Archive for July, 2013

Defining open collaboration systems

July 27th, 2013

“Open collaboration systems” has lately become part of the (working) title for my thesis. I had tried talking about “purposeful online conversations” when scoping my work. I had in mind online conversations where people argued in order to find common ground and take action. By contrast, I explained, while people argue in many online venues, characterizing those arguments is challenging: what shall we say (in general) about the arguments on Twitter, or in comments to blog posts? But the phrase “purposeful online conversations” seemed to mean little to anyone but me.

I latched onto a new definition to use in my thesis: “open collaboration systems”. In an open collaboration system, “people form ties with others and create things together” ((Forte, Andrea, and Cliff Lampe. “Defining, Understanding, and Supporting Open Collaboration: Lessons From the Literature.” American Behavioral Scientist 57.5 (2013): 535-547. doi:10.1177/0002764212469362)), ((The article, published this May, is their introduction to a special issue in American Behavioral Scientist. ABS 57(5), published May 2013. As a side note, the definition seems to have arisen out of need; I’m grateful. The original CFP for the issue explained what they were looking for more generally: “By open collaboration we mean the development of novel social structures supported by technologies including wikis and other content management systems that allow people to share and build content.”))

Forte and Lampe define a “prototypical open collaboration system” as

an online environment that

  1. supports the collective production of an artifact
  2. through a technologically mediated collaboration platform
  3. that presents a low barrier to entry and exit, and
  4. supports the emergence of persistent but malleable social structures. ((Forte, Andrea, and Cliff Lampe. “Defining, Understanding, and Supporting Open Collaboration: Lessons From the Literature.” American Behavioral Scientist 57.5 (2013): 535-547. doi:10.1177/0002764212469362))

I’m chagrined to say that it hadn’t occurred to me to quote the definition and then slightly redefine it. That is, until today when I chanced upon Andrew West’s thesis, “Damage detection and mitigation in open collaboration applications” ((Andrew West “Damage detection and mitigation in open collaboration applications” Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania. May 2013.)), about his large body of work on vandalism in Wikipedia, and the robust tool for vandalism reversion that he developed, Stiki. Very interesting since, as the title suggests, he creates a variant definition, Open Collaboration Applications (OCAs), where he liberally applies the “low barrier to entry and exit” to exclude moderation (for instance Github, which requires “proactive moderation” from repository owners, is excluded in his definition). He also stresses collective production more than most. But most interestingly to me, West very explicitly excludes voting-oriented collaborative filtering, based on the independence of the action taken by each voter. ((To clarify his modified definition of Open Collaboration Applications (OCAs), West says (in part):

We proceed by discussing familiar examples that are not OCAs. Append only and monotonically growing content/discussion repositories fail to qualify because they are not collectively produced at any granularity. This includes applications like YouTube, Flickr, forums, and blog/article comments regardless of the fact their content is user generated (these are aggregated independent artifacts). Collaborative filtering applications like Reddit, Digg, and Slashdot are also insufficient. Therein, community voting determines the acceptance and/or prominence of individual content items (“posts”) towards composing a public facing artifact. These fail in two dimensions: (1) Voting is an append only action, and (2) supposing participants could fully “edit” the ordering, this presentation is nonetheless a meta-artifact of independent posts – failing the atomicity constraint.

))

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QOTD: Heinlein’s truth-telling language, Speedtalk

July 14th, 2013

Inventing languages is a past-time both of philosophers and science fiction storytellers. It spotlights the relationships between language and thought and language and culture. ((Apparently Wikipedia keeps a list of constructed languages and has nearby discussion on the purpose of some of these.))

Yesterday I ran across Heinlein’s truth-telling language, Speedtalk. A few lines were really striking:
“In the syntax of Speedtalk the paradox of the Spanish Barber could not even be expressed, save as a self-evident error.”
“The advantage for achieving truth, or something more nearly like truth, was similar to the advantage of keeping account books in Arabic numerals rather than Roman.”

Here’s a longer quote:

But Speedtalk was not “shorthand” Basic English. “Normal” languages, having their roots in days of superstition and ignorance, have in them inherently and unescapably wrong structures of mistaken ideas about the universe. One can think logically in English only by extreme effort, so bad it is as a mental tool. For example, the verb “to be” in English has twenty-one distinct meanings, every single one of which is false-to-fact.

A symbolic structure, invented instead of accepted without question, can be made similar in structure to the real-world to which it refers. The structure of Speedtalk did not contain the hidden errors of English; it was structured as much like the real world as the New Men could make it. For example, it did not contain the unreal distinction between nouns and verbs found in most other languages. The world—the continuum known to science and including all human activity—does not contain “noun things” and “verb things”; it contains space-time events and relationships between them. The advantage for achieving truth, or something more nearly like truth, was similar to the advantage of keeping account books in Arabic numerals rather than Roman.
All other languages made scientific, multi-valued logic almost impossible to achieve; in Speedtalk it was as difficult not to be logical. Compare the pellucid Boolean logic with the obscurities of the Aristotelean logic it supplanted.

Paradoxes are verbal, do not exist in the real world—and Speedtalk did not have such built into it. Who shaves the Spanish Barber? Answer: follow him around and see. In the syntax of Speedtalk the paradox of the Spanish Barber could not even be expressed, save as a self-evident error.

Gulf, as printed in Assignment in Eternity – Robert A. Heinlein – Baen edition

This seemed to me to echo Leibniz’ symbolic language, in the “truthtelling” aspects — perhaps since I wrote a few months ago about Leibniz! ((For thesis Chapter 1, forthcoming; thanks to some comments from Adam Wyner. Ironically, my BA thesis was on Leibniz monads, but if I’d ever read the “Let us calculate” lines, I certainly didn’t have them in mind when thinking of argumentation!))
Leibniz was perhaps the first philosopher to write about a special language for expressing truth or making arguments evident. ((For more, see Roger Bishop Jones on Leibniz and the Automation of Reason.)) ((For references to the original, trace a discussion on the listserv historia-matematica, started by Robert Tragesser 1999-05-23, [HM] Leibniz’s “let us calculate”?, with responses over several months. Michael Detlefsen gives references to several of Leibniz’s writings, and a followup question about which quote is most widely known (1999-07-17, started by “L. M. Picard” with the subject [HM] Leibniz’s “let us calculate”) yields a very useful response from Siegmund Probst, quoting several variants with detailed references.))

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