Blowing Discourse Up to Make It Root for Public Hybrid Goverance & Public Intelligence (Decision-Support and Decision-Making)

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On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 2:04 PM, Jeff Atwood jatwood@codinghorror.com wrote:
Could you perhaps post this to http://meta.discourse.org for feedback?

On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 6:17 AM, Robert Steele robert.david.steele.vivas@gmail.com wrote:

   Michel Bauwens: Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

    Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation and Wiki
    Patrick Meier, Crisis Mapping and Humanitarian Relief Technology
    Stephen E. Arnold, Arnold IT wizard against evil
    Dave Warner, STRONG ANGLE, TOOZL, Synergy Strike Force ("Save the Willing First")

Michel Bauwens flagged Discourse as the go to starting point for creating a global public intelligence network in the public service – something that might allow all citizens to have full access to true cost economics information, whole systems feedback loops, and in doing discourse, be able to harmonzie all direct investments by citizens – screw the Empire – so as to create a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all.

I have been working on this for 20 years from the data side, and am now starting to look for points where I can contribute the data, analytic functionality, and hybrid public governance stuff we have done, to something that is viable, funded, and possibly ready for a break-out.

From where I sit, there are a few things that we might talk about if you are interested:

  1. What’s the difference between discourse and decision-support?

  2. Where do facts come from?

  3. What functionalities are needed to go from discourse to analysis to decision-support?

  4. What political and economic and socio-cultural/techno-demographic baises or roots should be recognized by person to facilitate discourse?

  5. Should a balanced budget be part of any discourse as a way of connecting means, ways, and ends?

  6. Where does geospatial taggging play in all this, can Discouse leverage Crisis Mappers, SMS, Tweet, bounded crowd-sourcing, etc? OpenBTS free cell? Autonomous Internet that cannot be shut down?

  7. How do we ensure that all data loaded into Discourse (and WordPress, and elsewhere) is standardized so data conversation is never an issue as other things come along?

Like yourself, my life changed when I created Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog (“The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.”) That is when I stopped fighting the Empire of the past and started "attracting the future (Zen and the Art of Leadership). It might be that your success could trigger a larger opportunity, attached is what I sent Sir Richard Branson by hand of Alfred Rolington former CEO of Janes, no answer yet, but I feel a strong sense of convergence across the board.

With respect, and hope,
Robert

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I really don’t know how to start approaching this. Can you expand on what you would like to do with Discourse? Keep in mind we plan to have a kick ass extension story that will allow you to build more complex systems on top of Discourse.

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Hi. Originally addressed to Jeff, and moved at his request to Meta, one way to start might be fore someone to have a shot at answering the questions I pose, that would give me a foundation for offering some explicit ideas. A really simple example of immediately useful cross fertilization would be Crisis Mappers and their humanitarian relief technology that exploits tweets, SMS (including diaspora translation and map plotting) and a volunteer network of coders and others that can quick tag and connect hand-held photos and messages to any point on the map.

But back to my questions – they were designed to start a conversation. Of course I will answer any questions myself, as they occur, I am out in the yard most of the day finishing the resurfacing of my wife’s two story deck, If you want a shortcut into my mind and 20 years of thinking by over 800 people, here are two links (trying not to “push” stuff at you, being respectful of the merits of Discourse team “pulling” but I can follow instructions and answer questions if anyone wants to push me. Bottom line is that discourse without facts, true cost economics, whole systems thinking, and the ability to visualize tradeoffs, make decisions, and harmonize budgets via shared public intelligence is just Kum ba ya coded to sing (smile – this is humor on my end).

2013 Robert Steele Overview & Workshop 2.6

2012 PREPRINT: The Craft of Intelligence 3.4

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David Winberger has been one of the minds I have been following, his latest book title captures precisely the decade I have spent following collective intelligence – Discouse could be “the room.”

Review: Too Big to Know – Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room

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Jeff, there seems to be no interest at your excellent place for my ideas, so I will not pursue but I remain signed in for following the topic and will respond promptly if asked. Below just came to me today, part of this whole “attracting the future” deal that I like so much. I think the time is right for all of us to converge, but lacking yet is the combination of powerful visualization, compelling funding story, and proof of concept

Here are some headlines perhaps worthy of your attention – you have my absolute best wishes as you go forward. I am certain that we need to restructure education, intelligence (decision-support), and research around the hand-held device as the point of sale “influencer.”

Out of respect for your wishes, also posting this to Discourse meta for total visibility. My small offering – and no one noticing – is a useful metric for where you might be on being “open” to external suggestions at the meta level.

With warm regards,

Robert

[2013 Robert Steele — Alternative Command & Control and Four Transformation Forcing Concepts][1]

[Jean Lievens: Revolutionize Corporate (All?) Learning — Beyond Formal to Informal, Mobile, Social Dichotomies][2]

[Jean Lievens: Digital World Increasing Access and Value of Old Content][3]

[Eagle: Public Information Cards][4]

[SchwartzReport: New Phone App Allows Point of Sale Boycott of Koch Brothers and Monsanto Products — Now Imagine an App with Face, Address, and Credit Card Recognition That Can Refuse Service to Anyone Working for Them….][5]

LIMITING NEW USERS TO 2 LINKS IS SILLY – NOT GOING TO WORRY ABOUT IT, ABOVE EASY TO FIND.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: szarpas@cox.net
Date: Sat, May 18, 2013 at 9:38 AM
Subject: Email from SSI Website
To: robert.david.steele.vivas@gmail.com

I have written a business plan on how to create an army of citizen journalists. The plan has two prongs. The first is building a public gathering place wherein people have access to the tools necessary to create polished, professional media worthy of widespread distribution; basically a television station for video.bloggers in a retail operation/restaurant.

The second prong is a conceptual approach to crowdsourcing where users have “living” avatars that grow based on their posts and the rating their posts.receive from their peers.

It will allow for purely democratic means of.deciding which media.rises to the front of the website by giving other.users a way to SEE how the interests of.other bloggers match their interests.

I planning on a.kickstarter campaign to.raise money to.open the.place in Washington, DC.

My background and professional experience is evenly split between being a bar owner, being a political affairs television technician and being a general contractor.

I built a place in 1999 called Revolution Coffee Lounge in Herndon, VA. The internet was not ready then. It is now.

Please call me 703-929-0403 or email

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You’re quick to assume there’s no interest after giving it just one day…

A tip to help people to grasp your idea: keep it short. You’ve got loads of text in a not so easy to read layout. Next time add a TLDR; (Too Long Did’t Read) part at the top where you describe your idea in 50 words max.

Good luck.

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Here’s the short version: Talk is not equal to brain.

Sometimes you actually have to do the homework, and that is the whole point.

No worries, am glad to have visited, will be on call if anyone has questions, otherwise wish you all the best.

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@robert_david_st Don’t be so hard on Jeff - I’ve actually tortured him with several elaborate emails on this exact topic and his was kind enough to read and reply to all of them. And when I say elaborate I mean like 3x text of your initial post.

But since he is quite busy with stuff he & his team already started working on I doubt he has the energy and motivation to pursue the kind of stuff you (and I) are talking about, even thought it would be nice to make it integral part of Discourse.

So - to keep this short - just know that there are tons of us out there who are willing to work on something that can be labeled as “collective decision making process” - i.e. taking our offline discussions (such as the ones in public institutions) and make them online and more efficient = making final decisions better.

And, I doubt that you’ll need Kickstarter or some huge funds - there are lots of devs (like me) who are willing to volunteer their time to implement the things we are talking about. So, since idea is good, I think it’s just matter of time, patience and word-of-mouth - I believe more and more people like two of us will start joining the topic to talk on this, expand the idea and see how it can be implemented.

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The message I posted just now was a combination of my reply to a comment, and my forwarding of a message from a person whose email I left in, but since I am a new person, I cannot invite them to this forum, nor the original four that I have followed for years and included in my first message. If someone with the authority to invite wants to take emails from me to extend invitations here they are, my top guns plus one:

“Patrick Meier” meier.patrick01@gmail.com, “Stephen E. Arnold” sa@arnoldit.com, “Dave Warner” davewz@gmail.com, “Mats Bjore” mats.bjore@infosphere.se, “Tom Atlee” cii@igc.org,

Michel Bauwens of P2P begs off, he is too busy but interested in how the discussion might turn out.

This is the email for the fellow with the business plan that mentioned KickStarter: szarpas@cox.net

The architecture documents I funded, including Medard Gabel (#2 to Buckminster fuller and co-creator of analog World Game, architect with my encouragement of digital EarthGame that is infinitely scalable) can be found at Earth Intelligence Network.

I see no reason why the topic should be started over. It is what it is. And it has a title. Will respond as asked to, following this topic. Would really like to be able to insert graphics, I have 20 years worth, the best ones are in the two seminal documents I cited early on.

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I wasted a half hour creating a post with six carefully selected and explained graphics, only to learn that new users could not post graphics. Sorry, but I don’t have the time to play games. I understand I have to invest time in poking around other places, since it’s clear Discourse is not at all interested in focusing on the seven questions I presented, am not going to pursue this further

Below for information is the judgment of folks who have tried to engage discourse before.

I agree with Poor Richard’s comments. I have been trying to engage with them, Jeff has been responsive, but they are not really thinking about the answers to the questions I posed them in the first place:

From where I sit, there are a few things that we might talk about if you are interested:

What's the difference between discourse and decision-support?

Where do facts come from?

What functionalities are needed to go from discourse to analysis to decision-support?

What political and economic and socio-cultural/techno-demographic baises or roots should be recognized by person to facilitate discourse?

Should a balanced budget be part of any discourse as a way of connecting means, ways, and ends?

Where does geospatial taggging play in all this, can Discouse leverage Crisis Mappers, SMS, Tweet, bounded crowd-sourcing, etc? OpenBTS free cell? Autonomous Internet that cannot be shut down?

How do we ensure that all data loaded into Discourse (and WordPress, and elsewhere) is standardized so data conversation is never an issue as other things come along?

On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 6:54 AM, Bubba C wrote:

I'm not sure its fair to say that I raved about Discourse, and it didn't take long for me to get in a beef with the developers about metadata (e.g. tags) and the semantic web. I'm sorry if I got anyone's expectations up too much. What there is of it is a pleasure to use, but its scope and state of development is still very limited. Their "meta" site is good for dialog with the developers and exploring the intuitive user interface. They say they intend to offer support for thrid-party extensions and integration. At the very least there are some good UI ideas that other developers might get some inspiration from.

Discourse does nothing, really, to move us closer to the holy grail of an integrated suite of open and flexible collaboration, content management, and project management tools.


On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 4:37 AM, Bubba A wrote:

    Dear Bubba B,

    thanks for having looked at it,

    Bubba C is the culprint, in terms of raving about it!


    On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 8:27 PM, Bubba B wrote:

        hi Bubba A

        I went to the site but it's largely greek to me.

        Apparently discourse is to be the next thing after forums (forum software) and from what I see on the site, their discussions are between developers and testers. Lots of bugs to iron out. The software needs to be installed, not sure if on a server or on someone's computer.

        There is zero explanation about what the program does, that a simple user could access, and as far as I can see there is no running version of the software that is actually acting as a forum for public use, except the discussions about bugs and features and installing it here or there, that are on the main discourse page.

        You say people are raving about it. Are those people by any chance programmers and developers for discourse?

        My feeling is that it's still too deep in beta development to be of interest to simple users like us <g>

        Bubba B

Jeff, I admire how accessible and open you were. I will always be available to engage here, but regret I cannot spend any more time on this absent a combination of answers to my seven questions, and the power to offer up graphics and invite a few others to engage, something I would only do if the conversation got robust to warrant. You all have my best wishes.

Robert

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Wow… for someone trying to get people enthousiastic you don’t seem to be too relaxed yourself.

Like I already said: the long texts don’t help in getting a quick overview, no matter how great your ideas could be. And that’s exactly what would help in the beginning of creating a movement.

But now that you show that you “don’t have time to play games” you lost me. Best wishes to you as well.

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You are missing an important distinction.

I am more than willing to spend time on this, but not when I spend a half hour only to find out there is a hidden constraint, i.e. new users cannot load graphics. Screw that shit. If you guys have not figured out that I am not a “new user” then so be it. As I told Jeff in an email, publish the bullshit roster:

NEW USER: cannot do shit

Sort of New User: one graphic a month, one invite a month

Etc.

The graphics were SPECIFICALLY in response to your guidance and then BOOM, my work went to nothing.

The comments I posted by others reflect my own experience – Jeff gets an A, Discourse is at best a D+.

With best wishes,
Robert