Re: Project PM

Hey Barrett,

Sorry for my extremely late reply! I'm still interested in your
project, but I've just started a full-time job here in the UK which is
taking up my day-to-day 9-5 life. However, if you have things I could
be doing to help, then please do get in touch and give me a list of
things for me to do, and I'll start taking a look.

I work best when I know what's expected of me, so give me a list and
I'll let you know what I can do and do my best :-)

Cheers,

David


On 6 November 2010 23:54, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, David-
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.
Below, I've pasted some more info on what Project PM is. If you'd be
interested in helping to administrate the project, let me know, and you can
come into our IRC channel and talk with me and a couple other people who are
heavily involved thus far.
***
Project PM is an online entity designed to address problems of information
flow in a variety of contexts while also perpetually expanding its
participant base in such a way as to maintain the high average quality of
existing participants, all without central direction or leadership. This is
to be accomplished by way of a communication/collaboration schematic Ive
developed for the purpose and which is best summarized as follows.

Participants A, B, C, and D are provided a widget which allows them to send
or re-send an item - an idea, a blog post, input on a task - to however many
of the others to which theyre connected, who will in turn have the option
to send items to them. Upon receiving an item, each can push that item to
whomever else they are connected, who will in turn have the same option.
A,B,C, and D may each also invite anyone else to adopt the widget and
connect with him or her, and will thereby bring in new participants with the
same ability to send and receive items and connect to new or existing
participants. Now let us say that A, who is very clever and possesses good
judgement, invites Z, who is similarly swell. But then Z brings in X, who is
only moderately virtuous and tasteful and who later brings in Y, who is much
less so. Y writes a blog post about how Obama is secretly from Tehran or
finds a great article on crystal healing or some such thing and pushes the
item to X, the person who brought him in. If X shows such poor judgement as
to think this item worthwhile and thus pushes it to A, then A, who has
better judgement, will refrain from pushing it forward to anyone else, thus
stopping the item from making its way further into the network and bothering
everyone with its nonsense. A might even opt to severe his widget connection
to X lest he receive any further nonsense. Thus it is that the network may
expand without limit while still ensuring that the information flowing
through it is always of relatively high quality.

There are a few other factors worth noting. Any participant may connect to
any other participant, regardless of how far away they are within the
structure of the network, assuming that both agree to the connection. A
participant can be connected to as many others as agree to the connection.
In order to prevent good information from being regionalized as the network
grows, a pushed item has a 20 percent chance of also appearing in the widget
of a random participant elsewhere in the network, which may then be pushed
around among those participants as well if they find it to be of use.

When the software is completed, slightly differing versions will be used by
bloggers and by our general participants. The former will use it to better
share their best posts while also being privy to the best posts of others,
the titles of which will appear on the bloggers widget which in turn is
visible to his own readers to the extent that the blogger has chosen to push
the articles he receives; meanwhile, readers have widgets which display
headlines with links of those blog posts which have been pushed around the
network a particular number of times as set by the user, making it an
aggregation tool that is not only crowd-sourced, but crowd-sourced among a
particularly erudite and intellectually honest array of bloggers and other
online commentators, rather than having been chosen by one or two editors or
voted to the top by a huge group of internet users who have not been
filtered for competence - thereby making it potentially the best source of
news and commentary that has ever existed.

Meanwhile, our network of Project PM participants necessarily connects the
individuals themselves, rather than blogs, and items tend to be ideas or
improvements in the context of loose working groups of participants
collaborating on some particular task, such as our Africa Development
Program or Science Journalism Improvement Program or one of many others that
will be founded and furthered by groups of participants who will work within
the context of the schematic and with other tools well be adding.
Organizations such as charities and NGOs in general may also join the
network as a single party.

While we wait for the software to be completed, Project PM is operating in a
more informal manner; about a dozen members are involved in setting up our
various programs, building the widgets, recruiting new participants and
advisers, and otherwise preparing for the integration of the hundred or so
other participants we have on have on hand into what will eventually amount
to an ever-expanding distributed think-tank made up of scientists,
journalists, activists, software engineers, authors, activists, NGO workers,
and combinations thereof, exerting soft power in a wide variety of contexts
and otherwise serving as a sort of technocratic counterpoint to the other,
lesser institutions that shape human society with the very mixed results
that have presumably led you to inquire about Project PM in the first place.
On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 9:51 AM, David Ault <jdault@gmail.com> wrote:


Barrett,

Thanks for the email - it sounds like an extremely worthwhile project.
My speciality is astronomy, although I've been a little out of that
academically for a while. Nevertheless, I'm intrigued by your mention
of working with you and the administrators - could you give me some
more information there please?

Many thanks,

David


On 15 October 2010 20:37, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

David-
We don't have much interest in formal credentials; I've just taken a
look at
your website and in particular your page on the tour you're doing of
science
centers and your reasons for doing so, and I think you'd be of
extraordinary
assistance to us in general. If you'd like to advise a writer, let me
know
the particular branches of science in which you're most knowledgeable
and
I'll put you down on our list. But you also might be interested in
working
with myself and the other administrators as time permits as we oversee
the
project in general.
I'll have my associate Clark Robinson send you some additional
information
about Project PM and our fundamental goals, which involve the
development
and promotion of improved methods of collaboration and information flow.
We
have a number of documents you might find interesting, and our more
active
participants tend to congregate in our new IRC channel which itself may
be
accessed at irc.freenode.net, #projectpm (I recommend Xchat if you're
new to
IRC, but Clark will send along a short guide including other methods of
getting on).
Anyway, get back to me after you've heard from Clark, if you would.


On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 5:48 AM, David Ault <jdault@gmail.com> wrote:


Hi there,

I'm a UK-based science presenter and writer, and I'm interested in
your project. However, as neither a science journalist nor a current
academic I can understand if I'm frozen out somewhat. Nevertheless,
I've been going around North America this summer doing reviews of
science centres and so on, so I keep in touch that way, along with
presenting the twice-monthly Jodcast.

If I can be of any use, please let me know.

Many thanks,

David

--
David Ault
www.davidault.co.uk
Twitter: @astrotour2010




--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302




--
David Ault
www.davidault.co.uk
Twitter: @astrotour2010




--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302




-- 
David Ault
www.davidault.co.uk
Twitter: @astrotour2010