If you are reading this: Thank you!

This initiative is still alive! Though dormant, as I haven’t had the spare energy/attention to give the project; it’s still a major interest of mine.

My desire is to serve the public, by investing time and effort into deeply considering important challenges in communicating and organizing ideas.

Emphasis on verbal and visual representations, due to the strengths of technologies supporting those modes of expression — text and images.

Emphasis on humane systems design: careful consideration of participants’ human experiences — mental, social, emotional, physical.

Emphasis on systems interconnectedness and dynamic aspects: how systems operate and change over time, and how we want to facilitate and cope with those operations and changes.

Articles I’d like to write soon:

• Abstract Syntax Tree (AST): What is it, and how is it used?
• Epidemiology and what it can teach us about the spread of IDEAS in society
• Preliminary design concepts for open-ended connected-content web interface (desktop and mobile)
• Design summary and request for comment on initiative-developing-and-organizing platform concept (needs a name) — https://github.com/laddhoffman/ourmindspace

Longer-range topics:

• Appropriate schemas for reference to previously published content, originated from self or others — consider CC BY-SA; git DAG model of source version control; CRDTs; eventual consistency; content distribution mechanisms such as IPFS
• Web of trust — private key networks; reputation model; attribution;
• When and how do systems tend to be “gamed”, in the sense of eager user behavior? What are the strengths and weaknesses of “gamification”, in the sense of systems implementing reward mechanisms to reinforce user behaviors?
• Simulations of successive generations of entities adapting to their environments; multi-dimensional modeling of inter-related intrinsic and extrinsic attributes
• Factors influencing adoption of technologies and mediums — digital, analog, and the influence of temporal and spatial characteristics — radio; television; letters; books; public internet; walled-garden internet

Hope to share more soon!

 

 

The purpose of Ideate Foundation is to understand and facilitate the formation and communication of ideas.
What are ideas?
Ideas are identifying or descriptive. Each idea has a context. We represent ideas using symbols, and we interpret these symbols according to our knowledge of an idea’s context.

Importantly, ideas are not feelings, experiences, or actions. Ideas alone are not enough.

Communicating an idea is an indirect process. A listener forms their own idea. To communicate is to share context, and implicitly affirm or dispel assumptions in the mind of a listener. High fidelity mediums are those which enable us to more comprehensively share context and to more immediately provide feedback.

The written word provides fairly extensive and immediate feedback in the sense that the mind of a reader is able to generate and explore myriad ideas and yet immediately compare those ideas to the text on the page. The text varies little over time and so provides very consistent feedback.

Camping together provides excellent shared experience and immediate feedback as we work together and observe each other’s actions, and together experience the environment.

Instant messaging is a form of written communication. It trades some of the depth and durability of published work for increased immediacy. Its abbreviated nature diminishes its potential for establishing shared context, so I think it tends to work best between people who already have established shared context.

Online forums provide decent context but lack some immediacy. Wiki sites provide even better context, but less immediacy. Chat groups provide good immediacy but have a fluid, transient context.

I believe it is possible to develop better tools – a better platform – for organizing our ideas in a structured way and communicating with one another more comprehensively.

-Ladd