EmergenceAndTheBodyOfAllLife
Image trouvée dans un hôpital psychiatrique
See also Emergence Engine / Émergiciel
Francisco Varela ... biologist and cognitive scientist (escaped from Chile)
Participants
FredLmir - I think that an EmergenceEngine is all we need ; if we can take all the info we have here and submit it to an emergence engine — and if it's well designed — it could bring us information which is much more accessible. If we could have stats about things, we could see what are the main problems, concerns, interests, etc. We could also set thresholds for many recurrent collective problems. I discuss thresholds on my page. I live here in Montreal... Emergence is also about seeing what is. The Sages through the ages all point to what is, telling us to just look and listen, and perceive without all the layers above layers of filters that we usually have.
NathanRichards ... I work with AboutUs ... a wiki or directory of the web ... a reference for the web ... work with a webhosting provider ... Emergence is a new topic for me that I'm looking forward to exploring
BrandonCsSanders ... I'm from Portland OR, also with AboutUs...if neither of the developers of calculus developed it, we'd still have it..there's context, the individual cells of my body are essential, but there's a context which is even more important; I use the story of Newton & Leibniz as an example of emergence and the body of all life...
MarkSzpakowski ... I develop software (especially collaboration software) ... interested in communities self organizing ... progress of ideas and actions from the individual to the group ... how communities and organizations can find a sense of their own identity through process and then come to actualization relization of their purpose ... see the web as emergence for humanity ... Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere ... interested in computer languages, architectures, frameworks that can express emergence (binding) and so can articulate self-organization of individuals and communities ... Live in Halifax
DeborahHartmann ... AgileCoach and journalist ... love to work with software teams that have been allowed to or are taking back their autonomy to do good work ("tell the truth") ... one key tool for AgileSoftwareDevelopment is the wiki to allow for growing of a knowledge base ... if I could I would do nothing but emergence in my work ... live in Toronto
RobinMilette - Douglas Hofstadter's book I Am a Strange Loop talks about emergence..I'm the person who organises the FreeSoftwareWeek in Quebec - 9 days, people can come up with any activity to put on the calendar...Retiring this year, I find it hard to make emergence happen..emergence is comparing evolution to progress..I did a simple tool to look at wiki recent changes rss feeds - it looks at what changed the most in the last 2 days (10 most active pages)- Hot off the Wiki.
And probably a few others drawn in by our projected notes on the overhead screen.
Ways of Perceiving the Body of All Life
Does the term EmergenceEngine exist ?
iMergence was name chosen by the OneSocietyProject ... how identity (OpenID, iNames, XDI) merges into society(ies)
- Emergence is a concept used in biology
Autopoeisis
- Poetry
- Efficience (French works, no exact English translation) from the philosophy of Tao ... "effectiveness"
"StructuralCoupling" - relationship with the organism and the environment where they co-create each other
Seeing What Is
Seeing
seeing things as they are, we are affecting what we see as well (?? IdontUnderstand — FredLmir)
- seeing as human beings do, wikis and other technologies
- stats engines, statistic tools
What Is
Making Emergence Happen
- several noted that you can't "make" emergence happen
- or can we ?
Emergence in Wikis
Tools for Emergence
Tagging (or FreeTagging), Microformats, Folksonomies, Free Ontologizing / Nomenclature spontanée, Personomies
How did this meeting emerge?
One interesting thing is that by "radiating" our notes in real time on the projector wall, we drew in "the right people" all through the discussion. I (Deb) was actually drawn in from another group. I'd just introduced myself, and as the speaker started talking, I noticed over her shoulder Brandon's topic (this one) on the projector. I couldn't help myself, I was drawn like a bee to honey 
Thank goodness for the OpenSpace law of two feet... I knew Kate wouldn't be offended that I left her session! Several other people passionately joined us for the same reason. (Deb's note: Wow, real time information radiators. This is a very interesting concept... I wonder where else it applies? Imagine having a display outside every conference room at work, and being free to wander in and out of meetings which looked interesting to you, or to which you had something to contribute? Wow. I really must add this to the UnConference book site!!)
Transcript from our discussions
(to be organized into the above themes later, perhaps. Things were happening so fast, no time to put things in categories as we spoke.)
First, the TalkingChair emerges
We had a list of many interesting topics to discuss and wanted to let everyone have a chance to raise their topic, so we created a new collaborative process on the spot, based on the "fishbowl" technique. Since it's kind of like turning the "talking stick" pattern on its head, we called it the "talking chair": for a small group you have enough chairs for everyone, plus one empty chair. On the empty chair is a sign that says "talking chair".
It works like this: Someone has an interesting idea so they pick up the "talking chair" sign and sit in the empty chair B. If someone else's topic is underway right now, they hand the sign to the person current "chair" person (lol) in chair A, who holds onto it while that conversation continues and comes to a natural close. Then chair person A goes back to their own seat, leaving the "talking chair" sign on the empty seat. Now chair person B suggests a topic to discuss, and the group works on that for a bit. Rince and repeat.
As we continued, someone saw the projected notes we were keeping, and walked up to listen. We added a chair. We soon realized that we should keep one extra empty chair to invite people to join the group. Each time a new person joined, we welcomed them and briefly explained the talking chair pattern so they could participate.
We also rotated the note-taking, passing the laptop from person to person, because note taking is hard work and keeps one from participating in the conversation.
We were really excited about this development!!
Conversation continues
Deb: [Deb sat in the Talking Chair to start, at which moment Schuyler entered. He was really excited about our subject, so Deb got up and let him have the Talking Chair] (Deb's note: it was easy to cede the chair, because he was so excited, I wanted to hear what he had to say, and because of the talking chair, I knew it would be easy to come back to my topic later, which I did)
Schuyler: has audio visuals to share; EmergentOntologies, OopenStreetMap, collab project, street maps of entire world, GeoShapes with attribs, dont' know attribs ahead of time, !fixed ontology, but add key/value pairs to each db feature. Makes easy to put data in, but hard to get it out. OntoAnarchy. Has XUL presentation re this, humorous things put into db. Wiki page with keys, just HumanReadable, but can't gen other pages from it. How do we build ontologies from bottom up?
Brandon: WagN, wikis plus tagging. This structure for our conversation doesn't help (talking chair). This conversation we started we can continue as we go on. Made this observation to remove pressure to cover it all right here and now.
Robin: Folksonomy is good up until some point but then we need to agree (standardize) (like jello that congeal) ... on delicious the number of tags doesn't grow that much ... what happens is that more tags get added to items.
Fred: Opposition to irrelevant tags could emerge also (anti-tags) ... Ex.: I feel that that tag shouldn't exist (community does collectively change its mind) ... count how many people oppose something ... when that many people oppose (when the number reaches an EmergentThreshold) it gets put aside automatically.
Mark: Follow up on some of the level II headings ... how do you make emergence happen ... there is a process called TheArtOfHosting ... conversation about significant issues can emerge ... related principle is GregoryBateson's "The flow of energy through a system acts to organize the system". Perhaps culture enters into this, in both its biological and social connotations, re PregnantMedium from which stuff emerges.
Fred: When we deal with tagging we often have a problem dealing with words (people use different words to mean the same thing) ... different languages (freeway/autobahn) etc ... we could also emerge the concepts (Free_Ontologizing/Nomenclature_spontanée) ... the things themselves. Ex.: we can call something a "bike" or "bicycle" ; we need people to give synonyms, translations and definitions to emerge, through the very identity of the clouds they make, 'entities', KeyConcepts — as opposed to KeyWords. Now, when you invent a word, it can easily get lost. With KeyConcepts (which act as anchors), we can sort expressions (words, phrases, icons, movies, etc.) by order of popularity. Like OpenCyc, topdown. There are many ways to say things.
Brandon: there is a ManyToManyMapping betweeen SemanticChunks: movie, single word, wiki page, etc. Wiki page is great example of meaning, has a title associated with it, but the page is its own meaning. Tagging is a way of linking those chunks, when a word has multipple meanings, its just that many to many mapping. Wikis and folksonomie emergence is awesome.
Mark: TopicMaps, with xml version, is a tool for this. Another tool for emergence is hierarchies. There is the person, and flat relationship person to friends. Persons are in networks, a level above groups. People are links in the hierarchy. Each of those levels have many forms, similar to wiki. Going to Wiki++, example : multiple people make contribs to a page, groups = contributors to this page (emerge from contribution).
Brandon: TalkingStick..
Deborah: Fred talked about pulling statistics into one place to analyse them, see what is emerging. Deb suggested, instead of pulling info in one place, if we use microformats, could we publish stats everywhere (using microformats) and use an engine to poll the web, pull them in, and perhaps analyse them? This made her wonder: is there a MicroformatForWikis? This would allow us to aggregate things and find out what people are interested in now!! Microformats allow you to put info on your webpage to insert it in google map for example (address, contact info, etc.). Question: is there a microformat for Recent Changes?
Robin: Microformats are for robots. Rel tags are one way of showing it. Putting meta information into an html page. microformats are emergent ... let's make a microformat for addresses (vcard) thing. (it's called HCard)
Deborah: Rel tags are not just for robots... What's interesting is that I don't have to do anything more with it if my web client know about it, I can just consume it directly.
Robin: Where is your microformat address ... there are sites that you can ping to let them know that you've updated your hcard (technorati, a site that pools the info for advertisements) there is one for ... its agreeing on how to communicate this information through webpages
INTERMISSION / On prend une pause
Everyone tooka break... some had to run another session, some were tired, some needed refreshments... the space has been booked for the next session... will it continue (question mark) We will see what emerges... Nah, it didn't re-emerge (at that time). Re-emergence, another cool concept : deleted or abandoned things do re-emerge sometimes.
See also: video of this session on videotape Rococo #7