The last month has been quite a trip down the rabbit hole into the new reality of ruby on rails! The promise of a powerful and well designed web application framework was just too much for me to resist, so I decided to leave my own yawaf framework behind (though it has certainly served me well).
So marketing blogger Seth Godin has a mention of SnapMail in the same breath as File Maker Pro on his blog. It’s nice that my humble little program is in such august company, though the context is a bit sad. What’s so odd is how SnapMail was created before the Internet was at all a house-hold word, back in 93, and it still has such a faithful following. I guess there is something valuable about having a little communication tool that’s not on the Internet! Who’da a thunk?
In my on-going quest for good metaphors and ways of thinking about the community/multi-currency world, an excellent metaphor came to me that is useful when talking about all this with programmers:
I learned about the Aristotelean intellectual virtue of phronesis along with the related term episteme a few years back from Kathryn Montgomery in discussions about her book How Doctors Think. Episteme is the scientific rationality we are all quite familiar with. Phronesis is usually translated “practical wisdom” and is the kind of rational skill doctors and entrepreneurs have that is based on experiential knowledge and provides the ability to take the best action in particular circumstances. We are much less likely to have thought of this as a separate kind of rational capacity. These terms came up again recently for me in the context of a collective intelligence discussion, which really set my mind going and has led me to some propositions and a conjecture:
Recently it hit me that I knew of no generalized protocol for sharing the state of an abstract space among a group of computers. I did a quick google search to see if I could find anything, and after coming up dry (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist) I decided to slap one together to test out the many uses for this that were readily apparent to me (i.e. any application where multiple users must be able to collaboratively make changes, and become aware of changes made to that space in real time: chat, bulletin boards, network games, etc.) Of course there is similar stuff like Croquet that certainly does an even more complicated generalized version of this, and lots of single purpose applications, like Subethaedit which must also do thisbut I haven’t found other efforts that are quite as simplistic and generalized. So, I slapped together the beginings of a protocol as well as a ruby based server, and a RealBasic based clients for OS X and Win to test out the ideas, all of which are released under the GPL license. [tags]collaboration,FLOSS,sharing[/tags]