Protension on GPlus

"By dialogic we take ourselves beyond the usual realm of focus groups, which tend to be single issue, with one type of person present (e.g. young mothers who live in Harrow). The aim is to bring multiple viewpoints into the room (including scientists and experts) and include a wide diversity of opinion (young and old, north and south, enthusiasts and sceptics etc). By deliberative we recognise that the issues are often complex and controversial, so the dialogue group will need time to ask questions, review evidence and debate."

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Is public dialogue a form of social research?
DES speaks 2 By Daniel Start, Sciencewise Dialogue and Engagement Specialist. I’m often asked how public dialogue differs from public opinion research or social research. It’s a fair point, because there are many aspects that overlap, not least the generation of robust and reliable evidence for …

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thanks to +Edward Morbius for his comments to <plus.google.com/u/0/104846054806852679393/posts/W6fdvQoXt6m>

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Intelligence, knowledge, and ability within the participating community – This is one of many things I mooted / did end-run around.
"Even the fool has his story"; by shifting focus from technical correctness (Note: I wrote "shift focus" and meant it. Of course accuracy matters. But that isn't to say it need be central.) to "valence" i.e. "subjective narrative", the flow shifts. And the tone shifts. I think "This really pisses me off!" is an entirely valid contribution.
To illustrate, "What you wrote here really makes me think that you're malicious, as though you're conniving something nasty." is entirely valid, whereas "You malevolent motherfucker." is not. What a person feels and things is entirely valid. see http://groundplane.wordpress.com/gp-101 here. While a person can "know" the impression that has formed, the conclusion they're drawn to, they cannot know another's motives.

So the presence of SME (Subject Matter Expert, yes?) is important. And part of my strategy / business plan is to have institutional input / contribution, e.g. associations of, say, philosophers, economists, and political scientists / policy wonks. But this has to be done carefully as this affects the project's credibility … and concerning credibility, perception is reality.

A common culture – Where do parents celebrate the death of a child? Who enjoys abject poverty, or malnutrition / starvation? Who does not want security, justifice, and fairness? There is already a full platform w/regards to norms.
But this needs to be explored. And, in fact, this is the project's main aim. One person feels indignant at restriction on their ability to purchase and own fire arms. Another person feels indignant that they seem to always be surrounded by angry young men with guns. Point is: easy enough to understand / appreciate both positions, without stretching our "common culture". That doesn't mean that policy can be crude.

An administrator role – I simplified this by reducing it to core i.e. the only statements that appear are those that have surface validity: either statement of fact ("Joe Bloe from Idaho said that the world is flat; see URL") or personal statement ("I don't trust Joe Bloe's post because it appeared in a very biased blog.")
see above re: entirely valid

Noise controls – The design's core inspiration arose from, to a lesser extent, the need to increase S/R (SNR? signal to noise ratio) by reducing noise and, to a greater extent, by increasing signal amplitude/clarity for that reason, by devising threading and something like "routing", so that related propositions would be arrayed / presented in a way that serves discoverability.
see also above "administrator"

Participant choice in access tools – I think I know what you mean.
This was the hard part. It took me years.
FWIW I was using "Web2.0" techniques as early as 1999. Perhaps 1998. But those techniques do not suffice on their own. God knows they make the experience more entertaining / fun … but that's not actual productivity.
There are peripheral / ancillary functions (Have you seen BuddyPress in action? dandy support for building community.) And many of those. But "core" is particular and special. "Discourse-based decision support" … folk usually / often / regularly reframe that, reformulating to suit themselves, but almost never (as in "maybe twice in 15years") ever pay attention to what I'm saying there.

I'm protective of my IP. If I can cash out with $10M, that suits me fine. I'm not aiming for billions, but I want my share. I've plowed years of my life into this.

History – Curation and aggregation.
My line used to be this: "There's 1 war in Iraq, say. There are maybe 10K sites that support discussion on that. And maybe 200K threads. So over a million comments. And then there are blogs with multiple posts, each (perhaps) with more comments. But little of this serves community knowledge."
Hence my emphasis on Hesse's glasperlenspiel see: <soup.groundplane.org/post/126605253/Each-countrys-Commission-possesses-its-Archive-of>

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GP-101
To energize collective intelligence … … to magnetize the wisdom of crowds. Your opinion might be wrong, or it might be right as rain … … but either way: the fact is that you have an opinion…

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@SimonFParker: "Interesting call for new kinds of civic engagement by @sburall but I think too blase about crisis of formal democracy"

@SBurall: Thanks @SimonFParker. Not intended to be blasé, but certainly weary of solutions that focus need for change on citizens rather than govt.

@ITGeek: @sburall w/respect if we expect change to come from "them" then "we" are looking to the wrong source. cc:@SimonFParker

@SBurall::
1/2 I think that if got right new forms of participation can be part of solution for the crisis in rep democracy. 
2/2 if got wrong my worry is they push people further from structures of representation thus exacerbating the crisis.

@ITGeek: What I realized so long ago was that "participation" can be manipulated. "Invite; involve; inform; ignore". cc:@sburall

@SBurall:
1/2 – In large part yes, but just like public are hugely differentiated, govt is not a monolith.

@SimonFParker: 1/2 – Bigger worry: new forms of participation are right, but don't solve crisis of representative democracy. May even make it worse."

@SimonFParker: 2/2 – We need both – if government is to be our servant, we must be prepared to be a good master
@ITGeek: IMNSHO "self-interest" isn't always malicious, but rarely altruistic. We need alternative. I suggest "discourse". 
@SBurall: There is potential for some change from within too. There are good people working at all levels of govt
@SBurall: Indeed it can and too often is. But can be transformative too in the right hands. It is true thought that it rarely is
@ITGeek: I've been working towards a discourse system that takes "right hands" out of the flow. see <soup.groundplane.org/post/126605253/Each-countrys-Commission-possesses-its-Archive-of>

Article by Simon Burall (@SBurall)

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Local government network | Guardian Professional | Local Government Network | The Guardian
Advice, discussion and guidance on best practice from, and for, the local government community

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"It is not enough to observe, experiment, theorize, calculate and communicate; we must also argue, criticize, debate, expound, summarize, and otherwise transform the information that we have obtained individually into reliable, well established, public knowledge."
- John Ziman. 1969. "Information, Communication, Knowledge," Nature 224: 318-324; abstract online at <http://bit.ly/cNPB1d>.

Thanks to +Richard Hake for this.

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Richard Hake – Google+ – Some Google Plusers might be interested in a recent post…
Some Google Plusers might be interested in a recent post “Symbiosis: A Standardista Endorses a Direct Instructionist” [Hake (2013)]. The abstract reads: …

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but scattered around, with all the contents shuffled. #Discoverability is a major problem.Imagine that we do, in fact and actually, already have something like the Agora, where free and full discussion about the problems and issues of our day is taking place, 24/7. Again: #discoverability … Tweets, FB replies, blog comments … all a huge incoherent cloud. And worse? maybe worst of all? the good stuff is flooded out by a combination of  trivial blather and manipulative marketing rhetoric.Now imagine that there were a way to sort through this.Want just tweets, for entertainment? you've got it. Chit-chat like FB stream? you've got it.Care about schools funding good programs for your kids? controlling that creep next door with the collection of assault weapons? banks that manipulate markets in a way that strips your wallet while bulging their pals'? Well … no can do. Could do … could. If the 20% who cared actually got what they needed to work together on making the world safer, and fairer, and more sane.That's why I created Protension. (It's a double pun. "Tension" around issues, with everyone saying others are wrong. Against what's being said. We can turn that around to be positive and constructive. So pro-tention. And "contention" … some points are contentious, twitchy, hot-button. We can drill into that in a way that is, again, positive and constructive. Well … right now we can't. But we could.)cc: +Tim Bonnemann  +Martijn Russchen  +Tiago Peixoto  +Merijn Terheggen  

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I just spent some time thinking about 1 to many notification.

I agree with what you wrote here:
> The solution is a better coordination of the many flares to
> a single flare that summarizes the entire domino-effect of failures.

But I found myself wondering if you had mis-stated the situation here:
> _Well, the problem isn't that we don't need flares, the problem is we
> have too many flares._
Literally true? I don't think so.

I think why this matters is that it's experienced as "too many flares".
I'd reformulate this way: everything is reported with the same priority (null) and routing (broadcast), so actually there aren't any flares at all!

FWIW at my DEWLine site I had 3 levels of audio alert. 1st was a loud bell ringing /dong … dong … dong/ … one strike every 2 or 3 seconds. Quite a while later (minute and a half?) a buzzer would sound. Still later the phone would ring. That was Cheyenne Mountain … a shift officer (All of them called themselves "Snoopy"; such a good nick cuz that's what they were doing: snooping huh huh) and that was not a good thing. He was checking to see if I'd dropped the ball.

But see I don't know for a fact that I have the scenario right at the level of operations.
Do different failure modes trigger signals that are qualitively different? 

Addendum: There was no real response to this. There was a reply … which is better than stony silence, of course. But not anything like a response that would in some even small way acknowledge what I had written.

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Trying to connect with a certain person by email I wrote "Triage and decision support"

Situation: our shiny new-fangled aircraft landing system is in place at the foot of a runway in a narrow mountain valley.

    An aircraft is inbound. It will be doing an unusually steep approach because that's what our system allows. It's snowing, but our system will guide the pilot past his usual decision point because, again, that's what our system allows.

    BITE detects a small set of parameters out of range.
Q: how to respond? who to signal? with what? What to do?
A1: flash a light on the local remote unit and send data.
A2: shut the system down, conforming with prime mandate: thou shalt not transmit false data.

Maybe I'm dreaming in technicolor. But this seems to me analogous to cloud monitoring.

Please let me know if I'm dead wrong and I'll just back off.

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    What's turning me on right now is the idea of an effective real-time alert system. #Notification (I really like the work that @RTWworld is doing.)
    But background is the idea that sets of "failure alerts" (You have nomenclature for that? Cluster telemetry and such?) can represent a pre-identified "failure mode".

Here's what I wrote as comment in "Measure Anything, Measure Everything". (<codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/#comment-16748>)
(This was by mistake. I meant to comment on +SandyWalsh's "The Monitoring Stack (the state of the art)". (<sandywalsh.com/2013/04/the-monitoring-stack-state-of-art.html>)

    Something that maybe few people know about: Failure Modes;
    Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA).
         Slightly related to “measure everything”; idea is to analyze
     every chunk (“component”, “unit”, slice it as you will) to get a sense
     of how important it is. Sort of like triage before the failure.

Mean Time Between Failure and Mean Time To Repair is what we used (Hardware; avionics.) Stir in criticality i.e. consequences of error/failure.
This ends up giving you a real good idea of what you need to focus on i.e. worst case would be something that’s likely to fail soon, PITA to replace, and devastating in effect.

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Measure Anything, Measure Everything. Posted by Ian Malpass | Filed under data, engineering, infrastructure. If Engineering at Etsy has a religion, it’s the Church of Graphs. If it moves, we track it….

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> the problem isn't that we don't need flares, the problem is we have
> too many flares. The solution is a better coordination of the many flares
> to a single flare that summarizes the entire domino-effect of failures.
Right! So: "Information is data that makes a difference."

I'm not sure but sounds to me (#Nomenclature) that when you say "too many flares" you're talking about a whole bunch of "real-time operational metrics" .
But every datum shouldn't become a flare … an alert. That's what my subject line meant to imply. (Context: "Found was I was responding to" in your blog.)
For me a "flare" signifies a pre-specified condition i.e. "that freakin' HD has failed".

So yes, what you write about here is exactly what I guessed / intuited.

Example (from the avionics R&D project I worked on in Sydney … Micronav International, in Point Edward): any known failure mode will create a recognizable set of readings in our Built In Testing Equipment.
Q: How to take that data and produce information meaningful to the attendant? (BTW: we finished design for BITE but unfortunately the project failed before we got to that next state.)

> Currently, that's an unsolved problem, but people are thinking about it.
Well I'd love to chat with those people!

I was using #monitoring/#notification … it seems to me that's accurate … that it failed to communicate makes me wonder just where I stepped into cartoon fiction.

> _If you use PagerDuty or Nagios you'll know that it comes with an
> inbox full of noise.
A) nice to see familiar nomenclature. A signal that isn't significant isn't noice … but it sure ain't useful!

B) I haven't "used" anything. I only 3 days ago realized that Rackspace (Who I've known of for years) is very implicated in OpenStack (which is quite new to me). Looking into that got me here.
Ganglia made perfect sense to me.
Your videos were also totally meaningful. (From memory … StackTach and Stacky?) BTW I left a question about stacky on one of your TY.

FWIW I have Nagios docs loaded in a set of tabs; just now reading up on Ceilometer to get a sense of the plumbing.

> How to make that salient is key.
Contact … solid copy … salience = information; Irrelevant "operational metrics" ain't. (Can't call those metrics noise/static since it's not random / entropic.)

But yes, precisely that: the way I used the terms, "information" as a sub-set of all readings.

FWIW I first encountered this when babysitting NORAD/SAC multiplexing. (DEW Line … I'm old.) Channels, groups, super-groups … amazing similarities with cloud / instances / servers.

Sure, over-view of all metrics would give an experienced operator a sense of system status as a whole, but what was paramount was to have "flares" that were diagnostic.

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    given some sort of failure, that the system write to the log is not enough.
    That data and metrics present that data as information is likewise not
     enough. What would exhaust the need is some sort of alert or flare,
     a message of some sort.

Maybe there's no UseCase. Maybe folk managing a cloud don't need alerts or flares or messages … which makes no sense to me, but hey I'm out of my element here.

Trying to connect with folk who don't just //talk// about the stuff but are actually doing it.
It's non-sexy … a definite fail when it comes to #AttentionEconomy … 20/80 … less attractive than EdTech.
But here's I'm talking about my project, not NoGuff.

Real-time comms is what turns me on. I guess I was caught up by the fantasy of what could be.
#EIS [that's Executive Information Services]

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