Emerging

I didn't post yesterday, because I was giving my first ever public presentation. It was terrifying, but I think it went well.

The presentation was at a workshop on ""emergent democracy", a complicated concept, and one that Wikipedia totally fails to explain.

Learning about this led me to Minding the Planet, and an idea to use emergent democracy to decide on the actions of a group. Each group member would agree to give 15 minutes of time a week to whatever the group decided that time should be spent on.

I like the idea... but I'm the independent type. What if I didn't want to do what the group thought I should?

But then, I think that's where real emergent democracy comes in. It's not about voting in a group for what we should do, it's about doing it... or not. The decision emerges from the actions we choose to make.

And that's when I can see why I was asked to talk about Wikipedia. I talked mostly about discussions on the site, but really it's the edits that matter.

Intuition

The stuff I usually link to is quite... instant. Maybe it's the nature of the Internet to like quick snacks of interest, or maybe it says more about my own attention span.

But today I was shown an article on "intuitive design". A longer article than I usually link, but well worth reading.

Wikis have changed a lot since I started using them. When I first hit the edit button, I got an obvious box of text with very little code. It was easy to see what change I needed to make, and how to make it.

Wikis now are much prettier, but also contain much more complicated markup. I seriously wonder if I would be where I am now if that initial "knowledge gap" had been wider.

Credit: Brian