SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema :> Modus Collaborandi
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LIS. Discussion Note 103
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JA = Jon Awbrey
JS = John Sowa
JS: I have told you many times that you are capable
of producing a very good web site of your own
with very useful hypertext links to all of your
contributions and to other relevant topics by
others. SUO archives are a very poor substitute
for a well-organized web site.
John,
Since it bears on ways of working together, I will respond
to this piece of your off-list message under that category.
Web sites are good for many things, but they are not
very good for interactive dialogue, collaborative work,
and group problem-solving, a whole lot of which we need
to do before we can come up with a semi-respectable SUO.
There are any number of mathematical web sites, pointers
to which I have given here many times, that would render
my own humble efforts in that direction utterly redundant,
and in the non-informative sense of the word, if that was
all that I was I hoping to achieve with my backgrounders.
But the authors and the creative consortias of these sites
are very busy folk who have no chance of responding to all
of the queries that it might take to boil down much of their
content into SUO soup.
There are also many exciting new collaborative environments
that we can already hear rumbling down the pike, but until
the perfect collaborative software arrives we will just
have to make do with what we currently have. And the
threaded archive is modestly good for that, though we
are scarcely using even as much potential as it has,
because it allows you to do a small but non-trivial
amount of interaction with what's already written
(on the walls of the city of philosophy, I guess).
The reason that I know this is precisely because of the more
positive off-list interactions that I have with some of the
members of this group, not to mention the random by-surfer.
And this is enough to give me hope that all is not in vain,
and that maybe one day folks who are genuinely interested in
learning what's already standard out there, or about to be,
and working on the obvious abundance of real problems that
exist out there, will cease being quite so intimidated by
the "I am not a net cop but" patrols who continually cast
such a chilling effect on all of our abilities to ask
a question in a public forum, the results of whose
deliverations may sooner or later affect us all.
I think that a web site is a very poor substitute for that.
Jon Awbrey
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