Mary Panttaja

Sorry for the short post, but I’ve been trying to upgrade WordPress this afternoon and got stuck. Turns out you HAVE to especially set the encoding to ASCII. I didn’t, so the originally files were damaged. Well here we are now. Only sort of working. But lets see if this post goes out properly.

This edit screen is messed up and there is no “view post” section on the page. I may be sorry i did this.

Later. Hopefully.

PS Okay I found the preview—they moved it. Whew!

I have been writing two books and have discovered a real need for a non-linear way of writing and presenting material, which of course is rather obviously something we understand in the digital medium. I am looking to both produce and present material as a “context” (instead of a linear flow) with overlapping and interweaving meta-structures. (Structures and attributes like time, sequence, themes, voicing, tempo, density, audience, multi-modal, etc.) We can improvise this with tagging and linked-lists, etc, but I can imagine a tool that supports the structures and illustrates how each unit of writing is woven into the weft of the material. I built a few kludgy tools to help me, but didn’t find the ability to manage as many of these threads as I would have liked.

I envision a tool in three parts:

• A visual, multi-structural context editor which allows you to identify media components (text, images, sound, video, whatever) with threads/identifiers/sequences and weave them into the context; ideally both the context data and the components are stored in a database;
• A flexible text editor with html/xml as basic targets and CSS applied according to the meta-structural definitions so that readers can “feel” the structures;
• A deployment module which delivers to a database, print, web, blog, wiki, or a hypermedia-context object (which includes a potentially infinite number of components) with all the links, sequences, and meta-structures as defined by the author.

I can hack a simple version of it with hypertext if I keep a complex diagram/map of the context, but without any support for the structures being built and the meaning of the links and threads. But, of course, modifying or restructuring anything, which is one of the important features of this medium, causes massive rework.

I can also see using the meta-structures to deliver the materials, allowing the reader to meander along paths, diverge, regroup, etc. making the intentional threads more obvious as navigational tools. (Also recording the paths taken.)

In short: I’m looking for a tool that allows the writer to create complex contexts instead of linear lines of development, but that includes a visual way to understand and manipulate the structures underlying the context.

It has been interesting to see these requirements arise in both my fiction and non-fiction writing . For the fiction, I was able to evolve a complex enough linear sequence to represent what I was getting at, but I don’t really see a way to properly sequence the other book—it really wants to be multi-structural. The concept of “writing contexts” (you can’t really call them books anymore) is an obvious application of the technology we have now—but I don’t really see a tool that covers what I envision.

So, the question is, are you aware of anyone who is working on such a model for both the writer/developer and the reader/consumer? Where the writer can define the complexity of the meta-structures within which he wants to compose and weave the context (with whatever constraints he wants to put on them); and the reader can explore the material within the meta-structural context with some access to the structures themselves.

I’m just thinking out loud. Sorry if I’m not quite making sense of it. I wanted to see if anyone knows someone working this direction before I start to think about tackling something like this myself.

Any suggestions?

(Some things I have looked into: Storyspace, Tinderbox (the closest thing I’ve found so far), hypertext editors; I’ve tapped into some of the research going on at UCLA and Vectors-A Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular; also, publications by MIT Press in their Mediawork series.  And this morning I found a post over at Web Worker Daily with a lot of suggestions that I will be following up on.)

PPS. I meant to add that I realized that in many ways I’m looking for an object oriented component manager with multiple inheritance….a weird blend of my writing and software architect selves.

So, today I drove into town and bought a sandwich at Starbucks so I could use the network and get into Second Life. (We are working it out with our service provider to see if we can make it function at home.)

Yesterday offered a disparate set of chores. One minute I was researching venture funded companies, the next, the in-memory database market, the next, building a drip system for a new garden bed. But at lunch, I was reduced to trying to figure out how to use the arrow keys to keep my avatar from running into a wall. Don’t get me wrong, it was a little compelling, a bit like learning to paddle a recalcitrant new kayak in a swirling current. (Without the benefit of the actual river.) One that can fly and in which your paddling leverage occurs only at 90 degree angles.

And that was it. In 30 minutes, I got Second Life working and walked and flew around the training area. There were a few other people there, but clearly they were in the same self-conscious state I was and we carefully ignored each other. I found a Buddha-like frog and tried to see if I could elicite any wisdom from him, but to no avail. I managed to wander into the ocean and was assured by some commentary that I wouldn’t drown—not to worry.

In retrospect, I can see that my relationship to this is why I haven’t ever gotten into playing computer games (not that I’m a great games person anyway, to the chagrin of my entire family). I have some trouble measuring the time used against all the other things I want to accomplish. So it will be interesting to see if I can get passed that sort of reticence enough to actually experience what’s going on in Second Life. We’ll see.

I do like my little avatar—a purple and black Manga get up with pigtails. I’ll have to see if I can get a picture of her into the real world. (I mean me, a picture of me.)

PS. Now in First Life, we did find some really cool kayaks last week. Seems that to buy river kayaks, you have to go to the river. A real river, that is.

The research has begun. And where did it lead today? To Second Life—that otherworldly place where people talk, do business, learn, meet to play, listen to music, and create art.

After reading a series of articles on Second Life, I went to sign up only to learn that the first thing I had to do was choose a name that can not be changed. Suddenly, I was stuck. Choose a new name for yourself? this was going to take more than the time usually spend on choosing a login/user name. It seems important. It took 20 minutes of research and thinking to come up with a first name only to discover that I had to choose a last name from a list—okay that was weird, to have to build an identity from a small subset of name choices. Who can you be? Who do you want to be? I focused on how it sounded with the first name, trying to create something that could roll of the tongue.

The decision making process and the pause it caused generated a basic change in my relationship to Second Life; suddenly it was important; it meant something. This engagement was increased when I had to choose an avatar. (Okay, I can change this later.) But suddenly I had to think about the style I want portray. What did I want people to see? And I’m not stuck with any existing genetic or historical baggage. I can look like anything.

Okay, that’s the interesting news—that I was surprised by the engagement created just by signing up. The bad news is that I can’t get in. I’m not yet sure why, but I think it has to do with the speed of my connectivity. I can see the enticing entry scene—but no dice.

So the potential of the experience seems more compelling than I expected, though the technology hasn’t come through for me yet. I expect that it will.

More when I get there.

The expo wasn’t large—there were more vendors at a utility industry conference I attended in March. The topics covered seemed to be:

• Development tools for Web 2.0 applications
• Development platforms (software as a service) which included tools
• Interactive writing platforms (wikis, primarily)
• Social networks with different spins on how to manage one’s digital life
• A few consulting companies in this space

My perusal of the expo floor and the offerings suffered from the variety of my interests. Right now, I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for—I’m looking to discover what it is I’m looking for. So, here are a few things that caught my attention:

• Buzzword. I had heard about them and, as a writer, I was very interested in seeing where they are going. I will be very excited to see their new editor—I can image many ways to make the writing life better. I was hoping for an editor that could be embedded into a larger application that could manage the meta-structural context of my writings (on which I’ve written before). I was also hoping for an editor that was open enough for me to manage the target object type and where it lands—an xml database, a blog, a wiki. I’m getting a little grim with working with a variety of not-so-efficient editors. So while, I’m still interested in it as an editor, it doesn’t look like it will meet my other demands.
• Yoono. These seemed like nice guys. Another thing I’m looking for is a way to capture and share my research with my partners. We want to choose a platform for our evolving information base. They are currently in a private beta of a social-based home page where you can track your site/links/research and share it with friends or the world.
• Coghead. I stopped by the Coghead booth. Coghead is an online application development tool for Microsoft Access-like database applications. They host the resulting application for a subscription fee. It’s a clever idea in an always-connected world. They were demoing a pretty complicated application. I tested the early beta and felt a little short-circuited by the limitations; it will be interesting to evalute and see where they’ve gone with it. The application in the demo looked like it had more depth.
• Wikis. I briefly looked at Mindtouch and Socialtext, but didn’t go into a lot of detail. They don’t seem to provide one feature I’m looking for in my personal writing environment, but are leading wiki-platforms. Wikis are group collaborative writing environments that organize the material through tagging. I will be evaluating for their appropriate use for our business.
• Adobe Apollo. This is something we are very interested in. Jim’s team at Sapias has been using Adobe Flex (which deploys in the Adobe Flash player) for their relatively complex application which runs as a “rich internet application”. As a developer-geek, Flex looks like a lot of power and control (and fun) for a development environment. Apollo then allows one to deploy Flex and Flash applications not only as web-based applications but also to the desktop for disconnected work. This is a new area for web developers, though it’s a circle back to the applications we were building in the nineties. If we decide that our future includes choosing a platform, the Adobe Flex/Apollo direction would be high on the list.

What I didn’t find was any type of meta-structural writing tool (context, threads, streams, etc.), or the components to put one together. I obviously have to look into other markets and technologies. Some of the responses I got was that folks in the areas of ontologies and semantics have basically “given up” on trying to solve the problem I described to them. We’ll see. I’ve got more research to do.

New topics for the rest of the week.

I spent part of the day yesterday at the CMP and O’Reilly sponsored Web. 2.0 Expo in California. It brought together people and companies who are working at the edge of the internet computing platform. Of course, it was for industry folks and their customers: technology providers, the engineers who build things, and customers who buy things. (When you follow this industry in the blogosphere, sometimes you get to feeling that it’s just a few folks talking to each other; but seeing the attendance you did get the sense that there are real “working” folks and companies actually figuring out how and whether to use these new tools.) There were a mix of development platforms (Coghead, BungeeLabs, Etolos, Adobe Apollo were the most visible); site enhancement tools (Snap [Do you like the SnapShot features?]); some social networking platforms (Yoono,) wikis (Socialtext, Mindtouch) and other writing tools (Buzzword).

Here is the most interesting product I saw; one of the winning Ignite presentors:

Wireless Power from Potenco presented by Colin Bulthaup of Squid Labs: A hand-held electric generator about the size of a large yo-yo: pull the string constantly for one minute and get about 45 minutes of talk time—that seems tremendously efficient. The product is targeted for the world that has yet to be wired and is so valuable nowadays because many of the community-enhancing electronic tools (like the cell phone) are so relatively cheap to power. The company is partnering with the $100 laptop project. (If you don’t know about this project—you should look it up.) The pair will transform many communities in less developed areas (wireless, as it were). I would propose a interesting funding maneuver: sell them to folks like us as at substantial markup to fund sending many more overseas. Having spent part of the weekend rebuilding the harnesses for the solar panels that help power our little camper, I am reminded of how possible its to actually live on much less power than we generally use.

Okay. Tomorrow I’ll talk about software in the rest of the report. And about the dearth of solutions for my writing and publishing challenges. (I was surprised.)

This week I am starting to post some of the materials for my next book—not the next novel, but the book on the creative process. I am starting to play with building navigational models for how to move through the material. There are so many directions to choose from, many types of material that can address many audiences. I see that there is the capacity and ability to write books—well, not books per se, but some kind of published object—-that are totally non-linear. They can be read non-linearly, but that I can also envision writing them that way.

I knew when I was writing my novel, Illumine, that linearity was something I wanted to play with, that is, it was important that the structure of the telling of the story reflect some of the ambiguity inherent in the philosophy underlying the story. And that without some ambiguity in time and sequence the novel would not properly embody the meaning. The structure needed to reflect the meaning so the reader would experience some of the ambiguity that the subject matter represents. So the threads of the novel are woven into a texture that represents the meaning of the book itself. I have chosen a sequence for the weaving, though the material could as likely be reorganized to produce a different experience.

My next book, which is to start appearing shortly on the site catchingtheupdraft.com, is even more complex. This is one reason it has taken me so long to write it. (In fact, I have already written three versions of it and hundreds of powerpoint slides.) It is very difficult to choose an optimal entry point: for who, or which topic, or which style of reading, or which interest group?

I see that this book in particular has a whole meta-structure. It looks something like this:

• The Overall Topic (which has many flavors of explanation)
• Three Key Ingredients
• Depth: Introductory to Complex Explanations
• Voice: Personal, Coaching, Very Technical, Spiritual
• Audiences: Artists, Individuals, Organizations, Philosophers
• Media Types: Fables, Discourse, Essays, Stories
• Multi-Media: Text, Images, Audio, Video

So one of the intriguing ideas percolating on the edge between my writing and my technology research is about how to build tools that help the writer and then the reader to describe, employ, and deploy the meta-text that can structure publishing objects that are inherently non-linear. What do the meta-structures look like? How could one implement them? What do the readers do with the meta-structures? How does the whole experience with the material evolve?

I believe that this model of meta-structural writing reflects the evolution of ideas as they come into being and that perhaps now we can reflect multiple approaches to complex material in one such meta-object that includes the structure and the writing. I find it liberating to not have to find “the one” linear structure in material that does not lend itself to a single line of attack. I also think that we can produce more ambient fiction—that is, where the new model of digesting the material has more flexibility, context, and ambivalence, allowing more flexibility for the writer to reflect meaning in more complex structure.

New thoughts percolating. Now I need to research to see who is doing this and what tools are arising, and see how the meta-structures arise in the work as I go.

(Well, it’s not really a competition. It’s really about joint and parallel evolution.)

I read the San Francisco Chronicle article on mobile workers—by their examples, young, hip, technology workers living and working in the coffee shops of San Francisco. It’s fun to see where it is going, but it’s fabulous to realize this kind of independence in your work.

I started tele-commuting in the mid-80’s when it was very slow over a phone line. I could just edit source files with vi, compile, and run—lucky when I got through a full sequence before getting into garble-trouble.

But having been a part of this movement for over 20 years it’s good to see it is alive, well, and continuing to evolve. The ability to work anywhere is another part of the new freedom that technology is providing. (In addition to last week’s discussion about “small is powerful.”)

My earliest incarnation of telecommuting included a early model IBM PC and a 1200 baud modem (and later an early Sun workstation over the same modem.) I lived in the Santa Cruz mountains and had two school-age children. I managed to go into the office of my client in Saratoga about once a week. And, almost every day until they were both in junior high school, I was home when the kids got home from school. Of course, over the decades the tools, techniques, and what you could accomplish have grown immensely.

Today, my husband and I travel in a car which has a cellular modem and a wireless network, or we use our portable Verizon wireless network card with a router. We can have network anywhere we have battery power or electricity. We travel with two Macs. When we are driving at least one of us can be working—as needed.

Our pop-up tent camper also has solar panels for electricity—our goal being to work absolutely anywhere. (The solar panels were a response to our experiences camping offline (without power) in late October in the Rockies—a single battery couldn’t keep even the fan for the propane heater running long enough—fortunately, we sleep fine in our artic bags at 29 degrees.)

We live in the country and our version of “going to Starbucks” is to move outdoors where the wireless network reaches most places. The challenge, as always, is power, and I actually had to run wires to the most suitable work sites. As a writer I am inspired to do whatever it is that keeps me writing. And I’ve discovered (and I’m somewhat embarrassed by this) is that I can almost always write if I find the comfortable spot. Often a reclining chair in the sun or shade (depending on the temperature), or sprawled on a sofa. Not very pretty, but I figure—whatever works.

Now our goal is to continue to expand our independence of place—and for many things independence in time. Maybe technology can allow us to arrange our work around our lives instead of trying to squeeze our lives in around our work. It’s a scramble, but in working at home I am able to keep the vegetable garden going, prepare more humane meals, spend my time in the spot that I’ve chosen to live—these are all worthwhile goals for everyone.

In addition, we want to travel more, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to work. We just want to take our lives with us wherever we want to be. Mix it up.

So it’s fun to imagine (and if you can imagine it, you can probably make it happen) what our lives can look like now that so much of the support we need for many jobs is both ubiquitous and mobile.

We’ll be hitting the road now any time. See you out there.

Why Doing More With Less is an Important Opportunity

There have always been ways for people to create businesses and organizations that are small and controlled. But in most situations, this meant that the organization would have a small reach: a local contractor, a small printer, a regional consulting service. You could often control the quality of your partners, pick and choose who to work with, find a small consort of like-minded individuals.

But for the most part, you could only build a company with a small reach—that is, it was difficult to speak to a lot of people, or provide services across the country, or to market around the world. If you had a really big dream, a far reaching goal, you needed to build a larger organization, taking on all the subsequent distraction that size brings.

But the advances in communication and connectivity have delivered profound solutions: distributed platforms for working with partners and employees, dynamic platforms for outreach to your customers. In addition, as Chris Anderson and others point out, the means of production for some many of our products are now in the hands of individuals: I can write, print, publish, and market my own books from the comfort of my living room; film makers can write, shoot, edit, and distribute video from any where in the world and connect with an available audience; I have a single laptop on which I can develop almost any kind of software with tools that I can buy without getting up off the sofa. (One of my favorite work sites.)

Because of ubiquitous communications, powerful personal computers, and evolving software tools, delivering a product or service to market now takes:

• Less money

• Less time

• AND FEWER PEOPLE

And, from my current perspective, as one looking for ways to deliver my inspirations to the market place, I am intrigued with how important it is that it can be done with fewer people. A concentrated, inspired set of partners can deliver products and services of value to millions of people. How incredible is that? How focused can our potential be? How much can we control our efforts and minimize the possibilities of diluted potential? With fewer of us, can we be more effective at staying aligned and coherent in our goals, intentions, and actions?

Of course, most of us love to work with others and we want to have partners in crime and inspiration. But since every inspired participant can do more and be more productive, we can each leverage more of our personal potential to the fulfilling of our joint dreams, with better odds of building a organization that can truly build potential geometrically.

E.F. Schumacher, the economist, in his 1973 book, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, inspired a generation of us to examine our lives and and our work through another lense. As the new economic realities come into play, we can see that small is not only beautiful, but that it can be globally powerful as well.

What are you going to be doing next?

The Idea of Net Potential

We are all trying to create things—lives, families, product, projects, businesses, communities. We are trying to create a future in which our creations are part and parcel of our lives, and perhaps the lives of many others. This seems to be our role in the evolution of the cosmos—to create what inspires us. Our ability to create is measured by how all our activities and beliefs net out—productive actions minus non-productive actions. Our results are the “net” of what we do. (Along with everything else that’s going on.) So the more aligned or coherent we are in what we do (assuming we find the right trajectory) the more “net” positive motion we can cause. So we can see that sometimes we do the right thing, and sometimes we do the wrong thing. And sometimes our beliefs can conflict so we don’t really know we’re doing the wrong thing. It’s hard to get it right even for ourselves and our private goals.

But when you build an organization (family, community, business) you have to coordinate the net positive potential of everyone. Everyone has to be working toward the same goal (we call that taking aim on a trajectory.) And then the hard part, everyone needs to execute productive actions—do the right thing. And there are so many more ways now that things can go awry. The further the group expands beyond the truly inspired, the more dilute becomes the net potential. Sometimes adding a body is a net negative, not even a small net positive.

Of course, we all know this. We can see that the complexities of size in organizations is a cost. But what we sometimes don’t appreciate (and totally forgot in the year 1999) was the possibility of size producing nothing but a negative to the potential of an organization. Suddenly we spend more time on the support structures than on the creative work; more time organizing ourselves than inspiring our customers and partners. More is often less. And usually the inspired ones are distracted from their efforts by the need to support the organization.

So what does this have to do with technology and smaller companies?

In any organization you need the key inspired folks who create the product. They have the idea, understand their customer, and have the passion to make something happen. Then, it seems, you need a lot of support (management, marketing, sales, system admin, office management, etc.) Any of these roles can be fulfilled by inspired partners—but as the numbers get bigger the likelihood is that some people you hire will not come the table with the passion and engagement that the key players embody. They will be playing at another level. These folks dilute the potential of an organization. And they can be anywhere in an organization.

(There is nothing wrong with these players. I have found myself to be one when I got into an organization that had a great deal of passion for something that I didn’t share. I wasn’t a bad person and on paper I looked useful, but I had gotten in over my head with respect to my ability to really commit myself to their passion. After struggling for awhile, I figured out that I should just leave. I was a net negative to their ability to maximize their potential. I wasn’t really helping (even though I did useful things) and I wasn’t having fun either. Both good measures of whether you should be doing any particular thing.)

Modern technology enables the source, the people who are the inspired participants, to deliver their wares/message/media to their audience with a lot less support from those who might be diluting the potential. So what goes wrong? That is, how is the potential of a company diluted when it requires “bodies”, people that “have jobs” in support of the creative effort?

(Now don’t get me wrong, anyone in any role can be a source of additive potential. It’s not the role that causes net negative, it’s the level of engagement. The janitor, the marketing support team, and the system administrators can be incredible contributors to the potential of an organization. The scariest thing is to have anyone in the leadership of an organization not be an inspired, engaged participant—a net add. As an organization grows, the difficulty in managing net potential grows more quickly.)

Think about dancing. If you are dancing by yourself, and your potential is how much creative enjoyment you get, you see that you are in control of what you get out of your effort. (Any activity you love will do if dancing isn’t your thing.) But if I match you up with a partner (let’s say a friend), then the enjoyment you can extract is complicated by your need to work/understand/communication with one other. Now the possible potential, should things work out really well, is higher. But getting the necessary coordination together makes it more difficult to realize.

So imagine that I pair you with a random person. Or four random persons. How hard will it be to extract the same quality of enjoyment or quality of work, and how long will it take you to get to a level that supersedes what you could generate by yourself?

The truth is that if we very carefully choose partners who are as inspired as we are, our potential can grow exponentially. But as an organization gets larger, and we’re probably not talking about dozens of people, then the likelihood is that self-selection or hiring-selection is moving more towards being random than it is to capturing people who are truly inspired. (You can hope that they will become inspired—but they might just want the job.) And, of course, they not all uninspired, but geometrically increasing creative potential requires that the team be really focused on the same value proposition. If they are going even slightly different directions or using slightly different trajectories (in the terminology of Catching the Updraft!), then the potential does not increase, but can actually be degrading all the time. We’ve all seen this happen.

And why do I care? Well, I’m working on what happens next and I’d love to find or figure out what combination of people, technology, and business models can fuel my inspirations. I think its different than it was twenty years ago when I started my first company and I don’t want to use any old assumptions in this very different environment.

Tomorrow:
Why Doing More With Less is an Important Opportunity