ThreadMode to DocumentMode
dyokomizo opened this issue · 1 comments
Twitter is only this half of what made original Wiki work.
-- @dyokomizo on the 357 virtues of ThreadMode and DocumentMode
Picture it! Sicily, 1922. An attractive peasant boi who has learning his coding skillz embarks on a glorious journey to write a better group chap.
What if we make a group chat tool that supports actual reviews and editorial, e.g. threading comments together, adding commentary.
We can hunt & gather comments, farming them into threads and transforming them into full blown permanent documents.
I've been experimenting with async and deep collaboration:
- The author writes a document. May be more than one author.
- Reviewers read it.
- Everyone chats to confirm the understanding.
- Author edits the document to incorporate the reviews.
- If people still think there's more to be said, go back to 1, but other people act as authors.
Also different threads may be at different steps.
It's basically focused on authorial intent and collaboration through the creation of documents that make sense to outsiders.
The reviewers make questions and offers suggestions that should be incorporated in the document, but by the author.
e.g. a reviewer asks "Why X?" The author thinks it's obvious that paragraph N is talking about this reason, but they add a "Why X?" bit near paragraph N.
It's for making the document robust and clearer.
Everything the author had to explain in the chat and confused the reviewers should be incorporated somehow in the document.
The author won't be able to answer the future reader's questions or clear up misunderstandings, the chat is not published as a companion.
This context is lost. So it needs to be incorporated.
Authorial intent matters because every bit of the document(s) must be consistent and tell the same story. It's about (narrative) structure, genre (e.g. a document should be a tutorial or a manifesto, but not both), style, reading level (e.g. it must have a clear user persona, like in UX, in mind, so the assumptions are coherent).
Once published I see documents as final*. Like books, we have new editions, but those should be approached as new projects that have more extensive reference material.
I don't believe in documents "authored by organizations"
Authors are specific people. Their perspective and intent matters.
Groups of authors feed on each other and their collective perspective and intent may have multiple cohesive interpretations.
I wrote about this here: Scenes and fandom, a rant.
* ignoring typos and other clear mistakes.
Instant messaging culture is killing people's ability to deal with context, people regularly:
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react to the last message in a (even small) series.
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don't "scroll back" to read earlier, missed messages.
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answer with ambiguous references, e.g. "what do you mean by that?"
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think links to additional information are just skippable footnotes.
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can't keep more than one line of reasoning.
Those are common IRL verbal conversation failures but people didn't seem to have them as frequently in written conversations before IM became so pervasive.
do you mean ‘email’? related and additional rampant failures there, starting with #subjectdrift
Your reply is an example of what I was talking about. You wrote "do you mean 'email'?" which is a reference to something in my original tweets and it's implicit, but I wrote about several things not a single one.
Maybe the implied subject that you think it's "email" is "IM"? Or "IRL" and you assume "verbal" was a typo of some sort?
I mean instant messaging, with it's ideal/emphasis on short messages that reply to one another is worsening the situation I exemplified in the items.
Email, in this scenario, is a consequence, not a cause.
#SubjectDrift happens because people are using email like IM, i.e. expecting it to be about synchronous and bite sized messages: ready to chew, swallow, digest, and move on.
These are also traits of phone calls.
A similar issue happens in Twitter, e.g. for this series of replies I'm using the phone app, but I also opened the original tweets in a browser so I can refer to the whole conversation because Twitter replies are focused on single tweets. I expect most don't do this.
There's a spectrum from Q&A and book review styles of communication, IM is pushing everything to the Q&A end.
Also, how many of us also edit the tweets many times before sending, to make sure the word choices don't have wrong connotations?
In face-to-face conversation connotation can be implied by facial expressions, body language, tone, etc., so either the speaker conveys more info or the listener gives feedback.
I hope this clarifies what I mean by IM and its influences on communication style.
This is related to what I call [[dialogue mode]], and I see it as a feature of the [[stoa]] aspect of the [[agora]]. Essentially a set of tools that let people build a hybrid of [[conversation trees]] and [[platonic dialogues]] :)
I'd love to collaborate on this, but my implementation ideas are all [[agora]] based currently. I'd be happy to discuss, though, as even if you don't want to tie this to the [[agora]] I see potential for reuse (at design or code level).