 have a recording of this call. This is the generative commons call on Wednesday, July 7th, 2021. I have to remember which of the calls this is. Hi, Judy. You preparing breakfast? Yeah, I'm working on breakfast, so I'm probably going to go off camera just for a little while while I eat. No worries. No worries. Thanks for being here. Stacy and I were just reflecting on the social nature of what's going on. And she was commenting on the series Halt and Catch Fire, which is about geeks having fun. And it's interesting, because a lot of people, a lot of left-brain thinkers, typical type X managers or whatever you want to call it, either don't think there's a lot of value in community, whatever that is, or think that it can be brought up on command. And then we need a community. So then we'll just snap our fingers and go up. And it ain't, and it don't, and it's not. And so trying to figure our way out, in some sense, community first is interesting. Well, one of the thoughts that I've been having recently had to do with how might we look at all the different things we're doing and try to actually set up a short project plan for three to six months of exactly what it is we plan to get done and what the metrics would be to demonstrate that we had success. Because I think we need to move into the implementation phase. And it almost doesn't matter what corner of the elephant you start watching, as long as you have an experiment going and you're trying to do something and getting people to work together collectively to do it, then hopefully result will accrue. And then you'll be able to see what the next logical step would be. So funny you should mention that. Pete made a suggestion yesterday. I had just a one-on-one call with Pete. And he had a great suggestion that was really quite simple and made a whole bunch of sense. Because in trying to raise funds for OGM, I'm trying to raise funds for OGM fellows or fellowships, which is a complicated thing. It's like, who's a fellow who's not a fellow? And then fellowships tend to last a long time. So when do you say, hey, what you're doing isn't working or how it tends to be a little bit strange? So he said, how about instead of that, raising funds for OGM projects? And thinking about it as projects. And then each project gets staffed with the different kinds of people who bring their special magic arts. Each project has deliverables for the commons under the rules of the generative commons agreement. And that way we can support the people we know are building stuff. And we can sort of help guide their efforts to feed the commons. That's splendid. We've had a lot of groundwork late actually with what we already did in the larger preparation for Lyonsburg. I think we hung up in the complexity of trying to project plan each thing separately. But if we view it not as a longer run project plan, but as a three or six month sprint, which means it's definitely discreet. And we should walk and run and demonstrate to ourselves and the world that we can do something in a finite timeline and deliver a, at least the metrics of success, was set out to set, let's say we want to create one little corner of the generative commons. And basically what we want is an experiment to see if three different sovereigns can come in and participate and share their information. So we only have to identify three of the hundreds or thousands that might be available and figure out a discreet, we're going to identify three, we're going to reach out to them, the measure of success will be the number of successful meetings, whatever we put in, to frame some little corner. And that's kind of like walk before you run or crawl before you walk. But I think that would help move us off the dime of endless discussion and debate about what we might want to become five years from now and into let's just start moving and see where it takes us. Totally agree. And Michael and Stacy, just in the process of getting a memorandum of understanding with Lion'sburg for OGM, we had a pretty big plan about what to achieve, what OGM would do over the next period. And then it just started unfolding into like what seemed to be recursive for infinitely unfolding project plans because there were so many different parts. And that just like, well, it exploded my brain for a while. And then we said, let's just cut this down and make it super simple and figure out how to get that done and that work. But that means that we have some old plans we can go reach into. And if we just start sort of digging at the coal seam, I don't know, I like that analogy better than I like, like swinging a dead cat or whatever else. Many ways to skin a cat, but still. Even for the OGM one that you're working on right now, Jerry, I think that we should step back for a day or two and develop some discrete measureables that are what we're gonna get done that you believe you can realistically get done. And I don't think the done is getting a certain amount of money. The done is building the tools and the outreach and the connections, having a calendar with an appointment every two days to talk to one person about it, having a process for getting feedback on the video and or developing additional short clip segments to modify it, whatever those would be that just shows discrete movement over a period of a few weeks. We could even say eight weeks because we're almost a month into OGM. So what are we gonna do in the next eight weeks, one week at a time? I like that. That would help kind of give us the milestones. And I think the milestones are really important. What we choose as measures, is what you measure is what you know is an old science thing. You get what you measure. Yeah, you get what you measure. And so if we can set discrete goals, I'm not saying it's gonna be easy to identify those goals but I don't think it should take more than let's say a one and a half hour call or a couple of 45 minute calls. Take a first pass, everyone walk away, think about it, come back and finalize and then shoot it off. I agree. Okay. Well, I think a life, I guess. Indeed, indeed. Cool, so let's... I would be waving magic fingers if I was on camera, but I'm not. Excellent, thank you. Do you know whether Pete's gonna join us this morning? I do not know, have not heard. We'll check Mattermost right now to see if he said anything. Okay. I'm actually using my tablet this morning being lazy. So that means it's harder for me to check Mattermost simultaneously. I'm seeing no separate note from Pete, so I don't know. Let me just ping him. I like, just wanna pipe in that I like the idea that, as simple as OGM is funding projects for the commons and end of mission, almost. It's like that, I mean, obviously there's a lot of flesh to put on the bones of the projects and what they are, but if in fact, everything that OGM does is by necessity for the commons, it makes a lot of decisions, I think, for us. And gives people a reason to be here and to join us and to support what we're doing because it's regenerative. I also think it's really important that we make the funding definitions, not participation, but outputs. And so it's a discrete task. It's not like we're gonna have people join the commons, it's that by joining the commons, you must do the following thing. Or to join the commons, we want to demonstrate with each person who joins the ability to accomplish something in a short period of time if the goal is well-defined. Then we have, it's not just an intellectual exercise. I don't mean to minimize the intellectual exercise because it's big, but I think if we want to be persuasive to funders that we're worthy of funding, they need to see results. That's just the way funding tends to work. And I think that that's, the result could be the development of the PR statement, it could be the development of the process for onboarding people. I mean, there's a lot of ways we could juggle it, but I just think we need to move into task definition and then recruit people to do the tasks. And that means they'll get paid for the task, but there's no commitment that they're a fellow forever. They're getting people to do work. Right, that makes sense. So this is tangential, but on point actually, one of the people I was going to approach is Rick Clow, who is a Googler, Zuggler, and is all about OKRs. He became like the go-to guy at Google to get them all using OKRs, which I'm only vaguely familiar with. And OKRs are objectives and key results. So put a link in the chat, in the Mattermost chat. I found that when I was trying to teach another organization about smart objectives, because OKR was sort of simpler, but then they had enough trouble even understanding the concept that I didn't dive deeper into the OKRs. We finally got it done, but it was a very arduous process because none of the people in this nonprofit had ever really done measurable objectives. And they're in their career. Which alas makes sense, unfortunately. Well, that's why I wanna make sure that as we move toward a nonprofit status, that's not a problem for us. Right, yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, and the steward ownership structure we're moving toward uses a 501c3 and a C-corp in order to build something bigger and different. And I'm not a fan of the 501c3 or the C-corp. So paradoxically, ironically, whatever the right word is, heading sort of toward those structures because they're deeply understood and well-known in American business and world. And then harnessing those to higher purpose to feed the generative comments. That's the goal here. All right, I'll be quiet and eat my breakfast now. I've done my sort of been thinking about this need to talk about it thing. Excellent, excellent, that works well. So partly I think we need to figure out who is already in the OGM community likes OKRs or something like OKRs. And it can help us sort of plan our way around those kinds of things. Because I think that would be... It would be one of our strongest players. He's a great project planner. Yeah, and so here's a startup OKRs template that somebody wrote that I put in my brain and it looks kind of useful. So I'll put that in the Mattermost chat as well. Great, let's, there we go. Oops, I've got to turn this into a Mattermost link. So what I would suggest, Jerry, maybe as a starting point is not to try to think up whole new things, but let's make measurable objectives of the things that are kind of underway already, which would be for instance, the collaboration with Vincent. That's a specific example if we can do some little corner that is compatible with Trove that fits with the generative comments concept. And I'd like to suggest we stay focused in this call on the generative comments. But pick things that are already nascent ideas because then you don't have to sell the idea or anything else. But it just means, you know, we've been talking for three weeks about doing this. What's our schedule for the next eight weeks? Right, right. Put that down as the objective and it may slip a little or change a little or evolve. But at least we know what we're aiming toward. So what would you say are the things of that nature, you know, that have measurable outcomes that are underway? I know we have some stuff going with Trove. Well, I think once we get into that conversation, which is a conversation I'm eager to have, we're sort of off the generative comments conversation. Oh, okay. Although we could focus that question on the generative comments. We could say, hey, what kinds of things are sort of separable, parsable tasks, objectives that we can describe to create the generative comments. And that makes a lot of sense. Oh, I like that a lot. Well, I would, yeah. And I mean, I think it's fantastic to think about what is a project that Trove being a sovereign entity, which to my knowledge is not a non-profit though he's looking at, you know, co-op structures, but still for profit. You know, how does something like that generate something for the commons? And that, I mean, to me, that's a great case study. And maybe it even makes sense that the idea that a project that Trove might undertake be interoperable with massive Wiki and Factor and, you know, whatever else is out there is a kind of gating criteria for a project that they can work on under the sponsorship of OGC. Yeah. Totally agree. And that's the first place I would sort of start looking is what is the space between that leads to interoperability, basically, you know, interoperability and open data, open resources in the generative comments as a goal would be one of the first places to look. And also, I think there's no reason to say that in order to work on the generative comments, you must be a non-profit or anything like that. I think that fleshing out how any entity, whether a government or a C-corp or a B-corp or a what-corp or a Q-corp, oh, God, maybe there's Q-corp's now with Q and I. Just kidding. How could any of those entities, like, what does it mean for them to participate in the generative comments fairly? And with the implications being that whatever project is in front of them at the moment that the outputs of the project as much as possible enter the comments. And I think that there's privacy requirements around this and then there's sort of proprietary information that will factor into these conversations somehow. We need to figure out what's the appropriate way to manage that so that as much of it as possible makes its way into the comments. Without being an enforcement of some kind that absolutely everything must be. When GNU first sort of became popular in pre-software and Richard Stallman was getting a lot of attention, the GNU license, basically there was a lot of talk about whether the GNU license, the GPL, the GNU public license was contagious. Meaning if you used GNU Unix or anything like that, GNU Linux or any other parts of it and accepted the GPL, were you then, was that contagious like ICE-9 to whatever other software you were doing? And that's turned out not to be a non-issue because that didn't happen that way. So, and this is like way beyond my pig read, but in our friend circle are people like Laurence Lessig and Corey Doctro and a bunch of other people who are black belts on these issues and who can sort of, we can consult with them and see how that should work. Go ahead, Michael. I'm curious to throw out the metaphor, fraught as it is. Oh, good. What a great start to a sentence, Michael. Go ahead. Go ahead. Of church, which we've used before. And when you think about a religious entity building a hospital for the common good, it's, there are private contractors involved in the building of that hospital that aren't just volunteers and the church is playing in the marketplace for the good of the commons. But the people who build the hospital are not gonna have any special rights to profit from the operation of the hospital. It's a fraught metaphor, but I think it's good for us to think about the idea that yes, we are these people who gather and talk and as Judy says, we don't wanna denigrate that. And there is something beautiful in church like about OGM, but we're also wanting to do projects for the common good. I actually think that doing the projects will be like a flower blossoming in terms of the good that can be done because it's not only delivering a result in the immediate, it's teaching a process of setting goals and objectives to accomplish outcomes. And as you grow into that, the measures and the specific objectives get broader and deeper and higher impact. But you start, again, you crawl before you walk. And so the important thing is to start people on the process, all of us on the process of really thinking about how we spend our time each day in terms of what goal it's moving us toward. And I don't, it's just a subtle change that it can be profound in terms of the focus of the energy. Absolutely. And Dr. Trich, for just a second, I think the more we float different metaphors and scenarios like, hey, this is sort of like a church in this way, the better we'll understand, we'll get a mutual understanding of what we're talking about here, what this is and how it works. I agree. So more of those, please. And I got stuck last week after this call, I started drafting in Google Docs an invite letter to invite more people to this call. And I kind of got stuck pretty quickly because I was like, I'll put a link to it, to the draft I've got in the Mattermost chat. And I got a couple paragraphs out that were fine. And then I was like, what, how does this work? Here we go, help us build. What if we set a goal for ourselves, because we have a week now before the next call and we're a third of the way through this call. What if we decide what we want to do as this group, limited though it'd be today and what we can pull into it in the next week to move us along. Maybe we could identify specific opportunity topics to explore for OKR approaches to the comments. Maybe there are, I don't know, five different zones or something of envision in the comments. I mean, part of it might be the process of membership. Another part might be the alignment of commitment to the comments. I don't know what they'd be, but I mean, just pick from the wisdom in this room and able to be discussed with others between now and next week. So that next week we could actually say, well, here are the framings of four different ideas for discrete activities that we would do for the next four weeks. It feels to me like one activity is I and whoever else who cares to need to get up on OKRs quickly. Because that's smelling like a really useful training. I'll commit to doing that, because I'm interested anyhow. Sweet. So let's pair up and go create it. Let's pair up, create a mini course on OKRs and then invite whoever else wants to come along for that journey. That sounds like a good to do item. And if early on, I can find the original article I sent this other group about OKRs. It may be included in your link as well, Jerry, but I think if we can at least get a nascent publication that's already out there by the people who are doing it, to those of us who work on it, we'll make faster progress on setting something up. That's a great suggestion. Okay, I just put that in the Generative Commons channel. Great. That you and I are going to draft a mini OKR course built from existing parts that are in the Commons and invite everyone along. So that we may use OKRs to guide OGM. And I think a probably a too large scale objective is to finish a Generative Commons agreement. I think that's one of the places we're aiming and I don't know what the bite size subtasks of that are. I think an earlier step is to figure out what is the table of contents of that agreement? Because I think we have a, and that's where I got stuck writing the draft letter, is that I have a general idea, but haven't done enough thinking and I need to do the co-thinking because I don't understand how it all works to get to a better flushed out understanding of what the parts are. And then one of my buddies when I mentioned we were working on this said, well, is this really a problem? And it was a good question. It was a very viable question. Nobody's asking for a Generative Commons agreement. It's spraying out of conversations we had, trying to look at old school intellectual property clauses and thinking, how might we rethink this so that when we think the old school intellectual property, what is the new school of Generative Commons? Like how, what? And so we're sort of pioneering and operating a little bit here. What if we didn't think so much about an agreement as identify in this early stage, key dimensions of specific objectives and how they align? Yes, and then the reason I say agreement is that it's a very concrete thing and it might be called a pledge, it might be called an umbrella, it might be called something else. But the reason I was heading toward the agreement concept is that it feels like, oh, okay, that's a page or several pages that someone could read and say, oh, check, check, check, I'm good on these, for example. And just a side story, but there's a really interesting book about Quakers, Money and Morals, something like that. And it talks about how the Quakers who were nonconformists, so were pushed out of all common occupations, invented a lot of stuff. So when you go look at the first sort of credit, like the granting of credit and stuff like that, it goes back to Quakers who lent each other money and there's plenty of other lending circles kind of through our cultures, but kind of the commercial credit that shows up in business, a lot of those were Quaker institutions, like Lloyd's Bank has Quaker roots. Audit, the idea of corporate audit comes out of Quakers who had open books for each other. So Price Waterhouse has Quaker roots and a bunch of these things were invented by outsiders because gentlemen didn't look at each other's books, you just sort of trusted blindly or I don't know the backstory behind like how this was an innovation in that day, but I imagine lots of dynamics were set in society at the time, they're just ran counter to building new institutions to try to create new forms of trust. So that all happened. And now we take for granted that, and there are laws that every company must have its books audited. Okay, awesome. So in the spirit of Commons, what are the ground rules, what is the agreement, what do we even call it is one of the questions here and how does it work? Please, Nessie. I don't know if this will make sense, but is there a way to build into the way the objective and goals are valued or measured that would catalyze those things that you wanna see happen regarding building of trust and things like that and the things that are normally left out of business type? I'm hoping so. I don't know enough about how OKRs and other forms of sort of objective mapping work, but my instinct is yes, my instinct is that that would lead us that way. Anybody else? That's a first step. I think if let's just say, there could be individual objectives and there could be I'm going to work with Michael to do this in the next three weeks. So if I and Michael keep track of how we come to agreement on doing that in the next three weeks, I mean, we in essence have created a trust bond because we're saying, I'm willing to work with you, I'm gonna trust you to hold up your end of the wood as we carry it across the field. And I think in a sense, that's how relationships build anyway. Most people don't jump in really big without discrete steps along the way with increasing complexity. And so I just think we're sort of taking a building block approach to all of the dimensions of this really big thing we're trying to do and starting with simple elements so we can build our confidence and our templates. And our practices. It's a great question, Stacy. And our habits. That we could include in the yet unspecified definition of what you put in a proposal for money, the mechanism of forming the group or the something of that order. Right. Good to see you, Michael. Thank you for working the inner tubes and the magics. You're muted on the new one. Yeah. Nice to be in the flesh. Yay. Yay, good to see you. That's right. This is the satisfaction of Zoom. It is a satisfaction of Zoom and I actually miss it when I can't see the people. Sure. And also it occurs to me that if we adopt some practices around something like OKRs that will be an easy way for anybody to come in and see what each organization is basically up to. You know, like here's the things we're aiming at right now. Here's the ones we finished before. You know, here's our Kanban board around OKRs or something like that. And I don't know how I assume OKRs dissolve into tasks that find their way onto Kanban boards, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the... What I remember of OKRs is basically I want to get to Abilene from Minnesota. To get to Abilene to Minnesota, there's a long traverse. So the key objectives along the way are to get to Kansas City, Missouri and then to get to Oklahoma City and then to get to Texas. And so... But they have to have timing on them. Right. So that you're delivering in sequence toward the objective. So that's... It's sort of like look where you want to be then back it down to what you can do in an interval of time then back that down into discrete things you can see right in front of you now knowing that the rest may change after you learn what you're doing right now. Which is very likely what Jordan is talking about when he talks about pool planning coming from his engineering and construction background. Yeah. Cool. And which leads me to ask myself, hey, has anybody written an open source OKR platform that has templates and tasks and things like that? That's certainly a query we can look into. I think there's a form. I think there's at least a template for drafting them. Well, I just pasted a Google Doc template into the Mattermost chat. So there's that but I didn't really look at it very deeply. It doesn't look like an empty template. It looks more like a description. But something like that would be great. That's a fine start. And then as we create ways of seeing ourselves if massive can create a table display of some sort and we can start feeding data in or if Factor would like to be the home of. And Michael, I'm dying to have that conversation about what you want Factor to look like and be like and its multifarious identities because maybe that's one of our tools for seeing ourselves. Our pillars, to be honest. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're talking. Uh-oh. You're breaking up on us, Michael. I'm freezing that. Yep. Yeah. We'll take your interrupted voice over the beauty of it. Okay. Go ahead and start over. Yeah, I was just gonna say as you were talking, this isn't about Factor, but the idea that I'm actually sorry, Phyllis, in Europe is like just very practical, very practical things and planning things out and project managing is something he's very good at too. But that part of the project journey is the prep. And if you're going from, you know, you're going to Abilene and you map it out, there's also the navigation of, well, we need a car and we need this much money and we need, and who's coming and like, you know, how is everybody gonna pitch in? All that stuff before you even leave is critical and those are measurable and determining those measurables is part of the process. And you all know about the Abilene Paradox, right? I'll put a link in the chat. The Abilene Paradox, I haven't reread the entry and I'm just gonna remember it vaguely, but it's like, it's the weird situation in which there's a group of people who have no particular goal and somebody says, let's go to Abilene. And suddenly they all end up going to Abilene, but only because somebody in the room said, hey, let's go to Abilene. It's like the Abilene Paradox is that a group can be on something altogether that just has nothing to do with the group or unrelated to the group. And it's fairly non-substantive. Yes. In terms of distribution or output. Exactly. To Abilene and you can have a beer in a Texas pub. There's actually a book title, The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Managing. Okay. So let's avoid that. Michael, can you tell us a little bit more about factor? I've never actually gone to your website to look at how it works in terms of the framing that it might offer for this early stage of trial and test? Well, I may have to do a video. I'm going to do a video just hoping that it makes me sound better. And I don't want to sidetrack us on a big thing about factor because factor is basically, I wouldn't call it a project management tool, though it can be. It's basically a place to collect information for most any purpose and either work with it alone, work with it in groups and or share it with the public or any segment of the public. And to me, it seems like it's obviously a product that can be used in for-profit ways, but we're very much oriented toward the interoperable use of it with other platforms and for other purposes for the commons. And so, I mean, we could talk more about factor, but I think thinking about how, not so much in our process, but how entities like factor or Trove or anything can be employed to do things where the result is something that benefits the commons more than that it benefits the entity, seems like the thing that we want to do. That makes a lot of sense. And I do think that there's a lot it's been sort of an interesting dance that we're still kind of figuring out like how entities like KikoLab and Factor and Trove and Massive Wiki and others to be named later work together for the good of the commons. It's almost a good, whatever it is, a good project to hand some group of us that don't, that aren't one entity, there aren't one sovereign to say, okay, you're in charge of creating this for the commons. And part of that is that you'll all be able to use it interoperably, but that anybody will be able to use it interoperably. But this piece of information that I have, that I, Judy, have can exist on these platforms and be found on the other platforms. If I so choose, that's the way it works in the commons. And Judy, I recommend just going and signing up for a free account, just registering, because then you'll see the interface, it's really elegant. And Michael, when you describe it, like you describe it as being sort of like pin board or Pinterest or something else, like what are the closest neighbors for you? I think in terms of conceptual grasp, the easiest thing is Pinterest in that it's one of the few platforms that's out there that has, it's social and yet it has a single player mode. I mean, you can gather, you can work on factor. One of the bad things about showing factor to people is most of what goes on on factor goes on in private, whether it's one individual using it for themselves or a group of people using it, but not chilling it to the world. And so there's a lot more of that than there is on Pinterest. But ideally, we want people to be doing things on factor that they do wanna share. Initially, we were just thinking of the commons of factor, but in the commons in general, we want people to be producing stuff that then gets found and leads somebody to OGM, to Trove, to more enlightenment around what OKRs are. Maybe there's a OKR fan group on factor and they're producing something and they wanna share it with the world so people see things that way. So yeah, Pinterest cross with Dropbox is often the conceptual model we use because Dropbox, you can't really, it's something that you work with and you don't, it's important when we're talking about factor that we get across the idea that it's not a social network in the sense that we wanna keep you engaged. You're really happy with Dropbox and even willing to pay for Dropbox, even if you don't spend much time on Dropbox, you don't wanna spend time on Dropbox. It's a place for you to focus, be organized, get something done in whatever way, but it's not visual. Pinterest is the visual side of that metaphor. And two thoughts along those lines. One is that because of my brain, I end up in a lot of conversations where I ask other people, where do you save stuff? And the most popular answer, I think, by a couple of yards is I have some private Pinterest boards that I use to just send myself to remember like what I saw, right? And that they use it as a memory aid and they may have one or several private ones, they may have several by topic or by part of their life. And then they have a public Pinterest that where they're busy doing what everybody else sees. And then second story, back in the days of Delicious, which is a social network for sharing bookmarks that I think many people regret no longer exists. A friend of mine was a digital historian and she said that for example, the tag C19, which means to historians 19th century, was this humming, humming online community for historians who gave a damn about the 19th century who were sharing resources and links and studies and whatnot. And I think that's a really ideal kind of dynamic to have. It's like, okay, I'm working over here, but the boundary between my private work and public is really easy to cross because I can make something public like by flipping a switch, no big deal. And then when I work in public, the benefits really multiply. So I'm urged by the dynamics of the platform to work more in public to create, and this is just to tie it back to the call we're on to create a generative comments, but I like that. So what other moving parts do we, Michael go ahead, it looks like you're about to jump in. Sorry, this is a video on, video off, Micah on thing is an interesting game. And you have to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time right away. Yeah, I was gonna say that I think, sorry, I'm gonna let you go ahead because I have to form the start a little better before I utter it. All right. And my question was gonna be to all of us and maybe just to ponder for next week, but so what are, how do we break the generative comments conversation quest project into sub projects that are bite size and tasty chewy and kind of fun. Cause Stacy and I started, we were the first two together on this call and we were like, you know, when humans get together and it's working, it's fun. Like these things are a big piece about community and having a good time doing what we're doing. And it's funny, there's a Venn diagram that I haven't written this post and I haven't seen anybody else write it, but I imagine if somebody has to have written it, but it's like learning, working and playing are three circles, which we separated. And if you go, if you go look to James Sussman, who's been traveling with a Juwanzi tribe of nomadic, you know, peoples in Africa for 30 years, you'll find out that when they go out on the forage slash hunt, it's fun. The kids are learning and like it's work play and learning all is one big circle. The Venn diagram is all overlap. And what we've done weirdly in Western society is we've somehow like torn these things apart like here's school and even in school, that's recess and that's, that part's fun. This is serious and don't fidget. And I remember a couple of, you know, a decade ago hearing from a friend who had a little boy who had been, you know, he got demerits in class for fidgeting. I'm like, he was like a seven-year-old boy. I'm like, well, okay. He's supposed to master like sitting in place the whole time. That's like the big lesson we're gonna teach him now. And all of this goes to the hidden curriculum of schooling, of course. Anyway, so I'm interested in dissolving the generative commons project into some OKRs without actually knowing what I mean about either, actually about how OKRs work, which hopefully we will learn up on quickly, but also about like all the, you know, many-headed hydra possibilities of the generative commons notion. And there's something about generative commons, there's something about this like an intention or an ethos or a spirit. And I heard, this may be apocryphal, but I heard that in the days of vinyl records in Jamaica that when somebody made a reggae tune, the backside, the B side of their record would be the tune without lyrics because the biggest compliment in that community was to be quoted in somebody else's song. So they were making the lyric-free song available on purpose because their community was all about picking up and quoting somebody and, you know, basically borrowing, it was remix culture made like just baked into the culture, right? And so I don't know if that's actually true. That's just something stuck in my memory from back when. But, you know, and in hip-hop culture, I don't know how much of that carries and what happened because there was an intellectual property crisis when hip-hop got big, a huge crisis because it was all so much about sampling. And everybody who had pieces being sampled were like, you can't do that. And then you learn to listen to songs differently because you're like, oh, right, that is that vanilla ice riff like in the middle of this new song over here and so forth. There's no such thing as a vanilla ice riff. You mean a David Bowie Queen riff. See, there we go, there we go. There's a guiding lathe, I think, who's a brilliant author and he wrote a piece about intellectual property years ago. I think I can find it. And at the end of the piece, he says, I really didn't write this piece. This piece is composed of full large quotations from these other articles. And he had composed an extremely smart piece on intellectual property by borrowing and folding together and remixing like other people's thinking. And it was just genius. Love that. Yeah. Let me see if I can find it. The Venn diagram notion, I think is really relevant to factor for one, but just for information sharing in general, if you're a knowledge worker. Sorry. If you're trying to press the other one, yeah. Yeah. If you're a knowledge worker and you're, and this speaks to a target audience for factor, but if you're a knowledge worker, gathering information is what you do. Honestly, the first sentence of your pitch when I saw it, it's like, wait a second, has Jared been looking at factors, early pitches? Because when you find something that matters to you, what do you do with it is really our elevator pitch in a way. Yeah. And I hadn't used it in a while and forgot about it. And I thought, yeah, that sounds pretty compelling. But if you're a knowledge worker, player, learner, assembling knowledge is what you do even at play. And so just pulling your knowledge together, organizing it the way you do in your brain, the way we all do in some way, the way some people do on Pinterest is what we all do. And the sharing of it is part of the fun. And having ways to easily toggle, hey, other people should see this. Should everyone see this? Should this group and this group see this? Should only my family see this? Who should see this? And should they be able to edit it and contribute to it? Should they be able to read only? What's the permissions involved? That's the thing that we wanna make more universal, I think that really seems like a process that should be available in the comments to everybody without somebody having to profit from your eyeballs, being on it for a longer time so that people share stuff that's gonna get them more hits or likes. Which tickles down the dark rabbit holes. But it's important here to note that the default dynamic on the question you just raised is often, we lock the door and then we unlock it selectively for different sorts of people. And one of the magic bits that makes Wikipedia work is that the door is unlocked pretty much all the time. And it's only locked in desperate times when we've got to lock a page because things have gotten overheated, which happens. But they try to keep a few pages as possible kind of locked. Which is like, but that's the beginning ethos which is completely counterintuitive, right? So I have a whole riff on design from trust. And I wrote a piece basically that says like when people first hit systems that are designed from trust, they have this visceral reaction like this is impossible. There's no way this should be working or could be working. And so how do you build a system and a platform and a community that defaults to open when our instincts are so well trained, so well grooved to protect, to lock down, to lock the door, everything else, right? And so this is kind of a, this is a cultural thing. This is a how did you start the dance kind of thing? And then when people join in, they're like, well, I joined in and I do it this way because everybody else was doing it this way, which is great, which is great because social movements have like inertia and other people once they see that something is working in a good way, all the people will join. And I think that's how remix culture and hip hop shows up and takes off is that clearly it's a brilliant thing. There's a Madion tune. There's a French guy who uses the, I always forget the name of the device. Anyway, I'll put, for after the call, this is a video that's one of my favorites from long ago about remixes. And he says, this is a tune made up of my favorite 31 songs. And he's using one of these little keyboards where every button is programmable. And all you see on the shoot, you hear the music and then you watch his fingers on the dashboard. And it is so artful. It is just because he programmed all the buttons and he knows where the buttons are. And then he'll hit a macro button at the top and all the buttons change what they are. So now he has a new keyboard, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just a brilliant remix of 31 of my favorite songs. And he's invented what is a cool new song as well. Love these things. Just FYI, I put a bunch of OKR references in the Mattermost channel. Awesome. From, I found the email I sent somebody else and just copy and pasted. So there's three YouTube videos and three books. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I think I'm willing to bet that on YouTube there's a couple of simple tutorial videos that we can start with too. It's called the Novation Launchpad is the device. And it's from Ableton. The name that I couldn't remember is Ableton, which makes these devices that are just amazing. If I were 12, I would be learning how to use an Ableton. Okay. I just wanted to push on the Wikipedia analogy a little bit, just to say that the beauty of Wikipedia is not only what you see going on. Yes, it defaults to public. Obviously there isn't an apparatus which may be unfortunate on Wikipedia for people to, for the editors of a page to be before there is a page. What's going on in private is everybody is amassing the knowledge that allows them to write the public entry and they're doing that individually or and it would be nice if they were able to do that collaboratively and say, okay, here are these 31 things from other sources that we are going to draw upon to make this public entry together. And that apparatus, that structure is, we assume it, we know that they didn't just make this stuff up out of their heads. There are citations that are then shown in the piece and there are links at the bottom of the page to these 31 other things that form the information that made this public facing thing. So, you know, easing that ability, letting, I mean, this is the way I feel like the information commons wants to work with a Wikipedia is that when there isn't a Wikipedia entry, there should be the searchable place that's all tagged up by the historians who all put C19 on this stuff. And if you put C19 and architecture and, you know, New York and the street, you're gonna find how, what style this building is in and how it came to be and be able to write the Wikipedia entry about it. So, you just triggered a cascade of things that might be interesting. So first, I have long, long, long wondered why news organizations and learning organizations did not cut deals with Wikipedia to use Wikipedia and then improve Wikipedia as they were using it. Instead, we had schools that were saying, you're not allowed to even use or look at Wikipedia. Like that was the reaction. I'm like, no, no, no, no. A really fun thing here would be to help build Wikipedia. Kids would learn like crazy. It would be fantastic for kids everywhere. And at one point I was suggesting to a friend, hey, just give kid, go to Wikimedia, download the wiki and give your kids an empty wiki and tell them to fill it out for dinosaurs without copying pages from the Wikipedia. Like go, go, go build your own version of it or something like that. Cause the exercise of doing that collaboratively is its own learning, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then separately, having this all tagged up made me laugh because I borrowed, there's a very eerie documentary called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. So I paraphrased that and I said all tagged up by machines of loving grace. And then the last thing you were talking about about tagging up our environment. Oh, one other thing I'll say is that Wikipedia does have, one of the rules of Wikipedia for pages is no original content. And so people aren't editing new things for Wikipedia. They're documenting stuff that already existed and then creating pages for stuff, which is a little bit limiting in what you said, but it doesn't have to be because there could also be a boundary for other places where other things exist that are collaboratively created, which I think is what you're looking for. But the last thing is, Phelan Morelife, who's been in some of our calls, he and Mark Thibault are collaborating on a startup that uses augmented reality to try to mark up the world. And the kinds of things that they're marking up with could be coming out of factor toward people who are then in the world, instrumenting them and putting geocodes on them and whatever else. So there could be this ecosystem where the data, which winds up getting sort of location stamps and other kinds of things, winds up being loosely linked depending on somebody's point of view and a role I think they're calling path makers. So they would have different players who come in and use their environment to make a path. And the path might be, here's my favorite tour through Philadelphia. The path might be, I'm in a museum right now, but a bunch of items that are relevant to what I'm looking at here exist in other museums. So I'm gonna make a path across museums and let you hop and skip, I'm making this up. But I think there's a bunch of interesting stuff there. So I'll put a cryptic comment with all those little notes to myself in the chat. And I'll add that location-specific piece is really, really potent. And in fact, not currently visible on factor, but formerly so, was a location tagging. We used a third party service that went out of business, but location tagging for any item. So if you're looking, you can have a map view of a collection of facts and you can find things by location, which feeds into what I have to talk to Mark Antoine. But the idea that you should be able to be in a place and search by a topic that you're interested in, things that are around that place for knowledge rather than yelp for restaurants or whatever is, I think, really, really potent. That's awesome. Judy, thanks for those links in the Mattermost. I think that last one looks like a really good starting point for our mini course or something. And I will try to create a page in the OGM Wiki using obsidian for OKR training or something like that. We can sort of build together there. And if we were using factor, we'd be sharing these links through factor, et cetera, et cetera. So this is a recursive conversation in some interesting way. Ideally, we each do it in our platform of choice and can get to the same information, whatever platform we're on. And that's the kind of thing that OGM would support as a project for the commons where anybody who was building toward that would have to be doing it for the public good. And interoperability, to me, doesn't seem to quite cover that. As a descriptor, is there a better name for that? Because if we can nail that, if we can describe that act and what that means for the different tools and all that, then we're getting somewhere really close to the center of the issue, I think. Because interoperability is the default name for, hey, these tools are data interoperable or just functionally interoperable or something like that. And absolutely, those are goals I have in my mind for what OGM could not necessarily create by itself but catalyze, right? But if we can find better language for that, even a catchy phrase, that would be fabulous. Yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, interoperability sounds kind of mechanical. It's very dry. It's very dry. Yeah. Hey, John. Oh, I thought things, there we go. Hey, John. We're just about to wrap the call, Alas. Yeah, I don't have a good word for it but the idea that really the lenses one puts on something, it's, yeah, I'll think about that. So the metaphor I use a whole bunch on this and I borrow a bunch of nature metaphors is the leaf cutter ants. And for anybody who hasn't heard it, leaf cutter ants can't beat leaves. So what are they doing? They're carrying the leaves into their nests where they were a subset of that particular genus and species of ant. You choose up the leaves, mulches them up and the spit plus the leaf matter they put on a fungus which they are tending underground. They're also known as farmer ants because they're farming this fungus. They feed the fungus. The fungus metabolizes the leaf matter and oozes a nectar that all of the ants eat. So unless they go about doing all these weird looking things and cutting down leaves and carrying, like I've been in a piece of jungle where there's a trail of ants walking across carrying leaves that are much larger than them. That's like really cool. And that's what they're doing. So, and by further analogy, I feel like one of the lone ants who's busy like mulching things up feeding a fungus, but I'm trying to figure out how can that fungus actually be shared much more broadly than just in this tiny little nest? Like how does that fungus become the healthy soil of the new commons? And maybe by the way, that might be a piece of our phrase. That might be, so we're busy because if you go back to food, the food systems and habitat and landscape, focusing on healthy soil solves a bunch of other things. And I don't know that this is an OKR way of looking at landscape management or farming, but soil organic matter is a good thing to measure. Soil fertility makes it absorb water better, makes it much more nutritious, makes it do a whole bunch of really great things happen out of it and leads to the recovery of landscapes and aquifers and so forth. So metaphorically, since soil is part of the old commons, like grazing commons for sheep, then if we're in the new commons and new commons are information commons, and I'm going back here to some language that I think Ostrom and her colleagues pioneered in Indiana and other places, then metaphorically shared, linked, open, reliable trustworthy, warm, contextual data is the new soil of the new commons. And if what we're doing is minding the soil together so that we can build more interesting, more generative things on top of it, that's really interesting. Does that fail for everybody or work okay? I mean, that's, I agree. I was just trying to think of something more tangible in terms of, I would just put this as an and, not a but, but when we think about how currency works and the degree to which whatever way you happen to be looking at value, whether you're looking at it in your pocket, in your bank account through one financial service through one transaction, the commonality is the currency that runs through all this stuff and you can pull all your currency from one place and put it in another place and you can have your currency privately, you can give it away. The bad thing is that it's very finite and it isn't generative in the same way that knowledge is, but you don't have it siloed and sort of owned by some other entity, it's always yours and it's always fluid. Now I guess fluidity is the thing in interoperability that's kind of what we want is information fluidity, which isn't a great phrase either, but. So David Baldwin talks, he did a lot of stuff on liquid democracy and fluidity, like it's in the air, yeah. Super interesting. So we should wrap our call where we've gone past our hour and just if anybody wants to make any closing comments for this call, this has been a super donor for me, thank you, which is so appropriate. I just want to come back to Judy's original proposal and just that notion of supporting projects for the commons as just being the essential nut of what OGM does and start coming up with even the little formative projects that can demonstrate that, I just love that. Me too, me too, thanks. Thanks everybody, this was awesome. We'll keep going, the lathering's repeat.