Andrius Kulikauskas, ms@ms.lt, as Director at the Minciu Sodas laboratory, designs an investigation, through material gain, of the hypothesis:

Robust Notes have Caring Authors

Summary
Motivation:
Dilemma, Solution and Implications
Implications for Hewlett-Packard
Hypothesis, Question, Investigation:
Nature of Minciu Sodas Investigations
Investigation
Comments

Summary

Motivation: A thoughtful format may expand the flow of ideas and experiences across Infrared connections in the way that HTML has expanded the movement of documents across the Internet.
Hypothesis: Robust notes have caring authors.
Question: What features of a system of notes enable authors to care for their notes?

Dilemma, Solution and Implications

Making a presentation to the IrDA Marketing Comittee provided me with a useful opportunity to analyze the various ways that companies would benefit from the standard, and who might sponsor research and thereby benefit as catalysts for building relationships.

The dilemma that we are addressing is that there are people who would like to use software for arranging their thoughts, but their thoughts get trapped, which is especially problematic when software gets discontinued. Moreover, competing products are unable to benefit, and the market does not grow enough to be taken seriously by larger companies. The solution is for us to take the initiative to organize the development of an import/export standard for sequences, hierarchies, and networks of information. Users will then be able to use converters to transfer their recorded thoughts from one program to another.

Our laboratory needs to understand and help realize the implications of the standard. The diagram below illustrates the various sectors of the economy that will be affected. Our research is public, so its chief value is in the relationships it helps build.

I group the various affected sectors based on the roles they might play in our research. We are open for all to participate. I think our research will yield best results, and our services will be most valuable, if we target our outreach to individuals and companies that bring new possibilities to our members.

Beneficiary: Individual Users Our first goal is to solve the import/export problem for individual users neglected by "market forces". Our research will stay on track if we focus on what benefits individual users, consumers. We need to think of how we personally might benefit, and invite others who might benefit in unexpected ways.
Leadership: Thinking Management The Minciu Sodas laboratory provides leadership as a champion for individual thinkers. We must not devote all of our attention on developing the standard, because our work on other objectives, such as Harmony of Motivation, helps bring out the value of the standard. We are happy to work with allies, and Steve Raiff and I have drafted a Charter for Alliances.
Forum: Networks of Devices The Infrared Data Association is a wonderful forum for specifying and establishing our standard. IrDA, www.irda.org, represents more than one hundred major companies, and the IrDA leadership is ready to help us make contacts for our work. IrDA has a history of very quick and streamlined approval of standards, and IrDA members are very interested in bringing new consumer applications to market. Infrared, as a technology for transfering information, encourages person-to-person transfer of information not restricted to any format or output (compare this with the social consequences of web, phone, television, radio, LANs, mail, email, fax, Blue Tooth...). Our work can help IrDA directly by expanding their membership into new sectors, such as corporate usage and information storage and retrieval. The Infrared universe currently consists of almost 100 million devices. I imagine that our standard can do for the Infrared universe what HTML did for the Internet, especially if our standard works for the transfer of aggregates of experiences, as in Irdakiss Me!
Implementers: Toolmakers, Synchronizers, Tool Integrators Natrificial Software Technologies, www.thebrain.com, KK Aw, www.multicentric.com, Eugenio Martinez, http://cartografiamental.com/ are members of our laboratory who have developed software for organizing thoughts. The standard would simplify transfer of information between hundreds of different such products. Most of the makers of such software, however, have very limited resources. Most of these immediate value to their products and also those of several hundred that would benefit is a great example of a company that might be
Catalysts: Corporate Users, Storage & Retrieval, Hardware Platforms, User Interfaces Our research depends on sponsors who might demonstrably benefit as catalysts for building relationships between makers and users of software for organizing notes. Hewlett-Packard has devoted many resources to putting together the Infrared universe, and with this in mind they are exploring sponsorship of our research.

Users: Systems Integrators, Knowledge Management, Document Management

Nature of Minciu Sodas Investigations

Purpose is to build relationships and coalitions.
Have a practical project that we are working on. In our case - creating a standard.
Start with a belief that we value, that can serve as a bold hypothesis. Lead investigator and sponsoring investigator should share this belief. In our case - Robust notes have caring authors.
State a question to explore, that we do not know the answer to, and is based on our belief and challenges it.
Working together helps build relationships among our group.
In making our work relevant to the practical problem, we are forced to look at the big picture. This makes another belief relevant.
Work on our investigation develops a theoretical path between the two beliefs.
The theoretical path helps us see the importance of working with people having the other belief, and is the groundwork for building coalitions.
The sponsoring investigator benefits, both as a catalyst for relationships formed by those helping with the investigation, and as a leader in building the coalitions that the investigation breaks ground for.

Investigation

Collect examples of systems of robust information. Contact standards bodies and software makers.
Interview users of these systems as to how they care for the vitality of their information.
Categorize the systems as to the nature of their features for tending to the vitality of information.
Interview standards bodies and software makers to correctly represent mathematically the categorizations.
Define mathematically a format that preserves the features of information essential to care for them.

I take "robust" notes, thoughts, information to be those that give rise to additional notes. I imagine that the notes they give rise to are related to them in sequences, hierarchies and networks.

Functionally, I think that this "robustness" is the defining quality of the systems that we are wanting to serve. We can think of
them as complex adaptive systems, in which the thoughts or notes are adaptive agents.

Instead of considering such systems in isolation - which can be depressing models for human life - I want to focus on the "authors" of the systems. How do they "care" for the agents in their systems? What does it take for them to continue to care about the system, for example, upon transfering the system from one platform to another?

I like this point of view very much because it contends that robust information has a special relationship with its author. The robustness is in the eye of the beholder, that is, the author (or the reader who tries to reconstruct the mind of the author). It is the author who perceives new relations before they are recorded. I think a note engenders other notes when an author cares for that note, lets that note carry something unknown, yet to be spelled out.

I think that this point of view helps puts the purpose of our standard in a very different light. The fact that the notes have an
author who cares for them - lets them mean to him or her much more than one might guess - lets us see that the words in the note may be only 5% or even less of what that note is meant to represent. So we see that the standard is not to be faithful to the letter, but to the spirit. The author can choose to capture the spirit of that note in a whole new way - change the note radically - and still deem the note to be persistent. The reason is that it is not the representation on the paper that matters, but the authorization of the representation in the mind.

The purpose of the standard, in my mind, is to support the author so that they feel comfortable that any transformations of the system do not keep them from caring about the system. The author's "baby" can look different after transformation, but it better be breathing. In other words, the standard is successful when it makes it attractive enough to continue cultivating the system of notes.

I'm very excited about this approach. Now, of course, is a good time to critique it. I am certainly taking ideas from our discussion - Saulius' desire for a typology of the different kinds of sequences, hierarchies and networks is for me at the heart of "collecting examples of systems of robust information". Also, the point of view is wide enough so that any of the systems that we've been discussing could at least in theory be cultivated by an author as a robust system of thoughts. At the same time, the vast majority of instances of these systems are - from this point of view - nothing more than accumulating heaps of inorganic records - they do not have caring authors, they do not consist of thoughts that spawn more thoughts.

Also, this picture holds up well if we replace thoughts with experiences, and if we look at small packets of experiences, that a
grandmother or grandchild might put together. Again, these are cases where we can call the person on the phone and ask them - what did you mean by putting this next to that? or pointing from here to there? or placing this in that? The standard does not have to answer the question "what did you mean"? It simply has to transfer the minimal structure so that we can try to make sense of what was meant. So I think this can hit the nerve of the human user, who is given what is needed to try to
take up a loved one's point of view. I think this can be a very helpful concept to bring this to IrDA and Hewlett-Packard.

Additional Research

I can use your help to design an investigation that Hewlett-Packard might sponsor:

Put together a specification that would yield concrete preliminary import/export formats for unstructured, structured, and restructured thoughts, as described in the paper Developing Import/Export Standards for Aggregates of Notes. The investigation would consider the needs of users of existing software for organizing thoughts. It should also consider current standards.

Here are some additional directions that it would be good to pursue through investigations:

Kinds of Memory. Aggregates of notes are extensions of memory. Memory itself can be thought of as an extension of the mental workspace. If sequences, hierarchies and networks are the basic ways of extending memory, then presumably they can be found within the mind (or brain) as different kinds of memory serving different purposes.
Range of Uses. It can be helpful in defining the standard to imagine its many possible uses. This can involve listing the variuos kinds of input/output devices that use Infrared, listing the kinds of operations that AI agents perform, and then imagining the kinds of transfers of aggregates humans might like and benefit from.
Generating Emotions. In what way may aggregates of experiences generate emotion?

Conceptual Foundations.

Other

Experiences, including expressions of ideas, are free to move about, form aggregates and generate emotions and responses.

The objective defined above establishes a new context for our work to develop a standard for the import and export of sequences, hierarchies, and networks of notes. I have been appointed convener of the Infrared Data Association's newly cretaed Special Interest Group for Flow of Experiences. The goals of our Special Interest Group are to create a conceptual standard for sequences, hierarchies, and networks of information, and to develop a strategic picture for usage of the standard. Eng Tan, R&D Section Manager, Communications Services Section, Information Appliance Operation, Hewlett Packard is exploring whether or not to sponsor an investigation at the Minciu Sodas laboratory to help specify the standard.

IrDA Creates Flow of Experiences SIG

In February, Barry Dobyns told me about the work of Infrared Data Association, www.irda.org, and especially the Infrared Mobile Computing (IrMC) work group, in developing standards for business cards (vCard) and to-do-lists (vCalendar). He suggested that they would be a logical forum for developing a standard for aggregates of notes. Subsequently, the Minciu Sodas laboratory became a member of IrDA, and I gave a presentation to the IrMC at the April meeting in Paris, France. At that time, it seemed that for things to move forward I would have to bring a specification (in XML) and perhaps do an investigation into concrete ways that the standard might create value for consumers in the exchange of data between consumer appliances.

I debated whether to fly to San Francisco for the October 18-22 meeting of IrDA, and so I called Lawrence Faulkner, the Executive Director. He was very encouraging and on his suggestion I wrote a letter to Robert Stuart, Marketing Committee chairman. Robert Stuart allowed me to make a presentation to the Marketing Committee with the purpose of creating a new Special Interest Group for the Movement of Ideas. My presentation focused on the implications of a standard for IrDA and various kinds of companies, and the way was clear for creating the Special Interest Group. Afterwards, I prayed and realized that the standard we are developing would affect many more people and provide more opportunities for companies if it allowed for the transport of bundles of experiences, instead of just ideas. The next day Robert Stuart, Rob Lockhart and others helped me draft a charter for the Special Interest Group. The IrDA Board approved the charter and appointed me as convener.