I see a way in
@lasindias, what if we do a project on documentation culture? We could make the following argument.
- Online collaboration is a cyborg system: part bits and wire (the tech), part meat (the humans). A fancier way to say it is that it exists in agent-artifact space.
- However, almost all designers of online collaboration focus on the tech/artifact part. Since they are not looking at the (far messier) human part, their success rate is unsurprisingly very low.
- Edgeryders has a very significant experience of online collaboration. Not only (not even mainly) around software development, but around business projects, organizing conferences (LOTE), socializing the submission of applications (FormStorm), near-real time coordinating in social media communication (Twitterstorm) etc. The reason why we can do this stuff is that we are a diverse community with a significant hacker component, and the hackers' culture of documentation has been spreading.
- Documentation is the vector of sharing. It means: every time you do something you take time to document what you do with guidelines, instructions, tutorials etc., so that others can pick it up where you left off. This is very counterintuitive to do, because documentation is time-consuming for those who do the documenting; but it is superefficient, because information can be duplicated costlessly. A whole tribe of documenters moves at the speed of light: everybody spends some extra time when documenting what he or she does, but then saves ten times that time by virtue of easy access to the knowledge others have created. So, documenting is non-Nash, Pareto superior.
- Historically, hackers have solved this by creating a culture of documentation. This means acknowledging the hard work of people doing it well, rewarding them with attention and kudos etc. Preliminary experience in Edgeryders shows that this can be done also outside the hacker world. For example, the latest Living On The Edge conference generated a lot of documentation, most of it pretty high quality. This both taught people to work together online (on wikis, comments and posts) and made the online space more attractive as its content grew in quality and coverage.
- So, we will not tackle this by building another platform. We will teach people to teach each other how to make tutorial, how to write an effective post, how to build and manage online communities (@Noemi and others keep a wiki for this in the context of Edgeryders – QED, I guess). Prototype it on some coops. And see.
- You guys can do the coop organizing and reachout and communication; we can take the lead on collaboration practices.