Saturday, September 11, 2004
Background material on why a National Project is required
Social Constructions and
Symbols ŕ
Manhattan Project to Integrate Human-centric Information Production ŕ
Communication from
Dr. Richard Ballard
Founder of Knowledge Foundations Inc
Suggestion: make a descriptive enumeration of the questions
Suggestion: Conference on different "Visions of the
Knowledge Age"
Paul:
Finding security in work is problematical during new industry formations. Somehow we manage it just because dying is not an option. The better goal is to create things worth dying for, but that takes intense effort and commitment for 5-7 years at least.
To attract a community to take particular actions amounts to selling a future vision -- one everyone can understand and see within the place reserved for them. The National Project sounds like a paycheck, but God knows what for -- and who then will assign the missions. How the mission is assigned is the key issue that we may now address.
You have developed a listening among many people. What we need now is to ask them questions that they will honestly answer about their own particular needs.
What could this community of scholars and experts do for themselves? Your needs and my needs have been explained openly and often, but we need a far wider circle of opinion to know the whole community represented by your mailing lists.
Knowledge Foundations Inc does some consulting on the formation of mission statements.
We start every knowledge engineering engagement by seeking the set of ten questions that a community must answer successfully. The list expands easily to 50 questions arranged in 10 groups. When we know those "defining questions," we can begin to find the rational threads (baselines) that satisfy the need. This community needs its "defining questions" asked, then an organization or project meant to answer them.
My sense is that past conjectures on what was needed were too specific and narrowly clustered to attract community interest. Only "questions" that are broad enough and clear enough should be presented publicly. What ultimately must be delivered? This control question has to be established without prejudging which technologies or inventors or project administrators are to be the likely beneficiaries of their pursuit. The appreciative field that is generated is not a hierarchical control mechanism, since the question of choice between players is delayed until a future time when the community’s interests are more fully enumerated.
The feeding frenzy and last stage narrowing of players on the last group proposal via SAIC was a case in point. The paycheck guarantee may attract attention but it is not a community interest or solution, just a change in establishment.
Get together with Ralph Hodgson and Mills Davis and put together a Washington Conference on different "Visions of the Knowledge Age" with time enough to submit papers and spin truly attractive opportunities from all your known champions and articulate contributors.
Something like that could pull us all together in one place and potentially find a sponsor for some travel expense for presenters. The sharing of those papers could build a collective vision of the world you, Sandy, John, I, and others envision and the community could ask then the questions on how they should play and find a place within that future.
Washington, with it’s political, governmental, and business centers of interest, would profit greatly see us all speak to this issue.
Such a gathering of champions could speak in later sessions of the impediments we find in advancing our solutions.
Richard Ballard