disclaimer: my “brainstorm” postings are used to dump sentences and refine them later to one specific posting.

On many things we do in our life we have once started blank. But we read things, thought about things and took a next step, then a next step and another step. That one thing that was once “one simple thing” has become a complete world of its own with its own complexity.

You can see this on the left. On top is the simple idea you had years ago. During the years you have developed, made choices and had input from articles, books, knowledge (blue balls). The questions and topics that are now interesting are on the bottom, in the green area. the rest is done that understand that.

Then you meet someone and want to talk about a certain branch (the green blob) on which you want to talk since the green area is currently your focus and your interest, the top part of the tree is boring and considered “knowledge”.

It so often occurs that the person with who you talk somehow reverts the complete tree to a talk about the top node. Something which is in your mind something you have covered years ago. It’s almost unbelievable that someone wants to talk about the simple things in life, the most basic conceptual things on things in your household or things life. As if the complete tree is absent. It’s almost insulting.

Often those talks are either someone wanting to explain to you how to get from the top node to the next 1mm in the tree and you get advice on how to do that, which only gives as a return from my side “uh…” (complete silence). Where you have to choose between the decision to declare the other person mental or just smile and say “hmm yeah interesting didn’t know that“ or “yes you are right, genius, good top, thanks”.

Often those talks force you into decompiling knowledge you have no longer as handy facts or even can catch your interest for more than 1 second since it’s listening to someone explain things you consider elemental. Which is of course good for communicating about the top node but totally misses the point on explaining the complexity and the questions in your green area.

It’s like discussing biology as a whole (with in your tree the thousands of articles on biology and the constant array of new articles) and someone has just thought about a microscope and you have to discuss the idea of having a microscope.

Often those talks also are somewhat like this:

There is no way to close the gap. You could discuss 1+1, you could talk hours about it, but … only to close the emotional gap. It does not bring you any further, your only investment will be to spend your careful time in educating the blue person.

Somehow you need the blue person travel some years in knowledge in about 1 minute to make him or her understand what you are talking about.

We send our children to school to get all kinds of pyramids in their head because we don’t want people in our society having discussions on the most basic top nodes forever and ever since that would bring us no further. It is absolutely possible to explain a child the complete tree by showing a picture of the 10 generic building blocks of the tree. It is possible to communicate a high level drawing so he at least has an idea of what he is learning but the only benefit will lie with the child, not you, since you already have the complete complexity in your head. What would be the profit for you to do so at all? Basically it comes down on just being nice enough. Other complexities are impossible to communicate like “physics”. Other than drawing 50 boxes of the fields of physics. Does that help you? No.

So what we have invented are basically references. If a child wants to know about a certain topic he has a textbook to look it up (or a teacher giving him the information pointing to that chapter).

As grown ups we refuse references. If you talk to someone who has a question and you simply point him to a certain node in the tree (somewhere at the top) since you find it ridiculous that you have to put the energy in keep explaining the top part then you will get a strange look. Somehow grown ups refuse to accept the complexity of the pyramids (or christmas trees).

Everything you talk about should remain simple, you should talk about the top nodes in all of those pyramids (the really simple things and keep repeating that same things over and over and over). When we watch tv we see the same elemental discussions. We watch moron tv. If at  all some complex topics are discussed it is either to laugh about or "be amazed”. When we look at the Internet we see, also on this blog, information that has long been covered and is seen by someone at the real complexity level as extremely novice or even retarded.

A discussion could involve why you, in the green area, make a step from a to b while you have to that in the context of someone who is barely grasping the top node. Don’t understand me wrong, it also works the other way around, the other person is on other levels on other pyramids. I’m not typing a therapeutic blogposting but I’m thinking on how to resolve that general problem.

I don’t believe that communication works with this problem. It helps in reaching a status quo. It helps in a political sense. It helps to end discussions with a direction somewhere aligned with the top node. Which doesnt bring us any step further.

The advancements are always made in the bottom of the pyramid, since that’s where the green area is. Never on the top of the pyramid since … many people already know what top of the pyramid is like, in extreme detail. The only thing todo there is to reconfigure nodes.

Communicating and understanding the top nodes is relative. For one person the top of the pyramid is in his green area, another person considers it as basic knowledge.

All of us are further down the road on other pyramids/christmas tree. Somehow the trick should now be to get everyone on all possible pyramids on the green level. The real interesting level to make advancements instead of repeating and repeating the same words over and over again.

We should have something that constantly educates us. The result would be that any elemental topics (and that basically means on every sentence that comes out of your mouth) would be verified against the knowledge on all fields and instantly takes you a step further on the pyramid. That same system should give electroshocks on anyone who refuses to dive deeper into a pyramid. And basically every concept is a pyramid of its own.

If you see an ant you know some basic stuff about ants and maybe you would write about it and talk about it. Maybe you have played sim ant and read the basic books about ants and saw a national geographic episode about it. But you should know the thousands of articles on ants. Every latest and complete knowledge on any type of ant to make any sensible sentences on ants. You should know science about ants, biology of ants, history and ants, demographics on ants, etc… preventing you from making stupid remarks which are not true or making decisions that make no sense afterwards.

There would no further waste in time on repeating knowledge. Or spending a lot of time “educating” or convincing or having not true knowledge or having only party knowledge on every topic,every word, every field of knowledge, practical, household or scientific.

This was a first “raw” throw at something I don’t even know how to describe but it involves asking five times “why” on everything we think.

disclaimer: my “brainstorm” postings are used to dump sentences and refine them later to one specific posting.

Maslow identifies at the lowest level of his pyramid:

• Breathing (Respiration)
• Drinking
• Eating
• Excretion (Feces, Urine)
• Sleep (Resting)
• Shelter (Warmth, Life)

The funny thing is that, apart from breathing, we have to pay for the other ones. They are all more or less in our household budget.

I wonder when breathing will become a necessary part of our budget. E.g. to pay a certain amount of money to be able to pay for clean air. If that moment is there then we have fully capatalized the society.

drinking

We already pay for “drinking”  (yearly regional water taxes), on top of that we have some more fun by buying more expensive drinks at the supermarket (e.g. coca cola, coffee, thee, beer). I wonder where that fits in the pyramid?

(If it does not fit that could well be since this pyramid approach has never been proven and is most likely false)

disclaimer: note that the pyramid is a fool’s dream

Conducted in 2002, a recent study forwards this line of thought, claiming that "the hierarchy of needs is nothing more than a fool’s daydream; there is no possible way to classify ever-changing needs as society changes"^[6].^{[unreliable source?]}Chilean economist and philosopher Manfred Max Neef has also argued fundamental human needs are non-hierarchical, and are ontologically universal and invariant in nature – part of the condition of being human; poverty, he argues, is the result of any one of these needs being frustrated, denied or unfulfilled.

 

Well… still I would like to know where my coffee fits in

One thing to note and to process further is that the tags applied to a post tell a story of their own in their relation e.g. If I post a tip on firefox I would tag it “firefox”  “howto” (or something alike).

The strange thing is that a sort of sentence is created “A howto on Firefox”

Could it be that by collecting enough tags, the stories can be created automatically?

Anyway by just creating a tagcloud on tags this concept is totally absent. The total set of tags need to be taken into account and processed into some sort of sentence. These sentences have a main “verb”  in this case “firefox”. That firefox concept then has multiple subtopics of which one is “howto”.

The difficult thing now is to write this code into WordPress, this sort of retro-actively trying to form a sentence and then do some sort of natural language processing on what the user means.

Therefore we need additional info like an analysis of the text of the post and e.g. words people use to get to that posting.

I wonder if we can create complete sentences with each posting one day.

(continued from previous brainstorms)

Now x-mas is coming I note that the wishlist and todolist types are more or less the same.

Let’s see what we can do with that for starters, they are simple enough.

- posting contains title and content
- additional fields could be added see hundreds of wishlist and todolist applications and sites.
- user should select if it is visibile, in rss feed etc…
- different views are needed e.g. wishlist for family A and wishlist for family B
- they should be traceable to higher level goals but since these are not in place yet, this will be part of future functionality.

All of this should actually be part of some project workflow but this also does not exist yet… work to do

I like to start by just using pen and paper wherafter we can model it further in other tools.

You have a certain amount of goals. These lead to things you need to buy. Some you own (you are going to buy them) some you want others to buy (becomes on your wishlist). Basically you tie other people in on one of your households workflow by using the wishlist system.

By setting different kinds of owners you can assign different people to different parts of your wishlist.

In a sense the wishlist item is a special todo list item. In fast the todo list item is part of something bigger and does not even exist as a concept by itself but that will be in further months to create:

So to once again repeat:

- You or your household have set some goals (also tied to your budget posts and your time)
- Because of the goal “fun” you define the subgoal “have a hobby called music”
- One of the hundreds of things under there is “buy new cd of genesis”
- That then, leads to an entry in the workflow management system of your household “acquire new cd”
- That again leads to subtasks of which one is to actually buy the cd (other subtasks could be to play the cd, write about the cd, store the cd, whatever). It includes the status of the task, a description, some dates (when wanted and when you absolutely want it, etc…) and the priority so you can see which of the thousands of things you really need most

That task list can be viewed in many different ways, thousands of ways, depending on your query. One specific report can be the “wishlist report”: all the items you need to buy and which you put on the name of person X or just “wishlist” as a generic name for “outside household”. Another representation/view/report is the todo list which contains the items who you DO have put on your own name as an owner. This includes things to buy but also other things.

Of course a field exists that specifies if it something to buy / if it is suitable to be put on the “wishlist” representation.

This is just a little outtake from the household framework which pretty much ties in everything your household does and makes it much more mature enabling households to do many great things.

We currently are in a phase that we have addressbooks, todo lists, agenda, budget application etc…

In a more connected approach these elements will be highly connected. The trick is to tie the individual elements to their “why you are noting it” and form more atomic elements in another structure.

That will boil down to having 1 application instead of multiple applications with just different views based on the objects and the relations that you find interesting on that moment. It will just be “your household application”.

There will be only 1 application in the future for households and for practical reasons I’m going to base it on a “weblog”. This is because the atomic elements could be anything in any application. I could start off from any application (e.g. todolist) to reach the goal but the weblog has already some advantages. It is already present, connected, has atomic elements that can pretty easily be changed and has relations and is based on a database. Furthermore the community interested in “weblogs” is big enough to slowly move to a change in what that concept actually is.

(continuation of previous brainstorms)

The impact on common households on the planet is so big that it almost does not fit in my brain.

On the moment that we will provide tools and structure to households, which are in fact mini companies, they will have an increasing impact on economy. They will almost automatically generate more revenue, tap into all existing markets with new products, services and information. They will undoubtly group in new kinds of organizations most automatically via a disconnected social network based on the elemental concepts I wrote about before.

I can probably write some books on what will happen when households across the planet mature and become an integrated part of not only the economy but on all other fields.

Households currently are not able to do this. They simple do not have the tools which enable them to do so. The household framework will provide them with the infrastructure and guided processes to enter a new age.

In contrary to the inventors of the atom bomb we also need to think on what can go wrong. What will go wrong if this technology becomes mainstream. Can it lead to bad things? Can we better leave households chaotic, non-integrated units as they are currently? Will it be like providing a chainsaw to a child?

All in all it’s a logical evolution of the thing that started it all “the hyperlink”. What happens when you can link objects to each other? Well… you get the WWW Internet… what happens when you provide somewhat more meaning to the objects? Well.. for starters you will get the household framework, but on a broader scale “everything” will be connected to “everything” based on these atomic objects with their atomic linkages.

If you then go more down to earth, more practical, you would look around you and take a look at where these objects could reside it is the most logical for a household to be present on what we currently call “weblogs”, since they are simply the most used form of digital presence on the net.

It’s all logical.

What would happen after we have connected everything with everything? One thing would be that duplication of knowledge would be less needed. Meme research would be a big thing since new memes would follow extremely fast paths within all connected entities. New knowledge and new ideas. This could be a scary thing with false memes. It could lead to networks of false knowledge propagating very fast throughout societies. Somehow we need to build things in there to stop the propagation of false memes so they can not lead to false decisions.

Since households (including the 1 person household) capture 100% of humanity it could be very dangerous to connect them all. Currently ideas are in some university or institute and then make a long, time painful way to travel through countries, governments, religious institutions, all kinds of groups and intermediate layers before they enter the minds of a person (because that person heard it in the pub from another person). In a fully interconnected world new ideas will skip these layers. They will, 1 second after writing down the idea, be present “everywhere”. It’s really hard to judge the impact of that. I think we need to isolate new memes and trace them back to origins and give them ratings or something. Who knows.

Another thing is that the “why”’s on everything will contradict on many levels. If two countries currently have a fundamental debate on “why” it will lead to a war. This is logical since only one “why” can be true (at least that is how humans see it). A fully connected web will painfully display the different why’s since they will lead to conflicts in the system. They will become very visible, for everyone. This could lead to pain instead of pleasure.

(continuation of previous brainstorms)

I think that the types of postings is fairly easy to establish, just another taxonomy term.

Based on the type a lot of things can happen, this should be fairly open so that third parties can create their own additions based on type, possibly proceeded with a namespace so they can be identified.

Suppose you want to put the goals of your household on digital paper, so you can relate your budget posts to it, you would create a new posting of type “goal” or maybe “hhf.goal”  (hhf = household framework). This would then have some predefined form fields and the possibility to link other posting types to it e.g. budget posts.

You may wonder why we would not use tags, that’s because the tags is really in another realm and has another meaning. The tags are for identifying content not the type of postings. The type of postings are related to the “why” you post and the tags are related to “what” you post.

For a contact the type would be something like “hhf.contact” where you get a form of contact details and could relate it to “hhf.address” or “hhf.socialnetwork.hyves”. Displaying all contacts or all members of an address would as simple as showing the unique archive page of the type.

(continuation of previous brainstorm)

I finally made the big “Eureka” moment. As I previously was thinking there are several different workflows which can lead to different kind of postings.

The big click in brain moment is to actually identify the postings as being of a different type.

Until now the tags are merely used to identify “content” meaning that they identify a certain posting is about “movie”, however these kind of tags can be considered content themselves.

The new thing is the realization that a lot of postings are not “content” in themselves but of a different type.

Which means that postings that fall in the type “brainstorm” could have totally different properties than a normal “header-content” posting. These postings of specific types in a workflow have:

- a state
- have a previous and next post
- are sometimes part of a “project”
- have an owner
- have several different dates

And could therefore be not merely postings of “one big block of text” but contain forms with code behind it to lead to actions within a workflow. They will have much more structure. These are the postings which will govern the flows within a household. It makes much sense to consider both process steps, actions, reference, product and service as the same atomic thing but with different properties based on the type.

I could even imagine that every posting according to its type becomes a application on itself. E.g. a post of type “calculator” would become a calculator, a post of type “todo” would become a todo item and a post of type “wiki” becomes a wiki but that would be one step further on the way.

Ofcourse certain posts with certain types would be taken out of the rss feeds and “blog” and merely make sense for the household or person itself to position in the framework.

(continued from previous braindump)

So … some things that need to be in place:

- a clear division of our households budget and time division up unto micro level
- a division of categories and / or other representations on the blog/portal/thing
- a workflow per category (on every level) to come from reference to brainstorm to ideas to actual products
- “buckets” called brainstorm, idea, task, etc… to put posts from the workflow in
- metrics and reporting facilities to measure the succesrate and set new targets
- some more tooling and coding…

after that:

- prioritization of the seperate elements, define projects and start it

(continued from previous braindump)

Let’s start with the easiest parts: the media ones. Since they are mostly tied to only one goal in life “have fun”.

To explain:

Within my and probably your household you spend money on music (cds, concerts), movies (cinema, dvd), tv (subscription, dvds), etc…

If you have a budget in your household you will have probably put all of these costs under a single label, something like “fun” or “hobby” (this is different if you are in the media business, then it becomes work).

The biggest problem is to come up with a good description (and to keep track of expenses ofcourse).

It would something like:

goal: have fun –> requirement: have hobby music –> use cases: buy cds, go to concerts, write about music non functional requirements: have tooling to listen to music, have websites to download music

WordPress however offers us tags and categories, so we need to work with these. The category structure would therefore become something like:

“fun “   -> “My hobby: music” –> …. ?

The last part is rather difficult, to find good descriptions of these subcategories. You can see this by going to http://edward.de.leau.net/about/music (which is such a chaos its a good case). The trick is to find the reason on why I posted the posting. The reasons are the actual subcategories. The problem is that they all seem to be posted for different reasons lol!

One subcategory to add is “brainstorm”. I will add this to each category because it will contain my personal brainstorms on, among other things, how to generate money, have more fun, be more active or just think about the things in this thing. That’s the “meta” part inside a category (well at least i think it will be like that).

Let’s work on this further on a further blogposting.

(continued from previous braindump)

So the first thing is to test if Projects would work or if they are at all projects or just “life categories”. However for now I feel that they are. But they are not the only thing, what more is there?

Let’s take a households budget. Suppose I collect information on it, links, how to do it, etc.. Then I create the actual budget which would have some spinoffs. I keep doing this each year. I invent a workflow around it. This is not really a project. This is some regular thing. Just “maintenance” or something regular todo like buying shoes once and again.

So now we have 2 concepts: projects and “regular todo stuff”. And sometimes projects end up to be “regular todo stuff”.

How shall we call them in the context of a typical household?

Another thing is that some or useful for blogging purposes (maybe you want to earn money with it) but others absolutely depend within your household. Sometimes a complete project or sometimes just the details. However you would like to integrate the concepts somehow.

How are we going to integrate the thing inside the household with the thing outside the household (or rather on the border of the household”)?

A third category would be things you do for socializing e.g. your friends feed. Or giving reactions to things happened to friends. I mean, joining a social network is not exactly part of one of your households goals. This third category can be seen as laying completely outside your household and is tied to a mini crm implementation. A sort of hierarchical addressbook with a lot of extra functionality.

All three of them share that they have contacts attached, todo items attached, tooling attached, processes attached and different goals attached.

I was thinking on how how categorize my blogpostings. My first try was to categorize them all under a common hierarchy (e.g. like dmoz has) but I realized the “purpose” was missing in that hierarchy.

So I realized that postings that were in that common hierarchy were a mix of postings. Most of the external references I posted because I wanted to do something with it. It gave me ideas or I wanted to explore in the field further maybe to create my own product or service later (which could be anything from blog posting to moon rocket to new religion).

So I decided to make 2 hierarchies. The first one for “inspiration, reference, knowledge etc… posts”, since most of these are already tagged or existing in some hierarchy they really “belong there”.

Then there is a set of postings I post to braindump ideas coming out of it, raw ideas followed by more clearer brainstorms  followed by ideas. These ideas are well formed and can be published in another hierarchy. The actual postings of describing the tasks I then perform to come to a product or service can lead to how to postings that fit in that same hierarchy (howto postings or reference postings or top 50 whatever postings). The final product or service then can get a life outside of this blog portal on its own environment where it can help with forming ideas during the product or service lifecycle.

Of course this is applicable to only a set of the blog postings. Some are merely posted for fun, for entertainment, for use of social interaction and so on. So these need also to fit somewhere in there.

Still in brainstorm phase

Mijn indeling in categorieen zoals dmoz slaat natuurlijk wel ergens op maar ik had net zo goed die van wikipedia kunnen kiezen of een van de miljoenen andere indelingen en je loopt natuurlijk gelijk tegen de complexity van dit soort zaken op. Allerlei zaken die eigenlijk niet kloppen in je hierarchie, universiteiten vol met onderzoek naar het ordenen hiervan bovendien is de indeling die ik kies er een die klopt volgens wat IK blog. Eigenlijk zou zo wat alles onder “prive gedachtes” moeten hangen. Waarbij het natuurlijk dan wel weer interessant is hoe de indeling van die prive gedachtes nu is en te kijken of die prive gedachtes onder een dmoz categorie zijn om te hangen.

Een andere indeling is in brainstorm –> idee –> product of service maken –> product of service pagina zelf. Een beetje die workflow proberen aan elkaar te lijmen, maar tsja.. dat is toch lastig en veel werk, vooral omdat onder elk deel meerdere posts hangen en omdat er een wederkerige link is een soort link naar de volgende post en een link terug. Die moet ik er dan telkens manueel in gaan hangen en dat is ook niet handig bij wat je probeert te bereiken in zo’n gedachten proces.

Het bracht me in ieder geval wel op het idee om een tag “brainstorm” te maken. Een soort stortvloed van zaken die door je brein gaan. Heel erg rauw zonder dat je nagedacht hebt over hoe je ze uiteindelijk wilt verwoorden en/of kritisch hebt nagedacht hebt over elk individueel punt.

Eigenlijk zou dat gekoppeld moeten worden aan wat andere tooling zoals wikis e.d. Ik denk ook dat de fase “brainstorm weer in een aantal andere fases is op te delen , die zou ik eigenlijk wel terug willen zien.

Het plaatje hierboven laat ongeveer zien waar ik naar toe wil met een deel van de blogpostings. Alleen de Postings waar voldoende over nagedacht is en voldoende onderzoek naar gedaan verschijnen in de blog hierarchy. Bij het uitwerken van geselecteerde ideeen kan het eindproduct of service als eindresultaat een bepaalde lijn closen en doorgaan in zijn eigen website of product / service environment met lifecycle posts, marketing e.d.

Ik heb even geen zin om het plaatje verder uit te leggen, dat komt tzt wel iets verder in de blog workflow. Waar het op neerkomt is dat ik maar een deel van de blogpostings interessant zou vinden om uiteindelijk te posten voor anderen. Een ander deel van de blogpostings beschouw ik als referentie materiaal of posts benodigd om gedachtes te ordenen maar ook op stapjes vooruit te kunnen maken omdat je de vorige stappen vastgelegd het op digitaal papier.

Allereerst maar eens even nadenken hoe ik de blog ga opsplitsen tussen nederlands / engels.