Introducing OWL

I love outlining. I love wiki. What do you get when you create a mutant cross-breed of the two?

A fucking power tool, that's what!

It's just a rough draft, at the moment, a rough mashup of Concord and ideas from SdiDesk. But I think you can see it's compelling ...

Modules In Time : Synthesizing GitHub and Skyrim

Thanks to Bill Seitz I picked up on a Giles Bowkett post I'd missed a couple of months ago which compares the loosely coupled asynchronous style of development that companies like GitHub both promote and live, with the intensely coupled synchronous raids that occur in online game-worlds.

Bowkett seems confused by the apparent contradictions between the two. And yet obviously impressed by the success of both. He wants to know what the correct synthesis is.

That really shouldn't be so hard to imagine. The intense coupling is what happens in pair-programming, for example. Or the hackday or sprint. Its focus is on creating a single minimum product or adding a single feature / story to it.

The right synthesis, to my way of thinking, is intense / tight / adrenalin fuelled / synchronous coupling over short periods, where certain combinations of talents (or even just two-pairs of eyes) are necessary. And loose / asynchronous coupling everywhere else. Without trying to squash everyone's work into some kind of larger structure which looks neat but doesn't actually serve a purpose.

The future of work is highly bursty!

It shouldn't surprise us, because modularity is one of the oldest ideas in software : tight-cohesion within modules of closely related activities. Loose and flexible coupling between modules. It's just that with these work-patterns we're talking about modules in time. But the principle is the same. The sprint is the module focused on a single story. The wider web of loosely asynchronous forks and merges is the coupling between modules.

Smart Users

Dave Winer :

it would depend on my users being dumb, and as I said earlier, my users are anything but. They're the smartest people on the planet and I want to keep it that way. And I think anyone who makes software for dumb people in the end gets what they deserve. :-)

Quick SFW Generator

Smart Disorganized Individual philosophy is about doing things piecemeal; engaging in small opportunistic actions as and when the inspiration strikes. Today was just such a quick burst with the Smallest Federated Wiki.

I love SFW a lot, but it's a bit of a pain to bring a page or large chunk of writing from elsewhere into it. Adding one paragraph at a time is a nuisance.

So here's a quick tool to create an SFW page from an arbitrary large, multi-paragraph chunk of text. Just paste your text into the box, add a title and choose whether you want ordinary paragraphs (of the kind that most SFW installations use) or whether you want "wikish" (the UseMod derived format which is somewhat compatible with UseMod / SdiDesk markup). Hit the submit button, and it will deliver a json file suitable for dropping into the pages directory of your SFW installation.

Update : the source-code for this is part of Project ThoughtStorms on GitHub.  (Note: I may have broken other import scripts in the refactoring to make this import script work. Please log an issue if you find this.)

Horizontal Applications And Popular Data Structures

Joel Spolsky : "The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures."

Work is never fun if you do it for other people.

But why?

I'd guess it's not simply that someone else is asking you for it. It's that the other person is *always* setting some constraints, defining the boundaries of what the thing should be, that don't entirely line up with your own.

And then there's a *disappointment*, a sense of the thing not being quite "right" as you have to cut and stretch the product to fit the Procrustean frame your client asks for.

Lloyd Davis's Social Media Empire, driven from a N95.

Richard Gabriel is thinking and speaking about Ultra-large Scale, Resilient, Systems.

Essential reading.

My post yesterday on Composing, about Geeks, Suits and Abstraction is relevant to SDI philosophy too.

Executive Summary : Geeks, by definition, have to be good at shifting their thinking between different levels of abstraction; Suits, by temperament, believe in the rigid separation of levels into the corporate hierarchy and would love for technology to enforce that.

Dave Winer :

I don't like it -- because it betrays a not-useful point of view. I am not part of a crowd, I am an individual ... When you mash us all together you miss the point.

Update : continues

Of course, what Winer is ignoring is that companies are thinking of the crowd as an "aggregate" exactly because that's the only business model they have. It's no good calling it bad taste or a failure of vision, companies are entities who's function is to siphon off surplus value created from aggregates of people and give it to shareholders. If they don't have *someone* to "exploit" there is nothing for the shareholders.

Winer's philosophy is right for the web, and for us individuals, but it demands a new business model, possibly post-company.

Vagmi's Open Letter to Programeter (nice one)

I think this is probably the most mind-blowingly stupid and bad thing I've seen for a while.

There is no automated metric on earth that can get even a vague approximation of the value of a piece of programming. My colleague, yesterday, solved a fiendish long-troubling bug, by removing one character of faulty indentation from a 2000 line spaghetti routine. One change, one character and a comment. How would the system assess the "productivity" of that?

If SDI means anything, it's a rejection of the entire mindset that believes in the creation of, and use of, software in institutional control and measurement of employees. Bleaarrghhhh!

Update : someone from the company came back at me after I twitted (good for him, respect, obviously) ... but I went into full rant. :-)

Along with Smart Disorganized Individuals and NeoVictorianism I like Retro-Futurist Micro-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism (though I might need to shorten to RFMSAS for sanity)

There's a trend here.

Smart Disorganized Philosophy #1

I've been on a Smart Disorganized Individuals tip for several years, now. Always writing software compatible with that philosophy.

But what is the philosophy? What does this software mean?

In this series I'll start to make some specific notes towards that. Here's the first.

SdiDesk is wiki : a network of texts.

GeekWeaver is a programming language written in an outliner : a hierarchy.

Mind Traffic Control is a multi-user, dynamic queue, a "flow" of tasks.

Each is SDI. Each is completely different. Each is for specific purpose.

SdiDesk excels at capturing ideas and the relationships between them that are static.

Outlines excel at authoring or creating structure which is ultimately intended for a reader.

Flows excel at capturing change and movement.

OTOH, each is bad for something. These are true, even if you might imagine them not to be.

Wiki is surprisingly bad for authoring. Outliners are surprisingly bad for managing todo-lists. Flows are a surprisingly bad place to put ideas that you want to keep forever.

Wiki is great for writing, but awkward for the kind of reworking and structuring needed to polish a document for an external audience.

Outliners fail to match the dynamism of shifting tasks and priorities in the real world. They focus on making a structure of something which needs little structure.

MTC will lose your ideas when they are no longer in the future.