Chat with Clark Robinson

1:32 PM Clark: Wow! E D Kain, I follow his stuff on T/S, he is great.

1:33 PM me: I don't think I've seen it yet, I'll take a look

Clark: Justin Commu looks great, too, I will get something off to him later today, and some other people

1:34 PM me: Have participants randomly matched and assigned a collaborative method and task

1:35 PM we should think up several sorts of methods by which two people could collaborate in a particular "structure,"

and then randomly assign two participants to use that structure in coming to a conclusion or accomplishing some small task

1:36 PM this would give us insight into what might work best

also, having two participants randomly collaborate in general might produce interesting results due to the mixing of various skill sets

1:37 PM Scott and I talked the other day about having there be a probability that any info pushed forward into either networks would have a chance of appearing somewhere else randomly in the network in addition to where it would usually be sent

1:38 PM as means of ensuring that the raw material on one end of the network has a chance to appear at another portion of it, which I think will clearly have certain differing characteristics due to being "inhabited" by bloggers who have linked to each other, in the case of the media network

1:39 PM and which would thus possibly do something better with that raw material or have some other insight into it than would those from the region of the network from which it originated

1:41 PM Clark: so a blogger on a lower echelon whose posts have merit but are being stifled by his immediate superior would have chance

1:43 PM chance of wider readership despite an idiosyncratic bias of the blogger who brought him in

me: yeah, and in fact I think we should also integrate in similar methods to tackle any structural deficits that are still going to exist, like that one

1:44 PM Clark: up in the paired collaboration model I am not sure what you mean by 'structures'

1:47 PM there are various games like scattegories, scrabble, various card games, charades, whatever adults play at shitty parties

and these all either have participants interpret input from each other or produce it together, according to certain rules

1:48 PM we could design various procedures in a similar vein

intent on producing different sorts of results, as if they had been filtered, distorted, magnified, etc

1:49 PM we would then draw conclusions based on how the participants deemed the process method and what we see in the results

and perhaps implement similar novel methods when it comes time to setting up the governing network

or a template for procedures within sub-projects like Africa

1:51 PM I'm going to ask some of our more abstract-professioned participants to try to think up such methods

1:52 PM containing various questions about both specific and general aspects of what we're doing and what we should be doing

1:53 PM that can then be displayed in whatever documents deal with the aspect in question

1:54 PM this is just a way of making sure that our participants have quick and easy access to everything that needs to be considered or determined and thus doesn't miss a chance to contribute his expertise or ideas

1:58 PM Clark: sort of sounds like we need an "internal systems" team (forgive the bureaucrat-speak) to find or maybe build the automated support for the interfacing of these pieces of content, This new guy Justin Commu sounds as if he could do that

2:01 PM although if he is currently looking for employment, he may not have much time, once he finds it

2:04 PM how do I save this chat? I guess I can paste it into an e-mail and send it to myself

2:08 PM OK< did so, copying you, I have a couple more hours of run-around to to, then I will get off some messages to Justin, wrenchwench, Felipe and some others as they occur to me