Collabowriting an Institupedia to enable cothink

Recently i came across Nobel laureate Herb Simon and his ideas about how science should be creative. He basically believes that it is much more productive to create reality rather than to research the 'pure' existence. More straight forward he thinks that when we try to create something - let's say a rocket that flies to the moon - we will learn a lot during the process of the construction; we might not have understood 100% what and why things are happening but at least we have "mastered" a challenge and can reap the benefits. In comparison when we start out to understand and describe gravity, we might investigate for a long time, generate a lot of "knowledge" but can not exploit it. [please excuse the outrages simplification of Simon's thinking]

Having that said, I believe that, as words replace matter in the meta-physical world, the creation of new words is the essence of Simonian social science. So without further delay allow me to propose three new words: Collabowriting, Institupedia and cothink.

Collabowriting is the most straight forward of the three and its significance should be easy to decifer as it is a simple combination of the word collaborate and write to describe the practice of writing a document together. Collabowriting has been possible long before the advent of wikis and other IT collaboration tools, but the practice of jointly letting a document emerge was much less dovetailed and with less interaction. So true collabowriting is a rather recent phenomenon and most of us are still rather stone-age when it comes to doing it efficiently.

Institupedia is inspired by the popular encyclopedia wikipedia, which uses the collabowriting tool wiki to create an open encyclopedia on the internet. Following Wittgestein's claim that all thinking and human being originates in words, I suggested during my time at UNDP as well as in my university UOC to create an institutional enceclopedia in order to allow for collective and discursive definition of the institutions vocabulary. After i received an invitation to attend a webinar on "Ways to create an internal “Wikipedia” inside your company" (organized by socialtext), I decided that my proposal might have been viable after all.

There is several reasons why an institupedia (UNDPedia, UOCipedia, etc.) helps to create an enabling environment, and i plan to elaborate on that in due time. For now allow me to cherry pick just one: Cothink is a literal translation from the German term "mitdenken" that my dictionary translates as: 1. show some initiative, think (things through); 2. [please cothink!] help me (oder us) think; 3. follow someone's train of thought.
In general i would claim that cothink happens when an individual identifies to some degree with the scenario and thus applies his being to the situation. Two conditions have to be met to enable cothink: (a) the individual has to be motivated to help (team spirit etc. come to mind) and (b) the person needs to know / have information about the scenario. Developing an institupedia where the emerging plans, projects etc. are defined will enable at least the latter condition and probably contribute to the former as a positive spiral can be triggered.

Giddens - A call to arms (for sociologists)

Anthony Giddens published a short opinion piece reflecting upon the question "why isn't sociology again right at the forefront of intellectual life and public debate?" (guardian - http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/anthony_giddens/2006/11/post_682.html).

There are some interesting arguments. I especially agreed:

"A little bit more utopian thinking might help too - well, why not? Politics in some ways has become deadly dull. We need more positive ideals in the world, but not empty ones - rather, they should be ideals that link to realistic possibilities of change."

And some lines above he says:

"There are no longer utopian projects that would supply a source of direction for social reform and a source of motivating ideas. I'm not saying that sociology was ever itself a form of utopianism. But sociological thinking, born of the political and economic revolutions of the 19th century, certainly was regularly stimulated by an engagement with those who wanted to change the world for the better."

As you know i am all up for creating utopian ideals to strive for.

One i just recently came across:

technocratic movement - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocratic_movement

From my reading it seems to be true that technocracy (as they describe it) is wrongly negatively connoated; I dont really see why technocracy should be incompatible with humanism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism)

The chilenian 'socialist internet' project (1970-73) appears to me to have been an socio-technocratic experiment
--> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

brainfood selection 01

allow me to recommend two wired articles that caught my eye and made me believe technological progress once more:

Apparently (americans please excuse my european ignorance) internet based mobile phone services are already widely available in the States and they make communication decisively cheaper once again. In the wired article they are testing services for around 20$ a month offering unlimited calling some of them even to selected european countries. Unbelieveable but it really seems well talk for a low flat fee with all the world soon.

Also a guy was awarded a patent for a huge 35 m diameter baloon covered by millions of LEDs making the airship the biggest spherical screen ever - check out the pix @
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/02/video_airship_p.html

Fussball

Eine freundin von mir baut zusammen mit ihrem Bruder das Fussball-Portal http://www.nordostfussball.de/ auf. Dort findet ihr top aktuelle Nachrichten und Reportagen zu allem was Fussballfans im Norden Deutschlands interessiert.

DRM or no DRM - that's the question

this morning a friend send me this:

> Mark my words. this is the day, when DRM died:
>
> http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
> Open letter from Steve Jobs about how much DRM sucks, and that media
> should be unprotected.
>
> well written too

which made me - after reading and agreeing that it seemed quite a move - forward the message to some friends and bang i got some brisk critical feedback which i post as comments to this entry.

I recommend you to read Steve Jobs before you read the comments.

My 2 cents:
1) Apple is a really really street smart company and yes they are 'manipulating' consumers just as (or maybe a bit better than) the other big MNCs.

2) As long as they are playing in my direction i wont write a rant about it

3) I own an iPod and i have very mixed feelings - sort of a hate-love relationship. I only once ran into DRM issues (buying for the first and last time from audible) which i duly solved myself ;-)

so my conclusion is:

I don’t agree with dAn à all consumers hate DRM and the industry will not succeed in pushing it out so it is dominant.

I do agree with Micha – it is just a marketing communication fad (cluetrain manifesto style) and apple likes their profit more than their customers. However apple is among the few companies that are already playing with and seriously valuing their customers.

Best language school in Barcelona

In my constant search for spending my time with worthwhile activities, i consult my good friend Jan de Lassen (cool site with his pictures) who is a painter and who just recently opened the doors of what will be the best language school in Barcelona Spain - diloga. Jan's technique is really usefull and efficicent in braking the ice and actually make you speak. The school is located in one of Barcelonas best neighborhoods - Gracia - where you find small spanish plazas and an excellent street- & night-life .

For me it is a great opportunity to gather some hands on experience in entrepreneurship and get to work with really nice people!