Sound recording of community call has 4 plays so far + OT
However, I don’t think that is saying much in either direction. It is too early to tell, and I am also not really sure what is the best way of doing and integrating it. We’ll run out of minutes (180 for a no-pay account) on the next community call. I think it might make sense to archive a lo-fi version of the call on ER and only have the last one up for discussion and linking to it. The other thing is that I am thinking about a way to say something “off the record”. Of course there’s issues with that, and it would make some sort of editing necessary. I like transparency, but I think extremely strong transparency can get in the way of potentially good dynamics as well… I don’t think I have a hard and fast rule on this though. I’d probably want to “spread” these decisions throughout the community with the persons acting having a relatively large say.
The bettermeans.com video was interesting - thanks for that. I have a few visions some of which are somewhat similar (e.g. 2nd paragraph) under the hood, but I am not a fan of the interface. I generally agree with the hierarchy of communication channels you gave, though my take is that we’ll have to do a lot of trade offs so video will be the exception. The scenario I am designing for is one where most of us are very busy. Many doing menial and intermittent tasks, or agricultural work. Hardware performance is similar as today (but electronics lifetime increased), connectivity varies a lot by location (rural vs urban, energy dense vs starved). Sitting at home working with clean hands using pointer and screen will be reserved for a small minority, the rest use very rugged devices adapted to their physical work. The reason why I tend to favor audio is that it comes with a couple of strong pros: 1) your hands are free 2) it needs extremely little energy (works fine in the dark) 3) you can easily make or fix the i/o device 4) since we killed off most dangerous megafauna we only need our ears very intermittently 5) we pretty much come with spoken language pre-installed - written not so much 6) emotions can be reliably communicated 7) relatively frugal in terms of data storage 8) speech -> text -> arbitrary language (with fuzziness) -> speech is hopefully “around the corner”.
That is why the bread and butter jobs will probably be going through audio. Of course intensive interaction with the collaborative platform will happen intermittently for very many people (think visit to library or committee meeting), and may also be a full time occupation of some networkers. Both will use a lot more channels than audio. However, even in that case text will be probably restricted to a supporting role for aspects that require low ambiguity, and as a general rule the bandwidth of the optical channel will be required for fast orientation, navigation, discrimination, and pattern perception. Input would probably be based on hand/finger gestures and facial expression.
Summaries are of course essential (but also very political). Browsing through lots of unsuitably structured text is a losing proposition, but data synthesis comes with loss. My preferred approach would be to keep as much raw data as possible, as local as possible - with making provisions to make it searchable in an abstracted form and request a full data set in a smooth manner. E.g. individuals tag/comment/picto certain parts of the file appropriately, perhaps also while the discussion/presentation is ongoing. Then you could supplement a human made summary with automated “highlights” using various perspectives (e.g. based on sets of tags, or composites of individuals - like the members of a project). That reminds me, @Matthias - it may be useful to be able to @mention a project which will send a nudge to the involved individuals. That shouldn’t be terribly difficult technically I think.
If you have the audio you could probably do most of that at some later point when the infrastructure is ready. For the projects that get a little more hands on or are happening in an unMon you could do video (stills or moving by activation) from a couple of angles by default. It is likely that is can be relatively easily squeezed into a platform like bettermeans, ER, or something else altogether. The worst that can happen is a human transcript - which is a lot better than straight into the text box for people like me. I lose half my brain capacity when writing. During dialogues I think I perform better than if I can concentrate in a quiet environment alone (at least for the more creative bits).