Domain: rakontu.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to rakontu.org.
Comments · 7
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Related stuff by my wife on tagging narratives
Mainly by hand though. Free book: http://www.workingwithstories.org/
Free software for communtieis: http://www.rakontu.org/
Related business process patent (sadly) when at IBM Research: http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en&lr=&vid=USPAT7136791
Past commercial software: http://www.sensemaker-suite.com/
National security (does have some automatic aspects): http://app.rahs.gov.sg/public/www/content.aspx?sid=2955There is a lot you can do with stories once they are tagged for emotional intensity, whether automatically, by the teller, or by other people. Stories are all around us, as we try to make sense of our lives and events in our communities. So this sort of technology to tag emotions in stories is much more far reaching than just being about fiction. It can be used to design better products, to help communities figure out what to do about a pressing issue, to resolve conflicts, and to see emerging trends. That is one reason such work is funded by the intelligence sector (as well as businesses and some non-profits). She's been trying to make these ideas freely available to everyone, but it has been a slow going slog to follow the path of free and open source for all this.
By someone else on the relation between emotion and reason:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error -
Transcend instead of fight back
One other meme on this: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
"As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach.
Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."Some attempts by us at such FOSS tools:
http://www.rakontu.org/
https://code.google.com/p/rakontu/
https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20130202
https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20120623We've built other stuff in the past, but sadly it is proprietary. Hopefully people can go beyond all this in their own ways.
A billion dollars could see a good start on this project.
:-) Or a "basic income" for all, to give coders who want to do this the time to do it. -
Some ideas by me useful towards space security
From 2011: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2368162&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=37016386
"Twirlip: Towards a 21st Century Worldwide Public Intelligence Desktop Platform for Collaborative Sensemaking, Analysis, Risk Assessment, and Horizon Scanning"Around them, I also put together another proposal to collect and organize stories about security issues as a modernized "Risks Digest" using software like my wife desiged my wife wrote called "Rakontu":
http://www.rakontu.org/Another spin on that from this month:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/With some more code links and a video here:
http://twirlip.com/From 1999 to NASA, some ideas about rethinking our manufacturing infrastructure systematically and in an open source way:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/And also to DARPA in 1999:
"DARPA Progam Manager Position on Self-Replicating technology"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!msg/virgle/feS-LaqnFyM/z0sqkvvCx2QJ
"We of course need to minimize military tensions around the world through arms control, international aid, and setting a good example. This delays the culmination of these other trend to war, but in my opinion will not prevent them because of ever-present potential for a small group of unstable people to use weapons of mass destruction. ... I also don't think we have a significant choice. Such self-replicating and self-repairing systems will be developed eventually anyway, if only from commercial competitive pressures. The only thing we can do is slow down their development. Yet that has its own risks of our current infrastructure being overwhelmed by current weapons of mass destruction or sophisticated terrorism. Also, should such self-replicating technology be developed first clandestinely by an oppressive regime, the consequences for the United States could be disastrous."From 1987 for grad studies on improving security via self-replicating space habitats:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.htmlA long string of failed proposals.
:-)Well, at least I can still try to promote great ideas by others that have met with more success:
:-)
"A Conceptual Framework for System Fault Tolerance"
http://hissa.nist.gov/chissa/SEI_Framework/framework_1.htmlAnd I can keep on working towards those other ideas as very limited spare time permits.
I guess I am mostly just a creation of 1960s-1970s TV about our future in space -- to keep banging my head against the wall of space and security for decades?
:-) Star Trek, The Starlost, Space 1999, Silent Running, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Lost In Space, Thunderbirds, and so on... And way too many sci-fi novels. :-) -
Working on that with "Rakontu"
http://www.rakontu.org/
"Rakontu is free and open source software that small groups of people can use together to share and work with their stories. It's for people in neighborhoods, families, interest groups, support groups, work groups: any group of people with stories to share. Rakontu members build shared "story museums" that they can draw upon to achieve common goals."My wife and I have been working on that. The first version was for Google App Engine, but our next version is being built for the deskop in Java using CouchDB for a backend (a backend that can be either server-based or peer-to-peer) that can also provide an RSS feed.
But, after a lot of time spent doing this for free, we need to raise some money to keep it going (like on the order of US$20K - US$40K to finish the next version of the design goals in the documents on that webpage). We've been talking about using Kickstarter. But maybe Diaspora has used up all the mindshare about that?
But in any case, my wife wrote a related blog post called "Steal these ideas":
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html
"I spent part of last year building an open-source web application for story sharing and sensemaking in small groups. It's called Rakontu. This was a dream that began in 1999 (when I first started working in organizational and community narrative) and has been growing ever since. I used up years of savings to do it, and I was able to build far less than I would like to build someday, but I had a grand time and I'm glad I did it. I wrapped up the project about a month ago and posted an excerpt from a lessons-learned document for the project.
In my lessons-learned document I said that I'm more interested in the ideas from Rakontu moving on than the actual software surviving as is. Since then a few people have asked me to elaborate on that statement. So I've reviewed and thought, and I've come up with a list of six pieces of advice for anyone who would like to incorporate ideas from Rakontu into their own effort to support online story sharing."In any case, some people are trying. Maybe someday our society will have a "basic income" to ensure all people have more time for civic-minded pursuits if they are so inclined.
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Tell a story... using Rakontu
How can we "make use of the web so it connects people together and breaks down barriers more than it builds them up"?
"Rakontu is free and open source software that small groups of people can use together to share and work with their stories. It's for people in neighborhoods, families, interest groups, support groups, work groups: any group of people with stories to share. Rakontu members build shared "story museums" that they can draw upon to achieve common goals."
My wife and I are working on version 2.0 (in Java, semantic-desktop oriented). The design documents are linked there.
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Re:Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and the Oz Wicked Witc
When I was a young child decades ago, Fred Rogers had the woman who played the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz on his program. She explained how they did the scene where she melted. But she also tried to get kids to think about what things looked like from the Wicked Witch's perspective. Her sister was killed. The one keepsake was stolen. Her home was invaded. Finally, she is attacked just for defending herself and trying to get back her sister's property. And so on. It really shocked me in a good way, to think that things looked different from her point of view.
Here is a FOSS project (Rakontu) my wife developed (I helped a small bit) to help people see situations from multiple perspectives.
Read or go see Wicked. I loved it. It made all the good people into bad people and all the bad people into good people. My favorite line was, "It's a pair of shoes. Get over it!"
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Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and the Oz Wicked Witch
When I was a young child decades ago, Fred Rogers had the woman who played the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz on his program. She explained how they did the scene where she melted. But she also tried to get kids to think about what things looked like from the Wicked Witch's perspective. Her sister was killed. The one keepsake was stolen. Her home was invaded. Finally, she is attacked just for defending herself and trying to get back her sister's property. And so on. It really shocked me in a good way, to think that things looked different from her point of view.
Here is a FOSS project (Rakontu) my wife developed (I helped a small bit) to help people see situations from multiple perspectives.
http://www.rakontu.org/