 Recording is on. Oh, there we go. It's official now. I love the echo, but it sounds much more profound. Recording is on, on, on, on. So how about you? How's your week been? Good, I'm just realizing that I'm overwhelmed by the scale of the problems I'm looking at. So I'm trying to figure out how to parse them down to, you know, it's the old joke, how do you eat an elephant? And the answer is one bite at a time. Yeah, yeah. And so a piece of this, one question that's active for me that's a little bit too abstract is, where is the fungus? Have you heard me riff on the big fungus? It was mentioned last week, but I think it was mentioned in response to, I was talking about one of the people, one of the crews I was working with last year who were building a thinking tool on SOLID. And they were called Mycelio. And before that, it was called Understory. And their metaphor is they are, they want to build the fungus, the body of the fungus which lives underground, which connects trees together and there's actually a forest-wide communication networking, apparently. So that's there. And that's, you mentioned the big fungus, but you didn't elaborate on it. So go. Cool. So I own, so if you go to thebigfungus.org, you'll find a little baby fledgling website. The conceit... You've got a lot of those. I do. I have many actually. I know, because I've followed a few of the links and it's like, oh, here's another website built, you know, and clearly as a starting point, but it's not very developed yet. Exactly. I do that a lot just as a placeholder for an idea. And if anybody wants to come in and edit and jump in, like it's on Google site, so it's super easy to build. So the conceit is that leaf cutter ants can't digest leaves. So why the hell are they up in trees cutting off leaf bits? It's because they're feeding a fungus and they have the symbiotic relationship with a fungus. And they feed the fungus, mulched up leaf bits. They inoculate it with the fungus and then the fungus metabolizes and feeds them nectar and tasty fungus bits, which keeps, so happy fungus, happy hive. And it gets actually even more interesting. They noticed that the subgenus of ants who were busy tending the fungus had like a white powder on their thorax. And so they took samples of the white powder, looked at that under the microscope, turns out this is a beneficial bacterium that acts as an antibiotic to keep the fungus safe. It's crazy. So the bacterium grows on the ants but keeps the fungus safe, right? Yes. You know who you should talk to, that this is my son who's doing a thesis, a master's thesis. He goes in every day to the laboratory and experiments on ants. Oh, seriously? Yes, seriously. Is he a mycologist? No, he's doing a biology or a master's degree in biology on living systems. That's pretty much. And he's investigating something called... Oh, look, I can't remember it right now, but how there's epigenetics, the epigenetics of... He's got like 20 hives of ants in the laboratory and he's doing all sorts of experiments. What's his name? Oh, you wouldn't see him online, William Lowry, unless you find his Flickr account because he's an amateur nature photographer. He's got quite some nice photos online. Well, I've just added him to my brain, so he's official. Well, now he exists in the biggest brain in the world, so now that's quite something. He is brain famous, I call that. Anyway, so tell me more about... I mean, I did read the big fungus but I read like there's like literally five paragraphs. So I'm just using that as a rich metaphor because I feel like I've been at the fungus phase for 24 years feeding this weird tool called the brain. And the brain happens to work the way my brain likes to work, but every time I put something in, and this morning I probably already put 10 links in my brain from the news in the info flood, every time I click something in, it feels like I'm snapping a little puzzle piece into the large sense-making thing that we need, except the brain is a proprietary tool that doesn't play well with others. There is a thing called team brain, but you're still kind of building just a brain. And partly I'm trying to figure out how to external, how to avert this brain, how to make it so that it's a public commons good. That still looks like the brain for me, but looks like Kumu to someone else and looks like Rome to you or whatever, right? No, right, okay. Or Hubei. And how might we then each use our favorite tool to curate and improve this shared asset? Well, the thing is that that is exactly what open standards are supposed to allow, right? If you, like a Tivoli Pub is an open standard for sharing content socially, and it defines a unit of content, and you can view that unit of content using, Asterdom or Frendica or whatever, any client, which, so that's one of the reasons why I want to put my hub on the 30s and use an activity pub. Because then I might create these little atomic units of content as notes and then eventually build them into, or opposed to articles which I publish. But if I have friends who allow access to my notes, I don't know if you've seen the blog post, but there's a graphic in there which shows that I mean, there's two levels of social in there. You've got followers who just see what you publish, what comes out of the public end, but you've got friends, which is a mutual two-way relationship, and you allow them to see some of the notes inside your brain, but only ones you select. So you can, a note can either be private, friends only or public, essentially. And you can do that with activity pub. And it doesn't, for somebody else to be one of your friends, it doesn't mean they have to have a hub. They just have to have a client on the, that uses an identity, yeah, that you can recognize. Exactly, that can process that piece of content, and they can. So I was talking about this thing I'd read recently on, because I posted my blog post to the Fediverse website. And the guy, he shared me something, which he wrote just early this year in January, let me put it in the chat if I can find it in this interface, here we go. It's another long post, but he talks about social knowledge fabric. So when you're talking about big fungus, he's talking about fabric, so. Yeah, yeah. The other metaphor is tapestry or mosaic. Those are also. Yeah, follow the link and look at the picture. The picture is not a tapestry. It's a mosaic tapestry. Yeah, so, and if you read the article, this is the article that I was reading and I was like, yes, yes, yes. But I was reading it on my phone, so I couldn't do very much with it. So that's when I get back from my holiday, I'm away for 10 days, and there's some way to do this, just to process that. And I think that you'll find that there's some similar ideas there. So you might want to connect with him and some of the people in that space. That's the website dedicated to the Fediverse, essentially. Absolutely, that's really cool. And it's an open standard, so that's the sort of thing to use. And this is all about Fediverse and Federated Wiki. I think we mentioned Federated Wiki last. And we know Fedwiki and I'm in Portland, so Ward is a neighbor. Right. Yeah, so we could easily connect up with Fedwiki. And I've got a perpetual problem with Fedwiki in that I don't really comprehend why it does what it does, how it does it. But there's a big community there that's doing cool stuff. It's open source. There's a bunch of really great things around it. And I can see it easily as a tool that plays nicely in building this fungus. And so let me scroll back to the where's the fungus question. My best answer to where's the fungus right now is that if we use the simplest possible file formats like Markdown plus some metadata, then the fungus is Markdown files living on shared directory somewhere. And we reconstitute it constantly into our own visualization tools. But as long as it's in simple formats, we can then enhance what's in the files and share this thing. And so this is a really rudimentary view of what the fungus might be. And I think I need to learn a lot more about the Fediverse and these other components. And I've looked at IPFS and things like that a bit. But when I learned about pinning, I was like, ah, God, that sucks. Because- Sorry, tell me about pinning. What is pinning? It turns out, are you familiar with how IPFS works? Not very, no. I know what it is, but I haven't dug into it. Yeah, it's basically a peer to peer sharded file system that distributes file bits over everybody's server. The problem is, if you want a file to persist on IPFS, you have to pin it, which means you have to pay a pinning service. Oh, okay, right. And I'm like, okay, so every node I'm gonna put, every file I'm gonna drop into IPFS, I need to pin if I want it to persist. That's a little bit crazy because I have half a million thoughts in my brain. You don't know which one is gonna be worth pinning, right? You don't know it until you come back and find it later. Bingo, or I might want every node in my brain to persist as long as possible. And that may be super expensive. Anyway, so- But that's the subscription model, basically, but as storage where you gotta pay for the service space somehow, right? Yeah, yeah. And if you use another tool that uses Markdown, is Obsidian, right? Yes, and Obsidian is just Markdown files on your hard drive, right? Bingo. And so I was kicking myself a little bit metaphorically this morning because I ran into a Hungarian programmer named Zolt Vicham, who is on his own little journey. He's a big brain fan and then very frustrated that the brain is proprietary. So using Obsidian and Excalidraw, an open source drawing plugin, he built a couple other libraries and expanded on Excalidraw to the point where he can emulate the brain in that combo of tools with plugins. And his like brainy version is the best sort of thing like, let me share the link for you of him explaining this thing. Here's the brain-like graph-based navigation in Obsidian. Let me connect it to today's call and then send you a link to it in the chat. He's the closest I've seen to anybody sort of getting this done properly. And there we go. And I wanted to invite him to these calls because I think he's a natural. But the thing I was kicking myself for is not immediately just trying to emulate what he's doing. And I think that I think that I've seen this video. I think, I think, I think. Isn't he the guy that invented Excalidraw in fact? I don't know that he's the inventor of Excalidraw, but he might be because he's deep in the Excalidraw community, but I didn't think he was the Excalidraw guy. He was talking earlier, if it's the same guy and he was talking about what are they called? Argument maps. Argumentation maps. Argumentation maps, there's a bunch of things. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Because that was- I think- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is the inventor of Excalidraw. It's the same guy. I haven't seen the video you shared because he's got a lot of videos. But yes, I know this guy. You know, Hungarians are very innovative digitally. I have a thought in my brain called Remarkable Hungarians. Tiny little company. It's a study- Really? Excellent. Let me share screens with you. How do I share a screen here? Yeah, sure. Start, stop sharing your screen. Pick this one. Share, go to my brain so it's not recursively looping. And then go to Remarkable Hungarians. I think it's called Remarkable. Yes, it is. Look at that. Remarkable Hungarians. So Imre Lakatos, Carl and Michael Polanyi, Zoltan Kodai, Lajlo Vido. And I'm not sure I'm pronouncing any of these correctly. Arthur Kessler, Bilavartok, Gabor Mate. These are all Remarkable Hungarians. And I've got them under Magyarus and the Hanuk Empire. And I had a couple of Hungarians working for me many years ago. And one of them was the guy who introduced me to Prezzi when it was still in like a beta. Yes. And no one really heard of it. Yeah, and it was like, I think, this is so cool. You know, I was just so blown away by it. And he said, you know, we got into a conversation about how many Remarkable Hungarians there are. And he said, I think that his theory is that it's to do with the language. If you learn Hungarian with your mother's milk, you are basically being trained to be a computer programmer. Because it's got this logic, which is just perfect for computer programmers. That's hilarious. I don't know if that's true or not, but he was a computer programmer. So that was his belief, anyway. Love that. So a piece that I'm leaning into right now is trying to figure out how those of us playing in this pond might share our notes better more efficiently, even though we're in different tools. And I'm trying to figure out how to loop in Ev Williams, who is using Mem right now. And Mem is like Rome, only a little bit. I don't really know what Mem's native format is or whatever. But I'm like, OK, how can we make it so that we can start sharing notes through the big fungus wherever and whatever it is? As a simple exercise proof that this is even a thing that's easy to do. I mean, you know Ev Williams? I do. Yeah, OK. Is he still running Medium or is he moving on? He is. No, that's kind of his. That's one of his main sort of concerns right now is Medium. So many years ago, Peter Mehrholz blogged about using Pyra, this little website. So I went to Pyra, and it was basically kind of like a document management, workflow-y kind of thing. And so I pinged the webmaster, and I said, who are you guys? And I got a note back from Ev saying, hey, nice to see you. Why don't you come on, drop by. And so I went and visited them when they were in a basement flat near the train station in San Francisco, the Cal train station. And then I became an advisor to them before they invented Blogger. And so while we were busy. Oh, this is pre-Blogger, right? So while we were strategizing around Pyra, the guy across the room invents Blogger. That eats the company. There's a whole bunch of stories there. Then I met with Ev when he founded Odeo, which was kind of an incubator. And I talked with him and a guy about a podcasting app that was like, OK, before podcasting got really hot and cool. But then somebody in Odeo basically invented Twitter. And so Twitter eats the company. So he's been down this march a couple times before. But what's cool, I think, is that he's also seen what happens when VCs come in and when the profit mode kind of presses things. And if you think about what he's been doing, he's been trying to reinvent journalism and civil society. I know, I know, I realize. I mean, Medium has pivoted a number of times trying to make, how do we make money out of this? Exactly. It hasn't pivoted for a while. Since they brought in the paywall and membership scheme. I was a member for a while. I don't know how successful it's been, but they haven't changed. So I mean, they went away. I was glad that they moved away from the whole sponsored content thing. That really made my throat. I don't know. It's really hard to find a way to do that. I like Medium as a platform. It's hard to find your way to a clean business model these days. Yeah, it is. I think that having a data union of people working together and in the process, training in AI and monetizing the AI, I think that's the thing I keep coming back to, because I'm not going to pay $1 or even one cent to store a node on IPFS. I would like the possibility if I want to set up my own server, I set up my own server. I just download the open source tools. Great. But if I want somebody to set everything up for me, give me the pod, give me the apps, the templates, the Fediverse account and connect it all together without having to go into the code, which is what 99.5% of people are going to do, then I think there's a business model for that. But even then, I think getting people to pay for that is going to be hard unless you tell them you have six months free. After that, it may be a couple of bucks a month. But even then, if you use the tool enough, you may actually be able to, the training that you give the AI will actually, might actually pay for all of your costs and you may even get some money back. Yeah, that's an idea, I guess. I think it's worth pursuing. And I don't see anybody else doing this. So what's the simplest possible path to standing one of those up as an example? Well, you know how you were saying earlier how you got to eat the elephant one bite at a time? Exactly. Well, that's because you've got this big brain, you've got all these ideas, and you don't know which end. You still have to decide which end you start at. The trunk, the tail, one of the feet, an ear. You've got to have an angle of attack. And I had this similar problem many years ago when I was thinking about these interconnected issues for quite a long time. And it was like, I need a framework for this. And I couldn't really come up with one. So what I did do was I said, well, if I decided I wanted to build a product, that would give me my framework. I want to build, actually build something. And then I can look at something and say, that looks interesting, but it's not relevant to my product right now. So I put it aside. And that is the box I put IPFS in. It was I came across it, made a note about it, not directly relevant, so it's not on my, you know. So I did a lot of that for a while. But because I had the framework of does it fit in this product or not, most things I looked at, I went, no, it doesn't. And then it was, oh, this one does. Soldered is an example of that. I wrote a blog post and this crew from, I think they're from Portland as well, somewhere in California, they contacted me and it was like, you know, we're doing something in a similar space. We have a lot of similar ideas. And but I hadn't even, I'd heard about solid, but I didn't think it was relevant. And they showed me that it was relevant. So it's in there now. Same with activity pub. I mean, it started as what you see my hub.ai is the website right now that the alpha version. That was basically it to start with. And then it just sort of, it allowed me to, it gave me a framework and then I could see what was relevant to it and I could expand the vision. And but still leave 90% of what I found outside of the framework because it wasn't directly relevant. So that's why I've got this product focus and the blog post I wrote recently, which is the introduction to this chapter is, that chapter is now the latest version of my framework. I'm going to develop my thinking because I need to deliver a chapter by the end of August either. And that is the only way I can focus and not go down a hundred rabbit holes at once and end up getting nowhere, just getting lost underground somewhere because I went down 50 different rabbit holes. It's by turning it into a project and turning it into a product to build something. And so I'm going to write my next milestone, big milestone is to write that chapter. And by the end of that I'll have a basically a master document for the user requirements. I'll have the features that I want. I'll have mock ups and wire frames and other pretty coherent picture of what this product should be. And a lot of the stuff in your big brain will sort of not be in it at least to begin with, but that's okay. It's the only way of getting a hand on it. So you eat the elephant one bite at a time. I sort of like, I'm going to give, I'm going to take a product focus to keep me focused on it. A couple of things. One of the things I like about the brain is that it has a feature I call local structure, which is it's like websites have local structure. If I click on a link from your website that goes to some third person's website, I'm leaving your local structure, which is how you decided to design your website in whatever sense you made out of nav menus. And I'm going to new territory where they might have done something completely different. But over a little period of time, my brain is going to adapt and go, oh, okay, now I understand. Yeah, you're gonna learn that. Yeah, exactly. And so in the brain, every screen is organized the same exact way. And there's always only one item in the middle. It's the active thought. It's one of the conceits of the brain, but I really like the way the brain is organized because moment by moment, I'm not confused by the half million things that are in the big brain. I'm always looking at a screen full. And I don't care what the big ball of twine looks like. It's not interesting to me, right? So I have thoughts about the design of this project and so forth that are like thoughts in my brain and I go look there. And I try to pay attention there. Problem is I'm curious about everything and very easily distracted. In fact, yesterday, I put in a clip from the movie up of the moments in the movie up where they go squirrel. Remember squirrel? I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it. You must see up. It's actually really, really fun. That's great. Good to see you. Yeah. You're muted by the way. Yeah, I say we can't hear you yet, but it could be he's in a noisy place. So anyway, so this notion of the local structure, I just sent you a link to my brain to potential OGM architecture components, which is where I put things like IPFS and solid and all those kinds of things. Because here's the grab bag of stuff I've drifted across. Hey, everybody's showing up. That's awesome. How are you? How are you? Hello. How are you? Good. Yes. That's right. And SJ just joined us. He's on mute. We're not sure that he can unmute yet at this point. Matthew and I started at the top of the hour and have been having a great time. Hey, yes. Yeah. And I know what I was gonna ask you, Matthew, which was the chapter that you posted on Medium, how are you interested in and how might you instrument that? And I think instrumentation is the wrong word here, but I don't know the better word. How might you add stuff to it to turn it into a shared object in the big fungus in the shared memory? Meaning right now it's sort of a blog post on a blogging platform called Medium, right? And that's interesting because it's in the public sphere, that's kind of cool, et cetera, et cetera. But how could it be made more useful, more linkable, more weave-able, et cetera, et cetera? Well, at the moment because of Medium is a very simple blogging platform and every year, EVE makes it simpler and simpler and takes away features until it's basically just gonna be notepad. It does that all the time. It's just like, I like some of the features that he's just taken away and my blog post has to, they refer to the video left. No, it's not left anymore. It's just up or down, sort of irritated. Anyway, sorry. They took away attention, right? Yeah. I didn't know. The images are in the middle and they're all the same size and that's it. That's all there is. It's just... Oh, that sucker. Well, yeah. I clearly have written a post on Medium in a while. You know, the thing is that it's a full blog post and it belongs there, right? And it's got some tags which are relevant to the Medium platform and that's all. What would... And I think that's fine and that should continue. I like finished products published as blog posts. But what... You can have a cloud... In any piece of content, you can have a cloud of content around it which is related to it, right? So for example, if you were to read my blog post and you were to annotate my blog post into your note-taking app where there would be public or private, that would be your takeaways, your observations, your ideas which have been provoked by what I wrote. And that goes into your system with your tags and your way of presenting it and your local structure and your local navigation. And people do that. People take notes on various note-taking apps and they're all in these little silos everywhere. What would be great would be that if those notes about the blog post could be part of a shareable soup along with the blog post itself so that when you go to the blog post, you can see immediately, here's what all these people are saying about this blog post or even about this paragraph of this blog post. And that's a decentralized network of notes. So if, for example, you take notes about that blog post in your system and the system says, oh, 29 other people have also made notes about that. And they may have made notes about it on the same note-taking platform that you use or something completely different. If they all use activity hub, activity hub, then that could be decentralized together. So you will discover other people and the way they reacted to the blog post. Through this federation, essentially. And that's how I think you weave content together because people put content out there, other people react to it. But at the moment, all those reactions are all in these silos and they're not connectable together in any real way. I think people can comment on the medium post on medium and you can see that comment and you can discover that person, right? But it's much easier if I could just, yeah, as long as you've got a medium account, but if you haven't got a medium account, you can't publish your comment and you can't do anything with it really. So you shouldn't need an account to interact with content. You shouldn't need an account on that platform. Part of the problem is that medium doesn't want to outsource the commenting to hypothesis, for example, right? If that happened, if everybody was sort of commenting through a hypothesis, you'd have an account on hypothesis. So you'd need that account. But then you could string together all the different bits and bobs over there across platforms, which is pretty cool. Yeah. But you're just tying... Yeah, or a platform-based compatible, right? Yeah, but the thing is that hypothesis is just one other platform. It would be better if there was an open standard. So any tool that used that standard could interact with any piece of content and the content that they create could be readable by anyone using that standard. So you don't have to use hypothesis. You could use My Hub, you could use Mastodon, you could use whatever. But we do have that... There was standard, as I understand it, it should be that. And that's what hypothesis and MemeX implement. But I asked Dan Whigley and Oliver from MemeX, why don't you interrupt? And they were like, yeah, we're cool, because we're using the same standard, but we're not. But that does seem like a very, like potentially low-hanging fruit. Yeah. Like development. Just like get it, you know, these particular two implementations of the standard to interrupt. Well, at the top of the call, Matthew mentioned ActivityPub and the Fediverse project, which are, I think, attempts to do some of this. Yes. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the Fediverse is the universe of apps which use the ActivityPub standard, which is a WPC standard. So, but I mean, I'm not technical enough to actually dive into it. I don't even have a Fediverse account yet. I'm a bit sort of blocked by knowing, I don't know which server I should use, should I set up my own and I haven't gotten to it yet. I'm really interested in this simplest thing we could possibly do to stand up a working example of this. So if we can help each other do the tools and connect the bits so that we can begin collaborating with shared notes and comments in the Fediverse, for example, I'm in, like count me in. I want to do that soon, because I want to start riffing on, how does this feel? What does it look like? What are the platforms that make it work? What's just like, let's just like get practical and get out there. Really. Well, why don't we set up a Mestadon server or something? Oh, good. Another tool. Yeah. So we do have, we do have the... Mestadon is the Twitter look alike in the Fediverse. I know. We do have the Mattermost channel active already. So that's a very good... I'm sorry, I forgot about that. Yeah, I'm sorry, I forgot about that. And I'd be perfectly, perfectly happy to run this conversation there. And also, Flancian, if you want to put links to the doc in that channel, then people can follow our notes. And also I meant to ask you, did you save the recording from the previous call? Did you post it any place on YouTube or something? Interesting. I think it's saved to my roadbooks, but I didn't. Yeah, I will. This one, when I hit record on this call, it made me log into my Dropbox account, which I don't use very much. But I will take it from Dropbox and I'll post it on YouTube and I'll post that to the Mattermost channel so that we know where it is and I'll add that to my brain around this call. Yeah. Where is the Mattermost channel? I will... I send the Hedge Doc, isn't it? Yes. It should be, if not this in the hour, I think I may have failed, but it should be in the fellowship. I've got it right here. The link, yeah. I've, of course, got a link in my brain. There we go. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. Yes. And on setting up these tools and the Massome server and so on. Yeah, I'm happy with that, with preventing there. I am happy to get the start that you want. I have a spare server like with containers and it shouldn't be too hard. I also run an instance already, I mean, run, I think. Like I am an admin in SocialCop, which I don't know if you know SocialCop. It is pretty much an experiment in the same space, so I think it's related to what we're discussing. Right now it's, we only run the Massome instance for the community. It has about 2,000 users. And it could be at least a friendly project in the space, like a good source of interesting people. Yes, but for an experiment, I think it doesn't make sense to perhaps set up like a special alloc instance and try to make things play well to each other, essentially. Cool. Okay, that sounds good fun, yeah. Awesome. Yes, Anna, thank you for your chapter. Matthew, I'm looking forward to reading it. Good luck, it's 18 minutes long. It's just the introduction to the chapter. Oh, interesting. Well, you know, I've got two months to write the full chapter, so it's just a brain dump, which I wanted to, I had to get done before, you know, I'm leaving on Sunday for a 10 day trek, so I needed to get this out of my system. Otherwise I would spend the entire trek just thinking, you know, thinking it through. So a lot of that 18 minute read is gonna probably be transferred to subsequent parts of the chapter. I just wanted to get everything I had from various documents and, you know, put it all into one place and get a few diagrams out there. I'm really interested in deconstructing, so I'm on a similar path that I haven't written the essay you're writing, but for me, there's like a bunch of nuggets that assemble into an essay where some of the nuggets won't make it into the essay, but they still like deserve being published someplace. Yes, exactly. So in the video that I posted, I was like, hey, a book is just a playlist of nuggets. I just loved that video. You know, you've seen the notes I took about it. I paid a lot of attention, you know. And really, thank you very much for doing that. That's tremendous. And so I'm very interested in how to deconstruct your intro and chapter so that at the end, Bevor gets exactly what he wants for the intro and chapter, but every idea you have still exists in a lovely little nugget form in a shareable version in the big fungus somewhere, which is then- The thing is that there is like, yep, sorry, go ahead. Which is then weavable and connectable by you and by others. Sorry, go ahead. Well, yeah, the introduction introduces like five or six different concepts, which are all part of the big picture. And the idea is that each of these concepts gets a whole sub-chapter later on, and the introduction gives you the whole, the big picture. So if you think about each subsection of the introduction is like the executive summary of a chapter, right? So that's a nugget and it's linked to a slightly larger collection of nuggets. So it's like an executive summary of a set of nuggets. So you can deconstruct the entire chapter into one set of nuggets, which are executive summaries of each of them, a whole set of other nuggets. But so like a tree, but with lots of cross links, because you know, I'd have to do a diagram. There's no way of explaining this verbally, but you're nodding, so I guess you know what I mean. And that would be fun to do. Yeah, sure, that would be pretty cool to do. And SJ has a challenge for us. Yeah, go for it. Okay, take the comments that you care about or that you're building and scope out its potential full extent. So I have a suggestion for this project. Yeah, great. On my list of wish list of things to do in this whole general vein is to take one of the pattern languages that exist, like either liberating structures or the pyrogagic pattern language or wise democracy pattern language. Those are three that I know of that are well-developed, that are open source, that are brilliant or the communities I'm connected to, and actually turn them into common shared materials. And then further, again, this word instrument, somebody needs to train me with a better word than this. But the example I gave, I might have even done this on one of our conversations here, like liberating structures has a pattern called one, two, four, all, that says, hey, when you have a thorny question with a big group, it's really fruitful to give them each time by themselves, pair them up, bring them in the force, and then bring everybody back to plenary. It's just one, two, four, all is just a pattern. This could easily be a zap in Zoom. This could easily be a little Zoom applet that says, hey, I notice you've got a, there could be an intelligent chatbot that's helping you do facilitation that says, you might want to use one, two, four, all right now, would you like me to do it? And then you press a yes button and it does all the breakout room coordinating prompts, prompt setting into the chat, dividing people up into the breakouts, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff is handled automatically because it's just code, right? So all of that I can easily envision I haven't started doing any of it or approach the community, but that would make a very, very nice prototype project. If anybody else likes it. That sounds very nice, yes. I mean, in general, like the idea of having chatpots that assist in discussion and like push towards like coordination, high coordination, states, cooperation and so on. Sounds very interesting. For problem solving, something related, I thought of it's like, something that realizes when you're going, you're considering a Y and it leads you into like five Ys, right? For example, like perhaps in parallel, also in breakout rooms, it's like a little like a. I imagined a while ago a chatbot which the most irritating chatbot in the world, it's called five Ys. And it's really irritating, but you know that it's gonna help you at the end of the day. If you just keep answering it and it will get paid. It could be a really super simple chatbot. They're almost like Elisa, you know, back in the years. Oblivious, yes. And Robert Douglas is just his Y. So to follow up on your idea, Jerry, what would the full extent of the resulting comments be and what would its impact, what would its second order? So for me, part of the motivation is that there's a lot of wisdom, distilled wisdom, which is what I think of as a pattern language as a being. Pattern languages are distilled wisdom. That's just trapped in little websites nobody's ever heard of and trapped in books that are protected by DRM, et cetera, et cetera. So liberating, liberating structures and things like it and then instrumenting them so that they're really useful and usable and then creating some means that'll propagate, hey, everybody you should plug this thing in, it's available, would then hopefully upgrade the quality of group conversations because the facilitation would get better. Because you know, one, two, four, all is just one of lots of different patterns in these three pattern languages that I'm already thinking about. And there's a bunch of, and I know people who are dying to create other pattern languages. So how do we create a better platform for pattern languages? A brief digression here. In Free Jerry's Brain on Mondays very early in the lockdown, we decided to try to build a platform for pattern languages. So Mark Antoine Patel spent some time taking semantic media wiki and instrumenting it to create a pattern language. And we tested it out on the first day of testing we realized that when you change the name of a pattern, semantic media wiki sucked at being flexible on the name of the pattern. It just, we realized it would be a nightmare to try to propagate the changes or make sure that it was consistent. So we kind of stopped right there because the tool wasn't amenable to figuring that out. And maybe like a backlink rich system that knows that it's just a link and whatever you call it, I don't care. Maybe that's the way to go. But we could also then prototype a place for people to write pattern languages. And we happened to be using a finished one because look, here's the cake and what it's gonna look like when you're done but then inspire other people to build public facing pattern languages that are instrumentable. You definitely need a better word. Yeah, yeah. Instrumentable. I don't know because... I like instrumentalize. I mean, right. I think it's a term of art to say instrument X to give it an opportunity to Y. Normally my understanding now is instrumenting software means you're dropping sort of stop points and labels and tags or some other markers into the code so that you can then see where it broke and what's going on. That's what instrumenting means in software. The way it is, the way it is. Yes. So that's a question I know because... And I'm trying to take a completely different tack on and I'm trying to say, how do I enact, reify, enable? I don't know what the word is. How do I take an idea that's just an idea and make it software that's usable for example? Essentially it seems to be like, how do you develop an instrument out of something less pragmatically oriented or less available, right? So these pattern languages, they're a theoretical way. Probably should. A theoretical approach to doing something and you want to turn it into a tool which helps you do that thing, right? Yep. Yeah, yeah. I think instrumentalizing is the best you're gonna get actually. Yeah. Because it's instrument and this instrumentalize. I think instrumentalize is this? Instrumentalize is literally, literally gives you what you want but it's not very poetic. It's not very poetic. It's gonna be so loud. One of the patterns, so I like that you settled on this early on, Gary, because a long time ago, I also somewhere, I will track it down. I had a, after my first attempt to build tools for communities designing their own sites, I also tried to define what a platform for pattern language would be. And we wanted to help people do the thing. And my friends and I even reached out to the pattern language authors at the time they were all still alive and wanted to see if they were interested because the various books that came after Alexander's pattern language, they got kind of weird but they were all different kinds of patterns, right? Yeah. And he got the religion and he kind of wanted to patternize religion but they kept changing their framework and so the frameworks of the books are very different. Anyway, we had this idea that we could somehow get Alexander and Ward and a couple of other people to agree on a platform and use it in very different ways. But it was hard. It was hard. Yeah. You're talking about really strong. And I think it's easier with young people who are just playing around than with people who have like made a mark and then they're kind of fond of what the thing they did. They don't want to try something. Part of the problem with Engelbart in his life was that he couldn't see any other way to instantiate this thing he had invented. Yeah. Like Eugene Eric Kim spent a decade trying to help Doug rebuild the original MLS or no, NLS I guess, on new platforms which was not what was needed anymore. I agree. So love this. So do you like the scenario, SJ? So yes, I love the scenario and you have helped me clarify my challenge for you all. Good. What do you mean by scope out his potential to second degree impact? Could you please unpack that a bit? I'm sure that the rest of the other people in this group know exactly what you're talking about. I don't mind displaying my ignorance. So go, please. So what I initially meant and what I would like the challenge to be this week although we can come back to the other things is to do this for a global commons and to think about the global impact of the commons. So in that sense, if you start with building a platform for pattern languages for my friends who love pattern languages, the first group are the people who have all these small websites and they realize not a lot of people use it. If you think about the global commons around it, it is something like the societal change that is possible when you identify a friend in these games. And the scoping piece of this is think about versions of this that have come before and tried and failed. Think about the versions that are like this that inspired it. Think about groups you'd want to partner or integrate with. And then after you've thought about that, reflect on what the broadest possible scope could be if this were simply embedded in everything else. If this existed and it were in understood commons that didn't need to be named as something that we're constructing, what would its extent be? What would its scope as part of human behavior be? And that's what I was trying to say when I played out the scenario with the pattern languages in terms of this is not a fancy thing to make pattern language fans happy. This was actually a strategy to make anybody facilitating conversations a better facilitator. And that's the global commons second order impact is that it ripples back into, oh my gosh, I've got better skills in their right at hand and look, I should be using these and suddenly the level of conversation goes up. Similarly, if they start using the artifacts and feeding the fungus, then we start building a global shared memory artifact which is a second order benefit as well that could come out of the same project. Sorry, Flanxian, you even have your hand. It's fine, let's continue, I'm thinking notes. Yeah, does that make sense? Yes, yes, definitely. So do you want to, do you want to, oh, sorry, Flanxian, you're going to speak next. No, no, go ahead, go ahead. No, it's fine, it's fine. No, but in terms of scoping out, what is the end product of this scoping exercise? Is it envisioning something? Is it a document? Is it, you know, what is it? I'm being a little bit too concrete perhaps, but because when you use the word scope, it could mean a thousand different things or a thousand different contexts to a thousand different people. So what do you have in mind at the end of the exercise? Who, you know, how do you judge if the challenge has been met? I'd like to, I would like talking to many people about it to add to some very crude universal measures of scope, but a couple of measures that would be good for provocation are things like proportion of total human or societal interaction or outputs or footprints affected in a given year. So for some things, let's say, and depending on what you're talking about, it may really only make sense in a very cleanly defined dimension. So if you're talking about a commons around energy and you want to talk about how some particular commons would change the dynamics of energy, that's pretty computable, right? We know what the total installation of the planet is. We know what a bunch of energy sources sort of that could be converted within the planet are. And that's it. We actually have a fixed energy envelope for all sources and all things. And if you're building a commons that allows for some portion of reflected installation to come into the ecosystem, then you can very literally talk about that kind of impact. That's it, I mean, yeah. So there are some to use the other version of instrumented, there are some very cleanly instrumented dimensions where one can do this particularly well. Then there are others where you want to influence policy or thought or you want to influence education. And that's tricky. And there are some where you might want to empower people or speed certain things up. And then what are you doing? Yeah, that's what Jerry was talking about. If you instrumentalise pattern language, you're not making a tool which people who know what pattern languages are are going to like. You can, that'd be nice, but you're not going to have a great impact unless you actually make a tool with people who've never heard of pattern languages say, oh, shit, this is good. Yeah, this is cool. Oh, it's basically something called a pattern language. I don't have time to worry about that. I'm just going to use it, right? Bingo. What is this? Oh, I'm sorry. So, is that applause? Yes, from sign language, this means applause. Jazz, this means I disagree. So I've been using this all through lockdown because it helps comment back without interrupting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got to, I've got to start doing that because if you've probably noticed, I interrupt way too much and I know it. So jazz hands and what's this? This means I disagree. This means I'm kind of mad. I don't really like that. Well, I do that occasionally. Yeah. I also saw that for the first time with you, Jerry. And I just love it. It's great. And it actually, I learned about it through the Occupy movement because with Occupy, they were doing the mic check stuff and they also had some hand signs. This means blocking. I don't agree with this. I'm going to leave if this goes through. They're, you know, this means louder, speak louder. So there were a bunch of hand signs for Occupy that they borrowed from things like sign language. And now I teach this everywhere. In fact, years ago, I taught this. I gave a speech in front of a bunch of military people, 50 officers in a facility in San Antonio, Texas all in camos with medals. And there was a colonel who was doing jazz hands in the middle of the session. And I'm like, yes, we have won. If a colonel is doing jazz hands and laughing and everybody else gets it and likes it, we're good. Yeah. It's really great. Cause I mentioned, if you look over a crowd and you've got, you can count pretty easily how many jazz hands there are and how many like this without necessarily being in, you know, having a verbal conflict about it, right? So the Occupy hand signs, not phrased as such because half the people in the planet hate Occupy and think it's a terrible anarchist uprising. So feedback mechanisms for group process are part of a pattern language or should be. So this thing we just talked about jazz hands ought to be available to people facilitating zoom rooms and say, hey, would you like some tips? And there could be a simple intelligent chat bot assistant that says, I'm here to help you make better zooms. Tell me what you're trying to get done. I will learn about you. And then using a transformer tool it could get fricking smart. It can then understand what the pattern languages are and suggest the right ones at the right time. And you could just go to town with this. Yes, completely. Are you familiar with Free Federal Life? I think we discussed this. It sounds familiar. Yeah, so it is framed as a pattern language for the commons and for like, it's you with the governance and they did study Occupy and other like, you know. Silke Hefrick and David Ballier, yes, the book. Exactly, yes, exactly. So he reminded of that because at least they set up to do this. I haven't finished yet but it doesn't include exactly a pattern language in the second half. And so I think it's a, I mean, we need to organize a reading club on this and others we could do a meta. So there was a reading club happening inside of OGM around Dawn of Everything, right? Which is a really interesting book. And I had to drop out because I had other things going on and I just couldn't catch up with reading the things. But how do we metabolize knowledge together so that it's more usable and instrumented as much as possible, right? I think reading clubs are great. And then mostly the people who participate in the reading club, 20% of them understood the book. The others couldn't keep up. And then everybody stops that book and goes to the next one. And all of the artifacts of that conversation basically exist only in the heads of 20% of the participants. Yes. How do we metabolize all the stuff fruited into the world, instrumented into the world in tasty fungus bits that let us all improve what we do? I mean, I have an answer to that, but it's obvious which is, and it was in static, it is with an hour. But like, right. But so the no cloud organized by needle in the hour is meant to be a take on this which is like will be like a loosely coupled reading cloud and writing cloud. And the writing part is important, right? Because that's precisely how, you know we default to interact in via the notes. So by definition, we sort of like are producing perhaps like more artifacts that can then be read and picked up, you know for like all the minutes of writing but gets very interesting. I guess I wanted to pick up on like perhaps some potential dimensions to explore Samuel's question. On your metrics perhaps, or I'm scoping but I don't know if you want to close on previously pattern language in general or any other things we can touch on, okay I'll go. Oh yeah, Matthew, go ahead. I just wanted to say that I put a couple of but once I got a hang about what Samuel was looking for I just put a couple of ideas into chat as well. I don't know if they fit under the heading of pattern languages but one of the things which I think would have a really big impact is an instrument, a tool or technique or some sort of software or whatever that could just help two people have better conversations when they don't necessarily agree with each other. That would just change the world, you know if people would talk that, you know okay we're going to have this sort of conversation and there's like a sign, like not this but let's not have this, let's not have that or something, some other sign we say I'm not going to try to tell you that you're wrong and that I'm right we're going to have a different sort of conversation and there's a shed load of literature and knowledge about how people can have better conversations and no one knows any of it and even the people who know it don't even use it because you just keep on getting trapped in the patterns of the animal brain, right and you don't end up having conversations which are as good as you could have. I'm trying to lower my hand now, I'm not succeeding. That's really cool. Raise, lower, yeah, whatever, consider my hand down. So that was one idea, techniques for having better conversations and the other one was just as you were saying Jerry about how people were having a book reading club and they have a conversation about the book and then move on to something else and all that knowledge is okay the people who are in the room at the time come away with some of it but if you weren't in the room at the time it's gone that's every conference and workshop you've ever been to even the ones which have been recorded. It's terrible. It's every mailing list we're on people saying brilliant things on private mailing lists that go into the bit bucket. Yeah. Plus the hell out of me. It's terrible. So to me this just like leads me to think that one high leverage action here is like anything that reduces the friction for going from the personal and this goes very much in the direction of the book and so on it's like going from personal contributions to social contributions. Like, you know. Yeah, I don't know why my hand went down. I didn't take it down. I just wanted to interject two things. I have to leave at the quarter after. So I'm here for a few more minutes and then a small thing. We were trying to figure out how to have a really big effect on the world and I was like, we need to hack pastors.com because Rick Warren of the Saddleback mega church runs a website called pastors.com where tons of evangelical preachers get their sermons. Now. Oh God, how awful. Now I don't think Rick Warren has gone to the dark side but the idea here is if you could change what evangelical preachers are saying on Sundays in the United States only, you could change the world. Yeah, yeah. Because the evangelical far right is on fire about a bunch of issues that are being lit on purpose to distract us from the world's problems. Just my opinion, but hacking the server where they buy their sermons is. They buy them. It's a business. It's a business. You're not, you're gonna write a great new essay every Sunday? Well, I mean, couldn't you just post low cost, really well written sermons that are not necessarily fire and brimstone. There's no business model there. Yeah. No, but interpastors.com, you know, create an account. I'm saying, if you hack your way in and post like, you know, be good to each other and actual, be actual Christians, you could maybe hack the whole thing. But the problem is that many of the fiery creatures have gone completely off the deep end. Anyway, sorry to distract. That's not a distraction. That would be a really major impact on the world. And you could probably measure it if you knew how many people actually bought your sermon and how many people they preach to. You could probably get quite good metrics out of that. So as a fun idea, free sermons.org could be a website that where we motivate people who are really good writers of sermons to write sermons that are good for humanity. And where the landing page basically says, hey, one of our big problems is that a bunch of people are preaching non-Christian things. And then you get a bunch of ex-vangelicals. I don't know if you've heard the term ex-vangelicals. Follow Chrissy Stroop on Twitter. She's really good. There's a bunch of others. But it's people who've left evangelical fanaticism and are busy saying, hey, she wrote a book called Empty the Pews, which is really, really interesting. So anyway, so that's interesting. If you're looking for cultural leverage, yeah, sermon central, and then post-open source sermons and let people riff on them and let people remix them and build them as nuggets, right? Let them build playlists of the sermons that they want to do using this infrastructure and we're off to the races. Sorry, go ahead. Well, I would say that rather than building a separate website, which you've been a struggle to get, I think the original idea, when you said hack, I thought you actually meant like really hack it and take it down. But instead it would be better to actually just go in there as pastors. You'd have to set up some sort of shadow network of people who want to do this, right? Yes, and they would all go in and all like each other's work and recommend it and set up a shadow community in there just to try to shift the overs and window a bit back towards the civilized world, you know? So you've understood my intention properly, which is not to take down the site, but to corrupt the site with goodness or sermon central, which I'm gonna add to my brain now, but the alternative here is to be above board and post a new website with an interesting name like humanistsermons.org, right? Communists. That is perfectly open, it is completely open source and modifiable and loves and uses a fork and toll, uses GitHub as the underpinnings so that people can actually improve one another's sermons, blah, blah, blah, wouldn't that be a cool thing? Yes, and I think that there's a lot of like fixed costs in running such a site or such a project, but if you take a step back and see it from the pattern level, there are a lot of the sites that we have that ideally will be part of the knowledge commons, but aren't, right? The alternatives we could develop to actually replace them or compliment them or like subvert them, they look sort of the same. Essentially, and this is where concepts like, examples like the interlay, the underlapering and so on, right? And ideally, it's also something we want to talk about the algorithm is like provide the core, the skeleton for any such site ideally in a way that is more flexible than perhaps just the currently kind of weeks we have, which only goes as far over that pretty good. But again, like you said, like on Gitbase and so on.