… I think Gaia will need someone to play the role of info-collectors, “community reporters” in a way. Siona is doing something like this already in our mailing lists, telling us of the interesting stuff going on, usually in relation to the administration though. I did suggest a single place/thread/topic for all useful thinktankish-sitefeedbackish suggestions and ideas to be summarised, with someone either particularly active in this “site-ideas” topic or someone on the Team doing the collection and summary of ideas. And no, the nursery is not doing this already, because I can bet that many on the team have to crawl throughout the community to gather our little bits of good ideas here and there.

The same can and I believe should work for other topics actively discussed in the community. Main problem with gClouds - it’s just another discussion pod with strict moderation. I suggest gReports instead, where someone every now and then summarises the topic as discussed so far. In ideal this should happen on every pod discussion, where the first post is edited now and then to “try” and summarise the discussion by the thread owner, or mod, or both in agreement, depending on how long the discussion goes. (And please please introduce pages separation to pods? *begs*)

The summaries can be “polished” through comments and further discussion of course, and published in Gaia printed publications for example, but for now shown as articles on the “Community” hub on Gaia.com.

I suggest keeping in mind that people all over the world will be interested in Gaia community, and not everyone has broadband or even dial-up. Especially people in developing countries. I think a list of “see also” links would work better and be simpler to introduce than complex interactive cloud system.

Yeah, this was supposed to be a quick note. Right…

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

Zet White: Main problem with gClouds - it’s just another discussion pod with strict moderation. I suggest gReports instead, where someone every now and then summarises the topic as discussed so far.

Well, no, I wouldn't say it's just a more strictly moderated discussion pod. Being goal-oriented, and so time-limited, significantly changes the nature of the discussion, and the only added strictness is this time limit and unity of purpose. Standard pods are great at community, but pretty lousy at actually getting anything done, so that's where gClouds come in: getting stuff done.

Your gReports idea is basically what I mean by a wiki-esque knowledge article system, and I do think that's a necessary precursor to having an effective gCloud system.  And actually, one way of creating, right now, a gReports system like the one you describe here would be to create a pod-based Knowledge Base as I describe in my blog here (it's kinda long, so I won't cross-post here).

Articles could also be posted as blog entries, I suppose, but there are certain indexing and access benefits to creating a “centralized” knowledge base within a pod, and only the specific blogger could edit the article.  Ideally, of course, there should be a Gaia-centralized repository for our collective wisdom.

Cheers,
~Grey

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

I also stumbled upon a blog about ”implicit social networks” today that talked about some sites that are doing some interesting things and that reminded me of this gClouds idea.

The idea behind YouChoose (see their FAQs) sounds especially similar to the spirit of gClouds, although I haven't been able to find a good “campaign” that exemplifies this.

Other interesting sites that Gaia could perhaps borrow some ideas or get inspiration from include:

Delver (a sort of “social” search engine)
iLeonardo (for collective wisdom)

Ciao!

~G

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

Just saw a Cloud hovering around the mailbox. Next to tags. Is this thanks to this conversation? Is it new? And yes, I know it's a How To question , but…what does it do?

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Re: OMG! Discussion "clouds" (patent pending ;-)

No, that's to view tags as a cloud, the format where the more the tag is used the larger the word appears relative to the others.  But in mail it only does anything when you add tags to your messages, which I suspect very few people do.

Cheers,
Grey

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