An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Not long ago, Chris posted a call for discussion ideas in which he said [emphasis mine]:

Chris: I'm personally hoping for an improvement on the idea of discussions overall, something more innovative and organic. I believe if we're to succeed in our mission of collecting our wisdom and expertise and love and hope for the purpose of achieving higher causes, we certainly need a better tool than a discussion board.

That part, “collecting our wisdom and expertise”, made me think about sites like Wikipedia and Google’s “Knols” project and about how cool it would be for Gaia to have some sort of collaborative (and also not) system for creating “knowledge articles” à la Wikipedia or Knols. But this isn’t my innovative idea.

Let’s just pretend for a minute that Gaia already has a “knowledge article” system in place (and in a sense there is, since you can label a blog post to be an article, but this is too limited of an approach to article creation). What we have, then, are three different modes of “community communication” (i.e. one-to-many or many-to-many, so not counting one-to-one communication like PMs and IMs) and sources of knowledge within Gaia: pods, blogs, and articles.

Each of these systems has its own particular strengths, but there are a few general problems or deficiencies, as well. One of the problems in that discussion on any given topic in all of these modes tends to be very linear, stretching down a web page as far as the participants can bear and then eventually sort of just petering out without really accomplishing anything, other than building a sense of community. Not that building a sense of community isn’t wonderful, but it’s only half of what Gaia is supposed to be about, that is “being the change”. We’ve got tons of being, but not a whole lot of change. Communion, but not much agency.

The other problem is that these three modes are very much separate, and even the various conversations within each mode are separate and fragmented. So you often end up with several discussions on the same topic taking place all around Gaia, but with no easy way to bring all the various views and ideas together into “new knowledge”. The various bits are all “out there”, but nothing much is being done with them.

Now, to a certain extent, simply adding a “Gaia wiki” would already be an improvement, because there would be a way for people to work together on filing away our collective knowledge in a manner that’s more accessible to everyone. But a weakness in the standard wiki model is that one person, on their own, needs to write a decent first draft on a given topic, and then there has to be enough interest and attention paid to the article to get it fleshed out and properly edited and updated.

So what we need is something that will: (1) bridge the gap between all of the fragmented discussion on a particular topic; (2) not be limited by a linear mode of conversation; and (3) bring in more change to the “being the change” equation.

Enter “discussion clouds”, or “Grey Clouds” as I like to call them! You can shorten that to “gClouds” and pretend that it stands for “Gaia Clouds” if you want, but they’ll always be “Grey Clouds” to me. ;-)

What is a “cloud”? Imagine that you’ve been reading a couple of blogs (and related comments) and participating in a pod thread or two on a certain topic, and you get an idea for a “knowledge article” or any other sort of project based on these discussions (could even be simply to resolve a conflict or achieve greater clarity or consensus on the topic). Just create a cloud.

I envision that somewhere on any blog or pod page there would be a “Create a cloud” button. When you click on this button, you would go to a page where you can better define your cloud. This would mean linking any other pod threads, blog posts or articles that you know of that are directly relevant to the cloud and, and this is important, setting a “purpose” for the cloud in a few words (so that it could be displayed across the top of every cloud-view page). That’s the change part, and it also helps distinguish clouds from pods in that a cloud would disperse (i.e. be locked to further discussion) once its purpose had been fulfilled. Discussion could continue in the various pods or blogs that were linked to the cloud, of course, but discussion within that cloud would end when the goal is reached.  As part of the setup process, you would also kick off discussion within the cloud.

An important part of this would be some sort of “cloud map”, like a mind map, that would show all the interconnections between the various branches of the cloud discussion (and the linked discussions). This would help a cloud participant to navigate within the cloud and to have a global view of what’s going on in there. The branching and interconnections could actually get quite complex, again like a mind map, and the cloud map would help you to visualize these interrelationships and see how consensus could be achieved by integrating all of the various reasoned viewpoints. I would even envision that you could draw in your own connecting lines, annotations, color coding, and that sort of thing to the cloud map to help you keep track of everything. Some of these markups could be global for the whole cloud to see, and others could be personal for an individual cloud participant.

Whenever you’re “in” a cloud, you would also see, down one side of the page maybe, lists of the linked or related pod threads, blog posts or articles and could link related stuff (even external web items) as the cloud discussion progressed. Tagging would be an important part of finding related knowledge to link to the cloud, but I’d also like to see topic categories à la BigThink.com to help zero in on related discussions.

And yes, why not also link other clouds to your cloud and create a “perfect storm” of change?

There’s another aspect of Gaia that I haven’t mentioned and which is more about agency and change, and that’s gPro. So you could also link in gPro products and services that could help out in achieving the cloud’s purpose.

I would imagine that pretty much any cloud could end with the writing of some sort of article or report in order to capture the new knowledge that came out of the cloud (even if just to summarize what happened in the cloud for others to learn from), so this is why some system of collecting, creating and indexing Gaia knowledge articles is essential for clouds to work effectively.

Also, I don’t think that clouds should replace pods, because the two modes have very different functions. Clouds are very much more about agency and change, while pods are almost solely about communion and being. But there may very well be ideas here that could be applied to pods to change the way they work. Like “thread maps” to allow more complex discussions to take place without getting bogged down in an unmanageably long, linear thread. In fact, the whole “thread” metaphor might be replaced. Think of pod “clouds” as those pretty white fluffy or wispy clouds that look beautiful but don’t really “do” anything (and wouldn’t have to ever “disperse”), and the clouds I’ve described above would be the rain clouds (which are, of course, “grey”) that redistribute water for plants and animals to benefit from.

So that’s my “killer app” that I think would truly raise the bar on the Gaia community’s ability to “be the change”. Whaddaya think?

With love,
Grey