Really? Why? What are we trying to achieve that would be helped by that?

At times I have felt the same way. However, on reading your post, I started to get curious. Really curious. What assumptions are we working with?

Well, like William Hay just posted news about his new musical composition in the "$150 Billion To End Global Poverty" thread, because he knew it would get read there.

I rarely post anything on o/net that I don't want others to read, consider, and respond to. Some threads have lots of people reading and responding and others are just dead.

There are probably 100 dead threads on socially conscious businesses and there is usually one that's alive on that topic too (which we only figure out by watching "What's New"). Why not just have one thread on that topic and have it always be alive?

The advantage would be when anyone had something to say they could go to THE thread about that and be on topic, AND get responses. If there were one thread about musical compositions then William could post there and I would too.

I have so many responses for you David.

It would be fun to see an actual analysis. I think there are a several key elements--conversational flow, organization, clarity of purpose, attention spans, incentive systems...

Have you read the thread Thomas started about getting people to comment on your discussion?

I think a useful question to ask here might be what is the purpose of the conversation? And how do we know when it is complete?

At a convention, let's say, there might 100 conversations in one day about Sustainable Business. However, they probably have little knowledge of each other, and certainly no access to the conversations they were not involved in. So this space, then, improves greatly on that. However, the next step, beyond simple searching conversation for keywords, might be organizing--the ninja gardening of a wiki applied to conversations so that clear effective links connect conversations, workspaces fill with summaries and indexes, etc. To make that happen, we need an incentive system to encourage gardening. Have you read about Stones, Tumblers, and Gems in targeted currencies?

My response is this: "poor architecture". We have no way to glean gems and jetison the rest. All we do is dig and dig and create mounds of dirt. What a mess!

Brandon wrote about this here: http://www.circleid.com/posts/print/is_icann_producing_jewels/

Here's part of it:

Excavation is fun. You get to rumble around on heavy equipment bashing up this and tearing up that. Each scoop uncovers original earth. As your big machine chews up the hill, an occasional sparkle suggests a raw gem or two.

Sifting is tedious. Hunched shoulders and strained eyes are the sifter’s reward. The toil of a long day may fail to uncover even a single rough gem.

Disposal is thankless. Above every tiny heap of sifted gems towers the enormous pile of crap that concealed them. The audience does not remember those who remove the crap that is not worth saving.

Cleaving a raw gem is risky. Delicate tapping cracks the crusty gem to birth jewel from its slough. But caution! An inept stroke shatters what should have been.

Re: Poor Architecture. I see your point.

On the other hand, we are a fairly small group of people who post regularly here, it seems like we could agree on rules that could have the same effect as better architecture.

Like how about a rule for naming threads so they are more like subject titles than statements or questions. We can put the statement or question or subtitle in the opening comment.

If we could get people to do that, then we could create an index of subject titles, the way a bookstore labels its shelves.

And THEN, we could get people to link from each discussion to all the other discussions that are on the same topic! Or even get people to pick one out of those and archive all the others.

what is the purpose of the conversation? And how do we know when it is complete?

Good questions. Most of the discussions I participate in are exploratory, sharing ideas and experiences about making money, helping people, achieving political change, technology, etc.

Some of the discussions are more organisational in purpose, and the goal is to meet people to colaborate with, or to actually colaborate online and co-create a document or a structure.

I don't think either of those kinds of discussions are ever finished. The only kind that finish seem to be the ones about voting on something, like the Q4 Funding initiative ones. When the deadline is up it makes sense that those would die.

But if you look at the list of all threads, you will see hundreds (thousands?) of discussions that we are still having, albeit not in those threads. Some discussions are going on in two places, like there has always been at least 2 active discussions on terrorism, and at least 2 on poverty, and at least 2 on environmental issues, and in general it is mostly the same people in both discussions. Or it should be, anyway. Some people only participate in one because they don't know about the other. It's silly.

I used to be able to look on my profile page at all the discussions that turned bold, meaning something new was posted, and I could spend my o/net time just reading and responding to those.

Recently (past 6 months) I have had to click on "My Recent Threads" to supplement this list. That one has the last 50 different threads I have contributed to. Well, more recently (past 6 weeks) I have noticed that nothing is bold on any of my list.

Hey, maybe I'm the one killing off the threads!

I don't think any agreements can make up for lack of poor architecture, because there's no way for any of us to enforce that agreement on anyone else. With good architecture (wikis, for example), there is no problem if a new person doesn't know the conventions, as the rest of the community can simply change it. When a conversation is in the wrong place, it can simply be moved. When similar converstations are happening in two places, they can be easily (technically easy, not necessarily thought-wise easy) be combined. With a wiki, all those "way to go!" comments can simply be edited out after a certain point. Our new understanding about a topic can live on it's own, after the conversation that created it has been removed. I do agree with you that questions are not good names.

VotingIsEvil and VotingIsGood are not questions, for example. They're ThoughtChunks that lead to conversations supporting and/or debunking each one. And periodically, the excellent work happening in the comments can be "refactored" into the main document and those comments swept away. O/net is full of clutter and there's no way to sweep any of it away.

Well, if anyone knows of a place that has this kind of people and this kind of purpose and these kinds of discussions, and also has what Ted described as "good architecture", please let us in on it!

If no such place exists, then maybe we can at least take a small step in that direction by asking people to name threads usefully. VotingIsEvil and VotingIsGood are statements, and the topic title should be Voting, or Elections, or Democracy, or Politics, or DecisionMaking, depending on what you really want to talk about.

Let's impose the "Bookstore Rule Of Thumb": would a bookstore ever label a shelf "VotingIsEvil"?

I completely disagree. Threads are not book shelves, they're black holes. Anything put in there is lost forever.

I don't think discussion is a very good goal. The goal is more and more good things happening, I think, yes?

I hear you about all the junk that stays in the system. But it isn't true that the good stuff is lost.

Actually, how about a rule that when someone posts something worth keeping, we get that person to go in and tag it, and make the whole post large type.

The goal is more and more good things happening, I think, yes?

I think good things happen out of discussions, at least if they are good discussions. What kind of good things were you thinking of? And what needs to be done to make those things happen? Are you thinking of communal fund raising?

Ideas that migrate into solid concrete ongoing action tend to not die. If there is simply too much talk I think many people go looking for other things after some time.

Mark, can you say more about that? What kind of actions were you thinking of? How can we get our ideas to migrate like that?

hmmm, Interesting Thread!

To start w/ I kindda think that most threads will eventually lose interest simply because they get so long that simalar ideas posted in the beginning start to get repeated by other members later in the discussion, and further once a thread gets to be 10 or so pages long I think most members decide that they would rather start reading something else than to struggle with 100+ posts,

a few years ago, I believe it was Sue Braidon who would summarize the best ideas from the thread into the first posts, I thought that that was a great asset to the discussion.

On the Architecture, well IMO, there are many Great ways to build all this much more dynamic and therefore easier to keep the jewels visable as Brandon would say,

• 1. what if we had a way to mask out the 'chit-chat'? this can easily be done by filtering out the comments marked 'chat' by the members and/or authors, displaying them only if desired.
• 2. what if we could also rate the content of a comment by a single vote/feedback point per member that determined if the filter 'showed' or 'hid' the comment? If the feedback score per comment was tweeked so each member was allowed to give it a (free) 'show or 'hide' and it didn't force the opening up of a new page in order to do it, I believe that many more members would contribute to rating the content.
• 3. what if we could easily 'tag' the thread and/or posts for later viewing and referance, I believe that much great stuff here would not get so easily lost, (and by 'tagging' I mean simply clicking on a 'tagIt' button and have the system add a link to my 'tagged' page in my personal news area.
• 4. what if we could also add grouping to these tag's , ie 'poverty', 'Darfur', 'micro-finance', 'read later', 'good links' etc.
• 5. what if we could also simply look at each-other's 'tag lists' and use them as 'indexes', ie, I know that member x knows a lot about some topic, and maybe I would want to first view his or hers idea of whats importent here related to that topic. because truly everyone has a different view of how something should be indexed :)
• 6. what if during the course of a disscusion we start to get 'off-topic' yet the off-topic matter is of good importence and we want to keep the discussion going, just not in the same thread, and now we also had another button that allowed us to high-light the 'off-topic' content and fold it into a new thread, replacing it with a link to where, and along with we were also allowed to view the primary thread with 'folds' displayed or not. this type of architecture will also allow us to use the same 'folding' for 'consensus building', ie as we reach a 'common ground' or agreement on something we 'fold' it out of the way replacing it with a link.
• 7. what if we could also easily 'clip' out a copy of some content, and send it to the 1st post 'summary or highlights' post, as well as/or also to a personal 'notes' page, along with the link to where it originated?
• 8. what if we could also send all these things to a workspace that is communally edited by all?
• 9. etc :)

Loved #7. Also, question, is it possible to sort for multiple tags? I want "onet" and "social benefit" and "art" for example?

I like the clip thing too. Have you seen clipmarks? It would be great to use clipmarks to do the summarizing. Great idea. Love the list Brad. Thanks.

:) Hi Jean

just checked out 'clipmarks'! pretty neat!! hmmm, I would love to help get some of these widgets working, yet I havn't been able to get the xml-rpc stuff here responding in any way, and I certainly am leary of learning phython/zope just for this! hehe, hmmm, I wonder if Haney or Thomas has any update on the rpc status? :)

>>Mark, can you say more about that? What kind of actions were you thinking of? How can we get our ideas to migrate like that?<<

Sure.

Here are 7 threads of the top of my head that would likely never die. Why? Well, they are action based and collaborative in nature. Each has an outcome, often visual, and all have more than one person (within the o/net community) involved.

None of these threads has 350 posts overall, 47 posts in 6 hours, or is debating religion, politics, creating complex systems, guiding principals or hot monkey sex. Not that there's anything wrong with any of those.

I think people read threads to be engaged in either thought or action and very little turns into real action. Thought and talk is fine and dandy but (to me) action is where the juice is. Also looking for feedback can be a rabbit hole of spinning wheels masquerading as meaningful action. In other words, here's process one in which there are widgets X, Y and Z what do you like. After a brief chat Z is selected and the widget is built. Cool beans. Or, here is a process two in which there are widgets T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z and there may be others. Let's talk about those and others. What if T had Y, but V lost its whatnot? Process one may come to a satisfying conclusion when the widget it done. Process two may well never come to any conclusion whatsoever and after 30 pages of posts the thread itself may well just die.

You may look at threads that die and ask why? I may look at threads that create meaningful action and seem to work and ask how to do more. (not really, just sounded good)

Keep in mind...there's only so much time in a day. Some ideas will get traction and grow...while others will die on the vine. That is the nature of the beast, and that's ok.

hahaha -- see also discussion thread navigation with table of contents (a thread I started 316 days ago, and to which no-one has made a single response to [ah, it has a typo -- maybe that's why...]).

Mark, that's fascinating, and I think you're on to something.

It's like newspaper articles or tv shows or books. Certain ones are good at getting everyone to come look. But popularity wanes just as fast as it waxes. (What was that quote from Petronius?)

Then there are others, like "Think & Grow Rich" which people are still buying and reading and recommending to their friends. Music publishers tax their rock/pop hits in order to pay for the classical ones, because over time Mozart and Bach and Beethoven outsell everyone, but they are rarely a hit in a given week.

This brings up a cool measure of a thread's impact: For how many weeks does the thread get at least one post each from at least 2 people. Why not have that show up as "What's Hot" instead of points?

oh -- before we wait another 316 days -- here's another take on the heat business: influence metrics

another funny comment I heard recently was Jack Ma's comment about people coming to him and saying they have a brand or something like that -- I heard it on the podcast of his web2con presentation (or whatever)...

I just realised why threads die. Either I kill them or nmw does. (We are the last to post in hundreds of threads).