Collaborative Software is sometimes called Social Software, but arguably CS suggests work and Social Software suggests play and community. Social software is party-lines, chat, forums, photo swapping, six-degrees-of-separation, and not a cause of angst for me. Collaborative software is people working on the same project at the same time. The grand concept design challenges for any CS are therefore:

1. Allow simultaneous work without unproductive interference
2. Handle disputes about authority and judgment
3. Handle “ownership” of a task
4. Handle steering or allocating of tasks
5. Keep track of contributions and credits

The corporate world has known CS for a long time in the form of groupware applications. As far as I can tell, these consist of internal email (“memos”), shared calendars, shared contacts and sometimes “drawing boards” and document versioning systems. The new groupware applications tend to be served from a web site and emphasize design concept #3, hardcoding concepts like “tasks” and time/resources (e.g, dotProject ).

(These are creepy, especially in the context of free software and online communities, because business management theory analyzes a “project” (I speak Corporate, can’t you tell?) into tasks and resources, and deals with conflicts based on a hydraulic model of “flow”. Resources are people and office equipment (e.g., printers), and have dependencies on each other that can lead to “resource conflicts”. For instance, Resource A (“Bob”) might need to use Resource B (“HP Printer”), but Resource C (“Mary”) is already using B, leading to suboptimal utilization of A. No matter.)

The Sourceforge open source project is perhaps the most socially significant collaborative software other than wiki. Sourceforge is built around CVS (Commit/Content Versioning System, perhaps?), a linux app that tracks incremental additions to a code base. It adds forums, task-management and internal documentation. Sourceforge is the central CVS repository used by thousands of open source (and commercial) projects.

Open source is software that is licensed under an agreement, usually the GNU Public License (GPL), requiring that 1) fully compilable program code be made available for download 2) the program and code be freely distributable 3) extension and redistribution of the code and program be permitted. The “advantages” of OS software include: fast development time, stability due to bugspotting, and freedom to develop software in different conceptual directions.

OS software is, per the agreement, always free, but some people make fine distinctions between Open Source and Free Software. Open source software is ideologically ‘free’, since the code is at ‘liberty’ to evolve and improve itself, but many Open Source advocates also claim that it is a good way to make money! In practice, many OS projects rely on either donations or patronage of a pay service related to the software (e.g., webhosting for open source server software). OS projects also benefit from the donation of a great many hobbyist man-hours. Many successful projects have no profit-motive, but are developed for the sake of having a free tool, oftentimes as a substitute for an expensive commercial product (eg., GIMP as a feature-equivalent replacement for Adobe Photoshop).

The main motive for most open source development seems to be related to the ancient (and in modern times, likely underserved) human desire to work for the sake of a community. The biggest community tent in OS (and perhaps on the Internet) is Linux, the GPL’ed operating system core and related projects (Xorg, Gnome, KDE, Apache, etc.). Participants in the Linux development efforts can tell themselves a (mostly true) story about an open, free, community-driven operating system’s battle (to the death!) with monopolistic, kludgy, closed Microsoft’s Windows empire. The motive, in this case, for contributing to OS efforts is akin to patriotism.

There is an additional altruistic or humanistic motive that I find compelling. The argument is that if the undeveloped world is going to derive any benefits from computer technology, that technology must be affordable. Otherwise, third world countries must make the choice between outlays for computers and software packages, and payments for social services and education, which is unconscionable. Donated old hardware loaded with free software can be nearly as cheap as the cost to ship. A particular advantage of Linux is that it performs well on old hardware. Together with powerful commercial-equivalent applications, these machines could lead to greater and fairer global development.

Open source is a fearsome thing in the developed world, because it threatens to undercut the livelihoods of computer programmers by seeking to create a world where people expect software to be free. OS advocates tend to argue that no such fear is warranted because 1) innovation breeds innovation, and therefore 2) fear of free software belongs to a zero-sum mentality. I won’t pursue this here, but I believe that the OS people are in denial, or lie, about the ultimate implications of a system that relies heavily on volunteerism and donations. This is not to say that open source is not the future.

I think that I should inform the reader that the most concrete thing that agitates me at the present, the source of my dreary angst and torpid prose, is that sinister trifecta of open source development, collaborative software and content management systems. I am only partly joking when I say that nearly every word on these pages has been written under the influence of a near-constant meditation and study on these minute phenomena.

I feel an inexplicable urge to write!

I was specifically told 50% editorial and 50% clerical.

More like 50% inactive, 40% clerical, 5% data input, 3% index proofing, 1.5% writing copy for an online quiz game, and .5% getting my editorial suggestions rejected.

Weep for me.

Data -> Code -> Semantics -> Meaning

Of the two worlds available, the more intriguing one at the moment is the Internet. A crank calls it the “second spectral world that spins parallel to our own, the World Wide Web’’, but it might more cannily be described as the global subconscious. Not in the sense of a dirty, barbaric child subconsciousness that is out to get you and your socialized self (though there is that too, viz. pornography and fetishism on the web), but in the sense of a subconscious as the productive, free-associative secret double-life of the mind. The Internet is fast becoming humanity’s Wise Blood, a mysterious ground of real life (rl) action inaccessible to the frontward, or conscious, social attitude.

Why inaccessible? Because the Internet is so large, multilingual and informationally dense, it simulates the complexity of the world itself, yet it presents fewer barriers to exploration of that complexity. This lack of physical barriers more readily exposes a condition that we resist recognizing when we butt up against it in rl: that our understanding is not sufficient to grasp the world in its complexity. We may have a survey knowledge and we may have specialized knowledge, but knowledge as universal expertise is a doomed proposition. While many would see this as a common wisdom universal to the ages, it has previously been urged on us in the language of religious humility: bow before the infinite, o finite wretch, etc. The intellectuals, somewhat in defiance, have always sought to “broaden’’, “deepen’’, “expand’’ their knowledge as if there were no certain promise of defeat in this.

The Internet, its world, forces us to acknowledge our limitations: the problem can be displayed mathematically to us, by our computing machines. Sartre’s the Self-Taught Man attempts to read through the inventory of the local library alphabetically. Many an intellectual harbors a fantasy of reading through the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica. But the Wikipedia now holds over a million entries, and is growing; a broad Google search can yield millions of pages; the catalogs of Amazon and others confront us with terrible figures: millions of books, millions of movies, albums, billions and billions of man-hours on display. Even thousands of graduate theses, even millions of bad poems. This is our world, expanded perpendicularly to its surface, piled with all the information that has been teased from stony being, and given to us to wander at will. It is nothing but one of Borges’ maddening universal libraries.

Some clarity, of a sort. Confusion is caused by too many things going on, where the confusion of things cannot be condensed into a sensible whole. That is, confusion is caused by too many little things and not enough big things. Now, the ways to avoid confusion are multiple. They are:

• Avoid locales with too many small things of the sort that demand your attention
• Narrow your vision to limit the number of things you see
• Only look at big things learn new ways to see sets of many small things as big things

The most sinful of these ways is the third. This way can make you very foolish or very powerful. The first and second ways are not sinful, the prejudices of intellectuals aside, but they are-for what it matters-small. The fourth way is the challenge issued to the “modern intellectual’’. It means to craft new categories for things that have never been recognized as things before. It can be terrible, because you must live within the vast swarm for a long time, trying to find the rule that binds the things together.

Three conceptions of history:

• “One damn thing after another’’
• An arrow shot from the beginning of time
• Four-dimensional matrix, an ice prison(and many others, more mature)

This is relevant because history becomes a problem for human beings when it ceases to be a guide but a source of confusion, i.e., when the span of history becomes too long and the actors too numerous. The first conception falsely relinquishes a claim to guidance; in fact, it gestures slyly at human nature; and it recommends belief in the gods. The second conception is, of course, the crusader’s; also the liberal bureaucrat’s; and it can be buffoonish in its rush to absorb violent accidents and incidental jokes into itself. The third conception is a useless lie, because it simply posits a possibility of absolute knowledge that is impossible; and the image is dreary, anyway. Now, arrows shot in time, from different points…

Editor’s note: the lack of irony is a bullet fired in the cause of moral seriousness.

The source of the present confusion, why the Riefe quote appealed to me, is this growing awareness of mass movements in the “spectral parallel world’’ of the Internet the ultimate meaning, direction and force of which I can only guess at. I have my theories, though, the reason I am drawn to investigate and register these phenomena in the first place. Since my theories are kooky, relating to the far-flung future and deriving their conviction from a slapdash review of history, history of thought and systematics, I suffer from the recovering delusional’s greatest fear: of confirmation. To guard against false confirmation-rubber stamp of madness!-I try to watch what’s happening with an unprejudiced eye, but this requires persistence of inquiry, and it is this persistence that is encoding my mind with its growing obsessive fixations.

I try to comfort myself that I am merely developing an expert knowledge, but I know that the particular injunctions I have taken from my martyr’s study of philosophy make the attainment of mere expertise impossible. Learn to limit your horizon-yes, if only I could. Discontinuity is the new, infinitely harsh, infinitely hated teacher of wisdom-the student wants to run away to old teachers. How to make sense of it all?

From the wiki:

An Ethos in Bullet-point Form!

Remember: This is the site’s ethos, not yours. You go be how you want.

• Moral with respect to human suffering.
• Amoral with respect to nature, God, propriety, order and prudence.
• Belief in omnipresent, beneficent Doability.
• Idealist in dreaming phase.
• PMA in planning phase.
• Realist in prescription phase.
• Idealistic PMA-realist in action phase.
• Faith in phrases.
• Committed to wholesale disaggregation of interests.