So, the unfolding continues. This thing is spread across a wide array of sectors, that include the scientific (semantic ontology and computers), the political (particularly transpartisan and democracy-related), and the spiritual (how the world might be guided by wholeness). Everything else is included in there somewhere (art, relationships, justice, ecology, business, etc.)

And there IS a vision coming together, with a lot of clear pieces. Generally, the idea is -- organize an outreach (like a cold-call boiler room), where volunteers (or who knows, paid staff) can reach out to individuals and organizations anywhere, who somebody feels is contributing to a "world that works for everyone".

Invite these people or groups into the resonant tag-cloud, where they define themselves, and create common ground with others by sharing tags and network motivations. This is very do-able, it is simple, it's not technically demanding, it is very reasonable -- and it's absolutely holistic. And it can contain every bit of wisdom and spirit-insight we can collectively gather -- which is a lot.

So, yes -- this vision does need to be clarified and simplified, and presented in a formal strong way with clear polished bullet points. This piece is not yet that, but we'll get there.

For right now, I just want to send you a graphic of the current "Governance" tag input, and then enclose a long email I just posted to a technical group of computer scientists, some of whom are long-time old-school visionaries -- the kind of people who were influence by "Xerox PARC", or were there when the computer revolution first began.

First the graphic -- then the full text of the email to ONTOLOG -- and sorry, this is kind of a long and technical email, but it reviews the content of the vision for people with serious technical capability. Just skim it if it's not your thing.

From: Bruce Schuman [mailto:bruceschuman@cox.net]
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2014 10:18 AM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: RE: [ontolog-forum] Top-down / bottom-up - taxonomy/folksonomy

Thanks for the comments, Jack, interesting to look through your history and very hopeful vision. I too have been a fan of Doug Engelbart (and sorry, wanted to ask you if you are any relation to “Xerox Park” – maybe an older brother?)

One of the reasons this “ontolog” list is so interesting to me – is that not only does it gather a lot of sharp real-world professionals – but among them are very substantial people who have worked through something like the entire computer revolution from its very beginnings.

This gives us a powerful perspective on the classical foundations of computer science – that sometimes can be obscured (I think) by the very sophisticated things that can be done with sheer computing power today. A very tiny thought on that subject might be – some people here no doubt remember the days of non-proportional fonts – when by default every keystroke placed a mark on an “implicit matrix” of invisible rows and columns, like an old-fashioned typewriter, where the “alphabet” of what we were doing with a keyboard seemed very crystalline.

Every space on the page either had one character from a finite alphabet, or it had no character. If we were studying things like the matrix structure of language – or the kind of things Douglas Hofstadter brought to us through Gödel Escher and Bach, or Metamagical Themas – all of that was somehow easier to visualize when language was always recorded on a finite-state linear matrix. Even the elements of the alphabet itself – the pixel composition of the fonts themselves – were also clearly defined by an on/off yes/no figure/ground for every point in a well-defined finite matrix. That’s all no doubt still true today – but it’s much less apparent with highly sophisticated css and proportional fonts and what amounts to “near-continuous variability” in so many dimensions.

My father was the vice principal of Monterey High School, and he ran the “punch cards” for daily attendance. I was utterly astonished at the power and speed of an IBM card-sorting machine. It was just utterly awesome how fast that machine could accurately sort out a huge deck of punch cards. And I was at Berkeley in the summer of 1969, when I first studied Fortran and Algol, and we were still working with punch cards. For the years that followed, I continued to follow the evolving computer revolution, regularly buying computer science books at UC bookstores. I bought things by Terry Winograd or Patrick Winston or Marvin Minsky, or visionary authors like Ted Nelson. I subscribed to Data Communications magazine, and I remember the big deal when ODBC was created. I remember the big issue of Byte magazine when they first introduced “Windows”. One of the books that got a lot of attention in my world was “Conceptual Structures”, by J. S. I beat my head hard against that book – and if I was not a “semantic networks person” – because I already had a huge investment in hierarchical/top-down/taxonomic models – that book was still the best thing I had ever seen on the fundamentals of semantics.

In the late 1980’s, I was on The WELL (“Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link”, founded by Stewart Brand and Whole Earth Catalog people) and was tuned in on Howard Rheingold. Douglas Ruskoff was in our conversations. And one of the books that was a big deal back then – was the book Network Nation – about the “EIES” system at the New Jersey Institute of Technology – that was seen as the precursor of electronic/internet communications. On the WELL, we talked about “netweaving”, and had lots of visions of great things – as per Ted Nelson. Was this online thing going to change the world – even if some of us were signing in at 300 baud – where you could see the keystrokes appearing one at a time on the screen as they came through the phone line -- ? We all knew it would.

A few months ago, I got excited again about this concept of Network Nation. It’s a simplification of an important force, where the foundations are still clearly visible. So I started putting together this site: http://networknation.net

I’ve been working for years on “intercultural” things – basically all the permutations of the Rodney King mantra “Can’t we all get along?” – and in the last few, I’ve been very concerned with polarization and gridlock in politics. Basically – our political system is failing to meet the challenges of the emerging new globally-interconnected world. The reasons why – add up to a huge and complex list. Tons of books on the subject, all across the map. Does computer networking have a role to play in helping to solve this problem? I’d say it has a huge role.

I’ve been very connected with NCDD – National Coalition on Dialog and Deliberation – http://ncdd.org – a group that just wrapped up their 2014 conference in the D.C. area yesterday. These guys bring together hundreds of civic activists and “democracy theorists” from many of the best institutions in the USA.

NCDD is committed to the professional lives of their members, so they are not entirely guided by blue-sky idealistic visions – but there is a lot of creative push in that group to rise to the occasion, and work to address issues in “broken governance”. They are among the foremost experts in what this is about.

And for me – with a very ambitious algebraic ontology of natural language based on dimensionality and taxonomy, and a commitment to building bridges between cultural groups – this idea of “collaborative tagging” is suddenly starting to look like a hugely potent and “high-dimensional” way to establish common ground among 10,000 independent organizations with some commitment to nurturing our national culture.

Yes, “we fight about everything”. Language incarnates in abstractions, and abstractions spawn bottomless fights. All the detail supposedly inherent in an intended abstraction is implicit – so what I intended by my abstraction is very likely not what you understood. That’s a HUGE problem.

What I am starting to do now with “collaborative tagging” is define ways that we can “independently factor” every critical dimension inherent in what a political group (or any other kind of NGO or civic activist group) believes in or wants to do – in ways that can be independently checked yes/no in a big cloud of tiny pieces like “post-it notes”.

You – or your group – can fully dimension yourself in a free-form way – everything you need or want to tell us about yourself and your motivation can be defined in tiny pieces – and if we could get 1,000 or 10,000 activist agencies to respond into a universal check-box matrix that evolved collaboratively – we could just define the common ground of the American experience through Venn diagrams…

Every political issue that anybody wants to suggest can be defined as a tag.

Any position or recommended action regarding that issue can be defined as a tag.

Any tag can be regionalized through a central address on a Google map.

This can immediately lead to an integrated network on every issue at any level of scale or region.

Issues can therefore be absolutely local and intimate – and yet still shared across a national network where relevant.

This “collaborative tag” interface is extremely simple.

Don’t got to know much, doesn’t take much skill, no technical vision or theory required. Can you type a few words and hit submit? Do you have any clue what you want to do or care about? You can very easily tell us, in a format that can be 100% linearly factored – as a kind of huge a la carte range of options for the entire pool of American political motivation. You care about something, you can be on this map, and form an alliance with anybody else who feels as you do.

Can we agree on some basic principles of civility – as the people from NCDD and many other civic activist groups would like us to? We’ll have a ton of check boxes on those themes too. Go a la carte, be an individual – be a libertarian OR a communitarian – and we’ll figure out the common ground on a national level electronic matrix, and invite you to make-nice with your fellow citizens.

This approach, it seems to me – offers a very promising new kind of activism. Yes, we gotta sell it, and we gotta make it actually work, and it’s gotta serve people and groups in ways that make them stronger and turn them on. But do this in the right way, contact the right people, build a core that can move and build credibility, and solve the technical issues along the way – this might work.

It’s 100% “interdisciplinary” AND “intercultural”. It’s holistic, it’s simultaneity-and-interdependence-in-action. It’s a huge integral matrix of interconnected motivations, and seems natural and intuitive, with a very basic and simple front-end. People can understand this. It should work for “average bears”. The whole thing seems simple to explain.

So ….

Thanks for this network, and the very many subjects and themes that get posted here. Yes, I am one of those “knight errants” chasing the dream of the perfect ontology – but this tagging project looks like a design that can be driven from the bottom up. And when we start looking for a state-of-the-art way to melt confusion and discord at high scale, the great ideas posted here will undoubtedly be extremely helpful…