Talk:The Project

From Organic Design wiki
Revision as of 02:54, 27 June 2008 by Nad (talk | contribs) (new structure plan after meeting)
Info.svg After Nad, Milan meeting 2008-06-27 we decided on a new approach for this document. It was based on the idea of putting together a storyboard for a documentary about the project. We realised that such a story board structure is exactly what this document should be. And that Platform 1 and this document go hand-in-hand since the platform is the lowest-level implementation of the ideas which is applicable to the widest demographic.


Notes for pending re-write of project doc

Goal: A flexible framework for bottom-up organisation

  • Disillusioned with the top-down hierarchical corporate model (secrecy, copyright, centralisation, corruption), we are looking for new forms of organisation
  • Real-world organisations based on open and evolving business systems and work flows, taking the open source philosophy and methodology into business
  • Democratic organisations that offer full transparency and accountability, with any stakeholder being able to query any decision made or the state of any part of the business
  • Based on evolving templates which are self-contained, that is they include training documentation for all aspects of setting up and running the business.
  • Such organisations could fully focus on delivering the best service to their community while benefiting from the continual development of their business systems by a world wide community of experts
  • Fully "peer-to-peer" organisations which can be highly localised and independent, with access to shared frameworks and global information, allowing for collective intelligence and group decision-making and coordination

Organisational Model

  • Generic framework: A Generic framework or environment that encapsulates information in a structured way.
  • Software unification: Software unification though connectivity of diverse applications.
  • System documentation: If the roles, projects and procedures are fully documented then you can change any aspect of a system, for example move the framework to a different software platform or incorporate a new application into the system.
  • Technology independence: The collaborative nature and completeness of the documentation allows independence from any specialist support or and specific technology
  • Reproducibility: Reproducibility of systems the current work/research conducted without relying on specialists.
    • Allows dynamic expansion of systems
    • Mitigates against any potential disasters

MediaWiki software

  • Why use a wiki?
    • Our goal has been to leverage off highly successful projects such as Wikipedia
    • An audit trail of every collaborators contributions is critical
    • Maintaining history and change control using a difference engine is fundamental for allowing people to quickly see changes in content by others.
    • Organization of content is provided through Special pages
  • How would you use a wiki effectively?
    • MediaWiki allows a dynamic collaborative representation of the system which maintained by the users, all the content is contained in the same unified environment.
    • Documentation should be semantically described
    • Semantic definitions should be controlled using template transclusion so that implementation specifics are centralized within the template definitions.
    • Using forms makes it is not necessary for general users to have implementation knowledge.

Previous work

  • Code reuse rather than rewrite, it is better to wrap and integrate
  • Web 3.0 is here to stay, but the technologies used to achieve its ideas are rapidly changing
  • Functionality required that moves towards technology independence
  • Novice users are not willing to learn template and categorization syntax but are generally happy to pick up basic wikitext syntax.

Successes from our previous project XMLWiki

  • Provide functionality that reduces reliance on IT administration
  • Created functionality for task automation using Robots controlled through scheduling
  • Training, it is important for users of the system to use it and not rely on memory

Lessons learned from our previous project XMLWiki

  • Never fork a project if you can possibly avoid it, otherwise you cannot leverage further development of it and the forked project is in danger of becoming legacy.
  • Separating the XML based properties out of wikitext.
  • Implementation changes are overcome by using wikis own native syntax and template transclusion to add semantic properties to articles
  • Specific implementation such as Semantic MediaWiki annotations or RDF triples should be maintained in the template definitions

Current Work

  • Experience with writing over 40 diverse extensions for MediaWiki through multiple versions of the MediaWiki codebase.
  • Focussing on extensions that reduce administration requirements of the filesystem.
  • Extenions for generation of forms within wiki
  • Workflow using generated forms to structure organised content
  • Security extensions to address security flaws in MediaWiki
  • Automation of adminstrative tasks withing MediaWiki using Robots
  • Wikia, a framework for mapping multiple domains to filesystem paths
  • Automated distributed backups for workstations and servers using SVN

Road Map

Roadmaps often contain deadlines. Have we grown wary of those?

Wiki Organisation code

  • Integration of the API layer for efficient Robots editing and for AJAX form updates
  • Integrate Email/IMAP into our MediaWiki based system.
  • P2P and SQLite extensibility, allowing MediaWiki instances on devices such as the iPod touch.
  • A template wiki providing useful enhanced functionality and documentation (eg packages extension)

Learning Organisation

  • Regarding Peter Senge's definition of a learning organisation; we now have a technical means to implement it which didn't exist at the time of his writing "The 5th Discipline" (1994).
  • Senge's notion of the learning organisation is widely regarded in management circles as leading-edge thought, however we have not seen any organisations fully embrace these concepts.
  • In addition to the other criteria, our ideal organisation will embrace and support the implementation of the five disciplines of shared vision, mental models, systems thinking, microworlds and team learning.
  • We will embed these concepts and values within our template organisations because in addition to the technical criteria we want them to be learning organisations.

University

  • The notion of a self-contained semantically structured learning organisation will appeal to academics
  • An environment of learning, with experts easily accessible
  • A university which doesn't just teach knowledge, it is an open and evolving organisation with learning happening at all levels, with all participants actively contributing
  • We will align ourselves with universities to in an effort to test these ideas in the academic environment

Acknowlegdements

The following people and organisations have provided us with inspiration for moving toward our goal, share our values closely from what we can tell or are even working toward similar goals to the ones we pursue. We wish to acknowledge:

So, you are interested in "the project"? As a point of introduction to Peerix, you start anywhere you like, and it can grow into what you are interested in and put energy into. Two places to start are in the philosophical foundations that support the project, and in the actual technical domain.


background/philosophical

we have found that this project only "fit"s with with individuals and companies that are willing to move and change their corporate culture and beliefs:

technical
(how the peerix system will work technically)

--Phalseid 08:22, 4 Nov 2006 (NZDT)

High speed connections are NOT available in much of our global village. Images and other media should always be used when appropriate, not merely to tart up the display! --Phalseid 05:09, 13 Dec 2006 (NZDT) --

hey guys, thought I would throw this out: http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html. We have already expressed our Worldview, Religion, and now, it would be interesting to see our "political" inclination as defined by this quiz. After the quiz (i don't want to spoil what I predict to be your results), check out this link and see if im right.... --Phalseid 00:36, 24 Sep 2006 (NZST)

Nope, I was totally centrist - I couldn't agree or disagree with any of them because they can all be concepts which are done in a very beneficial way, but are currently done in a bad way basically giving the concept a bad name.... --Nad 19:01, 24 Sep 2006 (NZST)
Interesting/Surprised by your results, Aran. What do you think of the Lao-tsu article? --Phalseid 02:41, 24 Sep 2006 (NZST)
I'm quite familiar with the Tao Te Ching and its deeper meanings. I believe non-action is important, but needs to be used in moderation with activity. Structure and government is necessary but must itself work from the bottom up and in accord with the way. Most of the Taoist study that's gone into the foundations of the nodal model have come from the Bagua which was studied by scholars of Taoism, Confusionism and Zen alike, and also Advaita Vedanta which is similarly studied within the many strands of Hinduism.
i have been trying to keep up with your studies, and I found this link a couple of days ago....http://www.skepticreport.com/mystics/bagua.htm. --Phalseid 04:00, 24 Sep 2006 (NZST)
That's like trying to understand astrology by comparing horoscopes from magazines. The ancient knowledge is a very specialised area of interest and study which you need to be prepared to invest many years on. It's more practical studying the modern high level concepts of the project such as distributed architecture and generic organisation etc. If you do want to study the old knowledge, always read the words of the sages directly, not what other "authorative" source say about them. One such sage is Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj who's book "I am that" I've put at,
http://www.organicdesign.co.nz/www/I_am_that.html
Thanks for the link, this is the kind of direction I activly seek! --Phalseid 13:33, 25 Sep 2006 (NZST)


Aran / Milan,

My grandfather, Vladimir Tomek, has a keen interest in The Project, as well as a very good understanding of some of the philosophical issues discussed. Here are some comments below for reflection and further dialogue. A deeper discussion of The Project can be found here Project Discussion --Dan 20:41, 5 Apr 2006 (NZST)

Hi Vladimir, I've answered the questions below and read your document, thanks for you input. Our documentation is indeed currently aimed at specialists - ones like User:Jack who specialises in philosophy and writing, and has begun learning the core algorithm with the intention of making it more generally shareable. The project not about convincing people that its better than competing views or methods, it already has well defined harmonious principles for its development, deployment and growth and is progressing steadily with these things. --Nad 23:38, 5 Apr 2006 (NZST)


Questions:

1. How can one draw a line between tao-chia and tao-chiao, the philosophical and the religious aspects of Taoism? Is it not impossible?
Philosophcal-Taoism is the about class, the ba-gua themselves, religeous-taoism is a partcular context onto which the general principles of the ba-hua have been mapped. Other such mappings of the ba-gua are Tai-chi, Feng-shui and chi-healing techniques.


2. Whose ideas outside Lao Tzu's have been accepted as representative of philosophical Taoism? (Original ideas, not 20th century interpretations.)?
I'm not really a philosophologer, I have only studied specific scriptures in my search for understanding the core algorithm. Most of my Taoist study has been of Chu Hsi and the ten-wings of the Yi. A lot of understanding of these principles has come from Nisargadatta Maharaj, as Advaita vedanta also describes the same system of space-time resulting from the perception-creation cycle.


3. If we select only specific ideas of Taoism as basis for our philosophical outlook, can we still talk about a Taoist network? It is difficult to imagine that there will not be ideas taken from other faiths. Note that your examples of Taoist teaching are rather general.
The project does not believe in naming itself, but provides a naming mechanism for concepts defined within it, including the complete concept of itself, but all names can depend on language, locale and individual preference etc


4. How should we take into account that there is no technique for following the Tao? This must make application in practice rather difficult.
Such words are misleading, in reality the Tao is as easy to learn as any thing, and its growth simply requires a modest effort applied persistently. The process can be accelarated by being complimented by our information systems.


5. Original Taoist ideas of ecology do not conform easily to Western notions of what is important for ecology. How is this taken into account, without using wide-ranging interpretations?
True understanding of every discipline relies on the understanding of the perception/creation cycle


6. What specific Taoist teachings can be used as a basis for the modelling of our approach to ecology?
There are no teachings I am aware of that can easily obtain such knowledge from, it's taken me many years to understand the principles clearly enough to describe them as an algorithm. Our plan is to use the algorithm ability to describe itself in its own terms, to describe itself in our terms.


6. How can be applied in practice such sentences as 'incorporating the Taoist principle of change into the network allow all processes, no matter how large or complex, to be seen by the network in terms of energy', or 'the Taoist network is built in awareness of the cyclic nature of change'?
In practice incorporating this principle involves understanding it clearly enough to program into a computer. The core algorithm which has been developed is freely available, and not very amazing. In fact every part of it is already within other existing data structures which we often link to in Wikipedia such as the Trie data structure. Paradoxically, its power comes from not being as powerful as the others. This lack of power allows for a very simple and symetrical model, which applies to a more generic context by encompasing the fundamental systems
For exmaple our core algorithm exhibits the concept of a list, but unlike normal list concepts ours doesn't have the power to tell you how many items are in it, or how to pick the nth item from the list. But by not being able to do this, our list can be used in a layer more fundamental than that exhibiting the concept of number.


6. How can I Ching be used in ecological considerations? Note that I Ching does not mention Tao.
Its the structure of the hexagrams in the I-Ching and the way those structures and their changes map to the listed meanings that is important. That structure is the key to sustainable organisation, but the I-Ching is not useful to us now that the core algorithm has been developed.
Also, Tao is mentioned using phrases such as "the way of the superior man" - it was an implementation of the Ba Gua designed for the context of politics, and had phrases appropriate to that context mapped to the generic conceptual patterns. The Ten Wings at the back of the Yi are about the Ba Gua and hexagram structure.


7. What help can we get from faithfully translating the principles contained in the I Ching into computer software, thereby creating a uniform network based on ancient Taoist principle of perception and creation?
The help we can get from it is sustainable and scalable organisation freely accessible to all


8. Which are the deep philosophical foundations of Taoism to be introduced into a computer network dealing with ecology?
All the principles are dealing directly with ecology by addressing the fundamental issues such as eternal-sustainability and infinite-scalability - these are the principles that need to be addressed to define the way space-time works. By working with the Way, you work in accord with all things, but any deviation from it results in various problems for the life existing within that context.
Retrieved from "https://organicdesign.nz/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:The_Project&oldid=84536"