Mining the archives

[Eric Armstrong <eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com>]

The interesting thing I've discovered late in life is the
importantance of awards ceremonies! Getting something
started is important. Getting it finished is hard. If
there is no financial incentive for doing it, then
emotional incentive is desirable. Awards ceremonies,
publicity, and recognition therefore have an important
function in terms of motivating the important work.    (01)

In response, Eugene Kim observed:
> You have contributed thousands of words to unrev-ii, and I've been lucky
> enough to benefit from your contributions, because I've been able to
> follow your e-mails as you've sent them.  But now, those valuable e-mails
> have vanished into the wasteland known as e-mail archives, where others
> are never likely to find them.  It's especially frustrating when I follow
> unrev-ii now, and see the same ideas and questions popping up.  I still
> read unrev-ii, but I don't participate, because all I feel like saying is,
> "Yes!  That's right!  But we hashed out all those issues six months ago!"
> 
> This is one of the main problems I'm trying to address with the Launch
> Community.  Let's start to integrate our knowledge into something
> accessible as it is recorded.  Unfortunately, I don't think I'll ever have
> the chance to go back through all of the old unrev-ii archives and
> recapture all of the great things that were said there, but I can at least
> start integrating new contributions.    (02)

To which I replied:
  We should probably cobble together a fully-attributed whitepaper
  from the archives.     (03)

In fact, were it an IBIS-style "narrative" of the investigation,
it would be an opportunity to 
  a) Put together a readable, edited transcript of
     the discussion
  b) Give the community something to sink their teeth
     into, so they could clarify, expand, and revise their
     comments.     (04)

After all, if they're going to be quoted, they may well want to
clean up their work. That will get us thinking a lot more about
the process, and motivate improvements to it.    (05)

Being able to plink incoming email will be a big help. We could
always forward good stuff to the new archive to make it more
usable. (Question: How can we retain the existing threading??)    (06)

I suspect we really need Nodal to do it right, unfortunately,
but maybe we can work around that.    (07)

NOTE:
In the past, a "name" was incredibly important, because
it was a requirement for access to publishing facilities.
If you couldn't get your books or articles published,
and there was no Xerox to copy them, you were basically
hosed until and unless you created a name for yourself,
or apprenticed yourself to someone who had already done so.     (08)

However, that situtation no longer holds. The web makes
it possible to publish ideas. Email and chat rooms make
it possible to call attention to them. The quality of
the ideas, and of their exposition determine the outcome.    (09)

Example: Horst Reinhold's (name?) IBIS idea was great.
But what brought it to our attention? It was Jeff 
Conklin's brilliant exposition of the concept. I had
never heard of the man, before reading his papers, so
being a "name" had nothing to do with it.    (010)

The most important point is this:
  The process we are defining could reasonably be
  defined as one that takes advantage of remote, interactive
  media to redefine the publishing process as a collaborative
  effort. The web makes possible wide distribution of the
  ideas. Our focus is on the incremental accretion of
  knowledge in a form that becomes publishable with a 
  minimum of editing.    (011)