Dynamic Alternatives
http://www.dynalt.com/


Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 08:43:14 -0800


Mr. Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496
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Subject:   KM Progress Requires Focus on SDS

Rod,

Let me respond to several issues in no particular order.

In looking at your letter to Jack Park, I don't remember having read it, so I must have missed it or overlooked it. I will go over it more closely.
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What I see when I follow some links into SDS is this:

[Seems to be blank stuff looking at SDS... ]

When I tried to paste the text into this message, I get paragraphs organized by number: 


481439 -         which is why I contacted him on 010719 to suggest alliance,
481440 -         after he asked about SDS. ref SDS 28 OL8I
481441 -
481442 -         POIMS explains this design, and SDS implements it, so why
481443 -         hasn't Gary commented on POIMS? ref OF 1 6221
481444 -
481445 -              [On 011010 SDS records manage complexity of human memory.
481446 -              ref SDS 37 TP6G
481447 -
481448 -              [On 011206 sent Gary copy of letter to Jack Park
481449 -              outlining steps required to move forward, ref SDS 42 0001
481450 -              as shown in another record. ref SDS 41 0001
481451 -
481452 -         SDS enables people to grab up information that comes in a
481453 -         continuous stream and add "intelligence" to create knowledge
481454 -         (structure based on chronology that shows causation) that is

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I am using the opera browser on a Windows 98 SE system. The same page appears nicely formatted in Explorer (which I don't care for. A quick glance at the HTML didn't give me a hint as to why it should render so differently in the browsers. The short-term fix is for me to use Explorer when browsing SDS.
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I belong to a KM egroup at Knowledge-Management-Systems@yahoogroups.com , the members are KM professionals in the sense that KM is a direct part of what they do for a living. Their discussions all center around corporate strategic planning and all sort of corporate level initiatives and almost never any discussion of tools that help individuals organize and reorganize what they know. This is another example of where I see the KM effort having gone wrong.
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I like the idea of having more SDS on the internet so that people will keep "bumping into SDS".
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Neil Larson is working on a Windows version of his Methinks outliner (www.maxthink.net ) that may get me back some of the organizing power that I used to use for individual documents, but I don't know that it will allow the linking that I consider necessary.

I read some articles by Brad Cox, the developer of Objective-C, that are very good. http://www.virtualschool.edu/cox/CoxPSIR.html is about what he calls the "software industrial revolution" that can happen once we can deal with "interchangeable parts" (software ICs) rather than the processes that create them (languages, compilers, etc.) He has several interesting articles on a wide range of topics including "mybank.dom", a proposal for a micropayment system for software distribution. He has done some work on distance learning and the problems of "Taming the Electronic Frontier". Starting from the home page ( http://www.virtualschool.edu/ ) there is a wealth of material. He might even be interested in what we are trying to do. See the article at http://www.virtualschool.edu/cox/PSIRResponse.html for further analysis of how long it took to get interchangeable parts introduced into industrial production and some of the elements that influenced that introduction.
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Buckminster Fuller was convinced that it takes 50 years for a new paradigm to be adopted. By contrast, and incremental but substantial upgrade can be adopted extremely rapidly - DVD recordings are the most rapidly adopted technology in history.
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I would like to know more about how SDS actually works, and would be more than willing to attempt to integrate it into my own efforts if we can work out how best to do that.
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I am hesitant to tackle the development of a personal organizational tool on my own, but there remains the possibility that there are enough pieces in Open Source to provide enough of a leg up to make it possible. It certainly doesn't seem that I am going to get there unless I do much of it myself or influence some effort that is moving in that direction.
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I need to start publishing my ideas even if only to get them better organized and out of my head. I have been saying this for years and still haven't made the start on it that I need. I intend to try again soon. The tools I have are somewhat better than they were, though not great. It seems that the tools are the best I am likely to get soon, so I just need to get at it.
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Let's keep in touch and see if there isn't something that can be done to bring about the kinds of tools we need and want.

Sincerely,



Garold L. Johnson
dynalt@dynalt.com