roundtable: Re: nonprofit culture

roundtable: Re: nonprofit culture

Re: nonprofit culture

David Friedlander (friedd@iscinc.com)
Sat, 19 Mar 1994 06:58:29 -0500 

Date: Sat, 19 Mar 1994 06:58:29 -0500
From: David Friedlander <friedd@iscinc.com>
Message-Id: <199403191158.GAA09054@pipeline.com>
To: roundtable@cni.org
Subject: Re: nonprofit culture 


Responding to msg by jsebby@unlinfo.unl.edu (jane sebby) on 
  Thu, 17 Mar  2:14 PM
>
>What good are 
>thousands of sources if people don't have the time, 
>interest, or energy  to read them, assuming they can be 
>found in the first place.  

There can be technical tools to help with this problem, some of 
which are under development.  What's needed are useful, 
easy-to-use systems to help people communicate about what they 
think is worth reading.  Newsgroups and mail lists are a 
primitive version of such software, especially with the 
addition of kill files and bozo filters.  More useful software 
would allow the reader to easily rate the usefulness of a 
contribution, and to select what to read on the basis of how 
many other people and, perhaps, which people thought it was 
worth reading.  One could envision a system which would allow 
people to join a group of other people whose evaluations they 
trust.

At last year's Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, a 
presenter showed some software that worked to log the number of 
people who had looked at various sections of text.  He pointed 
out that paper books "record" frequent use by opening more 
easily to the sections that are often read.  We depend upon all 
sorts of visual and tactile cues to find paper information.

It seems to me that this sort of "meta" conferencing, which 
allows a sort of "voting" response to postings can have deep 
implications both for managing the flow of information and for 
the democratic potential of the new networks.

Responses?

---------------------------------------------------------
David Friedlander
voice 212-942-1156    fax 212-569-8680

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