Adapting/Adopting Online Conversation
You can't simulate human creativity--nor naivete--and you can't automate deliberation. I have no faith in any scheme which would substitute circuits for thoughtful minds. Tools merely augment a person's capabilities, as the bicycle and ballpoint pen extend our movements and our communications, respectively. Yet people are amazingly adaptive/adoptive. They learn to use tools and media for purposes they were not designed for. This is why anyone seeking to co-create wisdom inside social software needs the motivation, open-mindedness and willingness to embrace new communications media; it calls one to consider alternate world-views/word-views.
I think of "voting" in a general sense as any discrete action that expresses a perspective; it could, for example, be practicing "the Law of Two Feet" in an OpenSpace or raising a concern in Dynamic Facilitation. Choosing to speak or not speak, to listen or leave: these are discrete actions. It doesn't have to be numeric, and it need not have decision-making power. An alternative term to "vote" would be "feedback", a data source to let the group know what others are thinking. It could be non-verbal or verbal, a raised hand or a detailed solution. Attention may be the most telling form of non-verbal feedback. In my view, feedback is a major factor in Collective Intelligence.
Software is but the framework for an online community--as a Constitution defines the axioms of law-making but is open-ended with respect to law. People, especially young ones, are extraordinarily adaptive to the rapid, asynchronous, multi-threaded discussions typical of the internet. Just as dynamic facilitation uses tools for information-sharing (categorized lists on whiteboards) to support open-ended creativity, I have no doubt that creative people will adapt digital tools for the same purpose. Just look at the open-source software community or the blogosphere. The point is not to simulate face-to-face deliberation, but to discover new collective thought processes that take advantage geographical diversity, large participant populations, data-rich feedback loops, and the managed multiplicity of simultaneous threads of discussion. People are ingenious and persistent enough to create community anywhere, to extend themselves and their bright ideas into ever-wider circles of information-sharing. WE will all learn together, experientially, how to squeeze wisdom from the pulp of online "deliberation", just as we have to equally and effortfully strive for it in our daily face-to-face interactions.
I think of "voting" in a general sense as any discrete action that expresses a perspective; it could, for example, be practicing "the Law of Two Feet" in an OpenSpace or raising a concern in Dynamic Facilitation. Choosing to speak or not speak, to listen or leave: these are discrete actions. It doesn't have to be numeric, and it need not have decision-making power. An alternative term to "vote" would be "feedback", a data source to let the group know what others are thinking. It could be non-verbal or verbal, a raised hand or a detailed solution. Attention may be the most telling form of non-verbal feedback. In my view, feedback is a major factor in Collective Intelligence.
Software is but the framework for an online community--as a Constitution defines the axioms of law-making but is open-ended with respect to law. People, especially young ones, are extraordinarily adaptive to the rapid, asynchronous, multi-threaded discussions typical of the internet. Just as dynamic facilitation uses tools for information-sharing (categorized lists on whiteboards) to support open-ended creativity, I have no doubt that creative people will adapt digital tools for the same purpose. Just look at the open-source software community or the blogosphere. The point is not to simulate face-to-face deliberation, but to discover new collective thought processes that take advantage geographical diversity, large participant populations, data-rich feedback loops, and the managed multiplicity of simultaneous threads of discussion. People are ingenious and persistent enough to create community anywhere, to extend themselves and their bright ideas into ever-wider circles of information-sharing. WE will all learn together, experientially, how to squeeze wisdom from the pulp of online "deliberation", just as we have to equally and effortfully strive for it in our daily face-to-face interactions.
posted by Pyramis at 4:40 AM
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