Wandering through my personal notes and collected RSS feeds, I find myself rereading Thesephist's Research Community post. In it he writes about some of his own thinking on the characteristics and activities of such a (hypothetical) research community. Lots of value there.
Coincidentally (or not?) I near-simultaneously read in Turchin's EndTimesBook , "Science is a collective endeavour [...] For a scientific discipline to take off, there needs to be a community of scholars feeding ideas off each other, and [...] criticising each others' concepts and results."
How to foster and build such a community, I wonder. In some, very loose, sense, it already exists... a bunch of people who follow each others' blogs and toots, read each others' websites, might even occasionally reach out to speak with one another directly, but it's extremely tenuous at best. Good energy on the research front; not much action on the collaboration front. Pretty weird for a bunch of people who claim concern for making better Tools for Thought, better tools for collaboration!
What would kickstart something more cohesive? (And do people working in the space even want something more cohesive? What would it improve, and who benefits?) A conference/unconference? A regular online get-together on Hangouts? A journal?
2023-09-24 Further Thoughts
I agree, on a deep level, with Thesephist's take that "communities are made of the stories we tell ourselves". So now we have a starting place for building that community...
What are the stories we want to tell ourselves about exploring, experimenting, building better Tools for Thinking?
It strikes me that there are two, quite different, kinds of stories we'd want to tell ourselves. (And note carefully: the audience is ourselves -- those of us who identify as TfT experimenters and practitioners! The audience is not the wider world of people we'd like to see make better use of computational media, though they're welcome to kibitz as they please. All part of working with the garage door up.)
The first kind of story to tell are those stories that sketch what it is we want out of these "better tools for thought". Why are we driven to poke at this tangled skein? Some of those stories are about missed opportunities, about people who envisioned what a Personal Computer might do for human cognitive ability and how those opportunities have so far been squandered. Other of those stories might be about the vision of how a congition-enhanced society might do better at solving Big Hairy Problems.
The second kind of story we likely want to tell ourselves are the stories that describe who we are, what we do, and how we behave toward one another. In other words, the stories that delineate, that draw a boundary around the in-group and the rest of the world.
Let's start to tell those stories. It's the next Small Step that makes sense if we're at all serious about building a community or co-op of Tools For Thought practitioners.
And Another Thing...
(I should probably have made these into separate posts in the interests of generating more clicks, but eh... who wants to play that game?)
It is a truism of Permaculture Design that a Community requires a Commons. Without central and openly-accessible-to-all commonage, be it a park or a pub or a circle of standing-stones, community soon withers and dies.
So the next Small Step we might want to take is to create just such a commons, and that brings us all the way back to where I started in my original comments on the subject. A websty? A chat place? A forum setup? A subreddit? (Oh look! There is one already. Quite dead.) A wiki?
Clearly these thoughts are still young and raw and want much polishing. I'll get there in time...
If you're in the #ToolsForThought space yourself, please get in touch and let's brainstorm this more. I feel like we're reaching only a small fraction of the potential that's possible.
At the same time I find it ironic that quite a lot of what the community claims to be about is creating tools for better cooperation, communication and coordination, and yet we're so fucking poor at it ourselves! Why?