Software for organizing thoughts is put to the test when it is used for ongoing projects that accumulate thousands of ideas over several years. Unfortunately, without a standard, the more thoughts that you accumulate, the more thoughts you place at risk. Your thoughts will get trapped if the product you use is discontinued and no longer upgraded, as happened with best-of-breed products Lotus Agenda and NetManage ECCO. You may also have to abandon your accumulated thoughts if you want to work with the latest technology to come along, such as HTML, UML or XML.
Our exploratory standard provides the assurance that we may use software tools to accumulate and organize our thoughts without getting them trapped. A diagram shows the many industry sectors affected. A table shows how these sectors benefit. We have set up a Thoughtful Wishing use case matrix to show opportunities that our standard creates.
Understand, articulate and declare the purpose that our standard will serve. Now is the time to hear from you, especially if we have differing opinions. I will state my own opinion: the purpose is that people be able to use software to accumulate their own thoughts - for the purpose of thinking about them - independently of the fortunes of any particular software product. I am asking for help collecting use cases to clarify this purpose and also to know how it extends to other purposes.
Position our standard as helping create a continuum of use cases. I want to show how a flat-table format can help popularize TopicMaps. I will study TopicMaps and I hope to show that they can be collapsed - folded down into a flat table - and that this will actually make it simpler for humans to understand them. In general, I want to pursue the idea that an XML type structure is appropriate for a u t o m a t e d exchange between computers, but that m a n u a l (that is, human) transformation of data (that is, modeling) is much simpler with a flat table. With your help, we can prove this wrong or right.
Educating ourselves. I want to work, from the beginning,
to educate regarding the importance of having an import/export standard.
This is especially important with regard to our chief sponsor, TheBrain,
where there have been many changes over this last year, including a new
CEO and a large number of new hires. I imagine that most of the people
working at TheBrain focus on the use of the technology for navigating industrial
strength databases, as well as the SiteBrain, WebBrain, etc.. The
PersonalBrain, I imagine, is much less important for profits.
Unfortunately for us, import/export
is primarily relevant to the PersonalBrain, because industrial strength
users always have money to do their own conversions as needed. So
we need to argue that the PersonalBrain is very important for the assets,
if not the profits, if we want support from TheBrain, LLC for work on an
import/export standard. I believe this, because I think that the
PersonalBrain is a great attempt at the solution of a very difficult problem
(ergonomically editing one's own thoughts) and lead to technology that
can be profitably applied to a simpler problem (navigating thoughts).
But it is the former problem (still not quite solved, given the lack
of an import/export standard) that drives advances in the latter problem,
where other companies will catch up within a few years, I think, unless
TheBrain continues to develop the use of the PersonalBrain. Also,
it is the PersonalBrain that generates the excitement of a community, word
of mouth, creative usages. Our laboratory has a lot invested in the
PersonalBrain, and for that reason it is important to explain the value
of the PersonalBrain and import/export. This is a challenge, and
even if we are understood - and even if we are right - there are always
reasons why (for example, financial) why our position may be irrelevant.
This is, however, a great service that we can perform for our sponsoring
member.
Agree on a good name for our standard: Rethink, BrainRack, MindSet, IrDAKiss.
Find sponsors for Thoughtful Wishing usage matrix. Fix up pages so that it shows: Opportunities, Questions, Forums, and Prospects. Sponsoring Advisors play a vital role, because they are our main prospects for Sponsoring Investigators, they are major sponsors of the examples we collect that are the capital for our investigations, they are sources of free software and other perks for our members, they provide liaisons who serve as our advisors, they are the partners that our Sponsoring Investigators are looking for, and also our members are looking for. They fund and shape our travel - our major expense, and a crucial one, is the forums - conferences and standards meetings - that we attend to make contacts and move forward our agenda.
Help: Would you like to help? A big help is completing Raimundas Vaitkevicius' survey of thinkers Do you organize your thoughts? This helps us in collecting use cases where you would like to transfer groups of thoughts into or out of software tools, and why. Please write to me at ms@ms.lt I list below more ways to help. (See also notes on priorities). I hope to learn from you ways you would like to participate, and how we all may leverage your efforts and help you advance your own goals as we work together.
Building alliances. Convey the value of sponsoring research in building alliances.
Make list of companies to approach. The development of
an import/export standard for aggregates of notes affects a wide variety
of companies. I am putting together a list of twenty or thirty companies
that could benefit as catalysts for building relationships through the
development of this standard. My goal is to find two or three companies
that wish to play this role by sponsoring our investigations. Contact
me at ms@ms.lt if your company might be interested. Andrius Kulikauskas,
Director.
Write up a strategic picture of how the standard might affect various
kinds of companies.
I will invite IrDA members to become Sponsoring Advisors, helping with the Thoughtful Wishing use case matrix, especially regarding a question such as "Did information ever move me?"
Consider SyncML.
Ask sponsors-advisors of our Thoughtful
Wishing usage matrix to help us figure out who to approach.
I'll invite companies to help sponsor our Thoughtful
Wishing usage matrix and that way help sponsor our research, and
guide us as to who we should work to involve. Do Outreach for sponsors
of investigations. Thoughtful
Wishing is a major project that I plan to find sponsorship for
(at the Advisor level, about $5,000 per company, per half-year or year).
You are probably aware of our system of twelve
ongoing projects accumulating examples of caring about thinking,
for example, Tools for Thinking.
The examples that we collect for these projects, for example, through our
surveys, are the basis for our investigations. The examples are in
the public domain, which makes them easy to share, and makes their accumulation
all that more attractive and valuable. Thoughtful
Wishing is just another namefor this system of twelve ongoing projects.
Concrete implementations Turn attention to implementations - what is technologically and politically relevant. Concretely: Collect examples of how and why a set of links can be represented.
Foster services for corporate users. Encourage corporate use of tools and converters. Bring together a community supporting knowledge management for the individual at kmci@egroups.com. Write and distribute a letter to invite companies to enroll some of their independent thinkers in our laboratory that we might explore how to serve them. I am in touch with Gary Ellenbogen, www.clicksright.com, who is experienced at providing such services for ECCO users. This will make sure that we have the needed use cases and can follow through on serving them. Help users team up with custom programmers, for example, from Lithuania. Look for users who need converters. Sponsoring Researchers will be only a small revenue stream, but they will be very important contacts, often within very large companies.
Include the concerns of people all over the world, and invite them to participate. We need to be true to our mission.
Additional ideas to pursue:
Saulius ideas about Knowledge Management and the center two columns:
Elicit, Record, Refine, Manage, Share.
Nick Duffill's ideas about decision making for creative people, and
about distance learning.
Distinction between symbolic (compressed) and sensory (uncompressed),
also between focus and flow.
Consider theoretical questions that clarify what our standard should be. Questions to pursue:
Develop means to check whether our standard, or any standard, is
theoretically sound.
Offer flat table formulation for topic maps.
Offer flat table formulation for other standards: Knowledge Interchange
Format, Conceptual Graphs.
Complete investigation for TheBrain. TheBrain, LLC, maker of TheBrain, is sponsoring, and Andrius Kulikauskas, ms@ms.lt, is leading our investigation of the hypothesis: Linking Locally is Thinking Globally. Our goal is to specify our exploratory standard. Our intent is to involve the many different kinds of tool users and tool makers affected. My investigation raises the question: What kinds of structural links occur in practice? Our work has been leading us to a new belief that "Modeling is for Reexperiencing", and also that "Links Extend Equality". I need to flesh out all of these beliefs because our theoretical insights are our guideposts for the directions that we should pursue. Here is how I envisaged our investigation at the start:
User survey. Do
you organize your thoughts? provides us with use cases. Answers
we have collected are at: Uses
of Structures for Thinking.
Standards survey. What is your favorite standard? provides us with information about standards, which we present at Formats for Thinking and Features of Formats for Thinking. Help! Complete our survey What is your favorite standard?
Discuss examples. We need to discuss the answers we collect and use them to identify the structural types that our exploratory standard will need to support, and the various existing standards we should use to express our own, such as XML, Topic Maps, CORBA. Help! Analyze and discuss the examples that we are collecting.
Specification. I am organizing material for describing the specification. I will write up the specification and then share it with our working group, OurOwnThoughts, to discuss and review whether it suits the needs of our members. The specification should include guidelines on how to design converters, perhaps as an appendix.
Network of software tools and converters. Here is the status of conversion to various tools. Our aim is to organize help to develop converters between as many tools as possible, and to develop a multiconverter.
Toolmaker survey. We will be designing What can my software do to a thought?, a survey of software tools, and we are collecting information about them at Tools for Thinking. We should write and distribute a survey for tool makers so that they can easily provide us with information on what objects (or records) correspond to thoughts, what are their methods and properties. In the case of TheBrain and MindManager we have robust SDKs from which we can see that, indeed, a thought is treated like an object, and the methods of that object reveal everything about it, including how it can be linked to other objects. Help! Help us design, critique and complete our survey What can my software do to a thought?
Offer tools to members. Including discontinued tools such as Lotus Agenda.
Pursue concrete implementations through various groups
We'll pursue concrete implementations of our standard through various
groups, such as topicmaps.org (xtm-wg@egroups.com)
5) As we clarify the purpose of our standard, and design a conceptual
standard, it will make sense to focus more on implementations - what is
technologically and politically relevant. Conceptually, all of the
evidence so far is suggesting that we will have a set of links. How
will we implement this?
Concretely: We will want to collect examples of how and why a
set of links can be represented, for example, using a set of lists, or
a flat table, or an object technology, or an XML technology. This
is an opportunity to bring in standards groups into our work.
Get sponsorship for converter design.
Help! Organize petitions of users,
that the makers of their favorite products
design converters to our standard.
Organize programmers. We should find a place to make available these codes in the public domain. Contact and encourage programmers in Lithuania. Contact Linux community. We should write to openhandheld.org and open-palm@egroups.com
Benchmark examples. We need to have compelling collections of thoughts that we can use as benchmarks, so that people might try out conversion with. We should include sources published on the web, such as the ThinkTank for TheBrain. We can also think of benchmarks as information that toolusers would want to merge with their own. Help! Submit collections of thoughts "with a life of their own", preferably in the public domain, that you would like our import/export standard to be able to handle. We may use such collections as benchmarks.
Promote and demonstrate converters. Demonstrate that our standard can work and be useful. Demonstrate the use of converters between our members' products.
Specify requirements for the multiconverter. The interactive multiconverter should grow out of the Thoughtful Wishing usage matrix and reflect usage patterns observed. It should allow people to add their favorite converters, and walk them through various complications, such as the conversion of a web into a tree, for example. Figure out how to organize and finance the creation of the multiconverter. What are our goals and plan? What business model will reward appropriately all who help us create it? What programming languages to use? What platform to use ? (TheBrain, SmallTalk, Visual Basic, CORBA...) How best to distribute it ? (eBay or through partners, freeware or shareware, separate or together with a product like The Brain). How to find and enlist programmers ? (users of different products, programmers in Lithuania). How do we build a team? Help! Join or lead a team that we want to organize in a "Linux"-type effort to design our interactive multiconverter. Write to ms@ms.lt Help! us answer these crazy questions! Write to ms@ms.lt
Propose investigation for developing multiconverter. An interactive multiconverter will be a very practical application of our laboratory's work on the exploratory standard. Our laboratory organizes public research as a way of building relationships. We will therefore develop the multiconverter in the context of an investigation. We can explore a relevant belief underlying the need for a multiconverter, such as, for any aspect of thought there is a structural environment that brings it out when we work within it. We can then choose to work with a software tool wholeheartedly so that it brings out that particular aspect of our thoughts which thrives in the structural environment that it offers us. Or our investigation can emphasize and interrelate the conceptual and technological challenges of transforming structures with the social challenges of organizing independent programmers using a variety of programming languages. What company would benefit from sponsoring our investigation?
Our work on the standard is centered at our working group whetherwhat@egroups.com All are invited to observe our discussion, although participation is restricted to members of the Minciu Sodas laboratory. We invite you to join! You can join for free through by contributing examples of caring about thinking, or join right away by paying our membership fee. Write to Andrius Kulikauskas at ms@ms.lt
You can also join us at personalbrain@egroups.com, our discussion group for The Brain. Send a blank message to personalbrain-subscribe@egroups.com We also frequent other user groups such as mindmanager@egroups.com, thoughtstream@egroups.com,. eccopro@egroups.com and pimlist@egroups.com
Our laboratory is a vehicle for us to get things done, most notably, develop our import/export standard. We need to think about what each of us individually, and collectively as our laboratory, want to achieve, and the resources that we can afford to devote. Information on services.
We want to proceed quickly enough to show definite results and build momentum. At the same time, we want to proceed slowly enough to involve the widest variety of participants and integrate the widest variety of talents, ideas and interests. The Minciu Sodas laboratory is providing leadership by organizing public research that helps us all build relationships as we work together to develop our standard.
I have put together my business goals for our laboratory for the rest of this year, and for next year. I share it with you because of the consequences on how I will spend my efforts and organize our work together. I post information on our business goals, strategy, and priorities at: http://www.ms.lt/ms/staff/strategy.html
Infrared Data Exchange: 1999.10.22: Irdakiss
Me!
1999.10.06: Infrared
Lets Ideas Move, letter to Robert Stuart, Chairman of the Marketing
Committee of the Infrared Data Association.
Mobile Computing: 1999.04.21: Mobile
Computing Encourages Thinking: Complement X-IRMC-FIELDS with vThought
presented at the meeting of the Infrared Mobile Computing workforce
Knowledge Management: 1999.01.28: Proposals
for the Unified Knowledge Language at the first standards meeting
of the Knowledge Management Consortium International.
1999.10.28: Letter of Introduction to Phil Stenton
Enterprise Application Integration: 1999.03.30: EAI Takes on
the Vertical Dimension: Integration of
Documentation at the DCI conference on Enterprise Application Integration.
Hardware platforms
Mobile Computing: 1999.04.21: Mobile Computing Encourages Thinking:
Complement X-IRMC-FIELDS with
vThought presented at the meeting of the Infrared Mobile Computing
workforce
Infrared Data Exchange: 1999.10.22: Irdakiss Me!
1999.10.06: Infrared Lets Ideas Move, letter to Robert Stuart,
Chairman of the Marketing Committee of the Infrared Data
Association.
Thank you to TheBrain and MindJET for sponsoring work at our laboratory to develop this import/export standard.
Thank you to members of ourownthoughts@egroups.com, Flow of Experiences, the Minciu Sodas laboratory working group developing our standard. You are welcome to view our discussion at http://www.egroups.com/group/ourownthoughts/ I share with you some of our many interests:
KK Aw, www.multicentric.com,
inventor of Multicentrix 4.0
Stephen Danic, www.memes.net,
inventor of collaborative Lucid Fried Eggs
Ben Darnell, http://thoughtstream.org,
inventor of Thoughtstream for Palm and PC.
Hans Donner, Information and knowledge storage, representation,
retrieval, and creation.
Nick Duffill of MindJET, www.mindmanager.com,
MindManager Open Interface software, discussions about thinking and visualising.
Joseph Goguen, Socio-technical aspects of information society.
Anna Herbert of TheBrain.com, Project manager for the
Software Development Kit for TheBrain.
Andrius Kulikauskas, Knowledge of everything about life.
Applying this knowledge usefully.
Saulius Maskeliunas, Knowledge-based systems, knowledge representation.
Steve Raiff, www.brainfarming.com,
How thinking can be self-motivating through the avenue of fun.
Roy Roebuck, www.one-world-is.com,
Metaschema, multicentric views of information, especially tree-star-flow.
Raimundas Vaitkevicius, Object technology.