Visualising a people space

From the comments of the various people who read the last two chapters there seemed to be a sharp polarisation of views as to what a people space represents. Those who saw it in terms of a database thought the concept highly impractical and fraught with problems associated with the choosing of categories and the freedom given to users to construct it in a random way.

Others saw it quite differently. They didn't think of the people space in terms of categorised compartments, but, as a valuable conceptual model from which to think about meeting people who could help them obtain hard-to-find knowledge or assist them with e-business problems. Seeing a people space in this more abstract form, requires a considerable paradigm shift that is not easy to make– and is even more difficult to explain.

In writing the book "Magical A-Life Avatars", I had a similar problem when explaining the concept of object oriented programming. Some programmers could think only in terms of the syntax and structure of the programming and couldn't catch on to the idea of object oriented design strategy at all. Others saw beyond the code and thought about the memory space in the computer that the code would fit into. They realised they could divide that area up into self contained areas into which they could place little code modules that could function completely independently of any of the other code in the memory space.

Having this higher level view of the programming environment, allowed the programmers to think in terms of small code modules that interacted with each other. They could then rise above the level of the detail of the coding to concentrate upon the functions themselves. In this way they could construct high level systems that called upon functions, without having their thinking cluttered up with how the functions were performing their tasks.

To explain this idea of thinking about a formatted space in memory, I used the following dialogue which appears in chapter 4 of the book "Magical A-Life avatars":

Presenting a new concept:

Time: Early 1970's

Place: The president's office in a large electronics company in California

"The president will see you now."

The young man was ushered into the president's sumptuous office and shown to a seat in front of the huge desk dominating the room. He waited nervously for the president to finish reading through the pile of papers on his desk. The president looked up at him.

"You the guy with the killer app for these new-fangled computer things?"

"I think so", replied the young man nervously.

"What is it, then?"

"Well, it's sort of difficult to describe", began the young man hesitantly. "It consists of a grid of rectangles covering a computer screen".

"What's in the rectangles?"

"Nothing".

"Nothing?"

"Well, not until the user puts something into them."

"What sort of things?"

"Text and figures, but figures mostly, because the rectangles are used to do mathematical operations on the figures".

"So each rectangle is programmed to act like a calculator?"

"Well, they could be. It depends how the user programs them."

"You mean these empty rectangles have to be programmed by the user?"

"Yes, that's right. The rectangles are connected to each other by some kind of formula."

"WhatÕs the formula you use to connect up these rectangles?"

"I don't provide the formula."

"Who does?"

"The user."

"How are these rectangles connected to each other, then?"

"They aren't connected until the user supplies the connections."

"So, this killer app of yours consists of a grid of empty, unrelated rectangles that the user has to fill up with figures and connect together with their own programming and formulae."

"That's right."

"What are you going to call this killer app of yours?"

"I thought of calling it a spreadsheet."

"Nice name. Thank you for coming along."

"Thank you for seeing me."

"Good-bye."

"Good-bye."

The above scene seems humorous to us now because we know what a spreadsheet is and we can see how easy it would have been for somebody without previous knowledge to miss the point of having empty rectangles in a spreadsheet. The idea that you can model a business or a manufacturing process on a spreadsheet consisting of nothing but empty cells isn't instantly obvious. However, as the Taoists say, "The usefulness of a bowl comes exactly from its emptiness."

The dialogue illustrates the conceptual hurdle that has to be overcome before a living database, or a people space, can be usefully employed in the creation of an e-business. It isn't about planning the meeting areas, or, classifying them. It's about creating a structure where useful meeting places can appear spontaneously in a formatted space. In this way, any details of the structure are irrelevant – only the benefits that manifest within this space are important.

The example used in the last two chapters – of a people space being used by cancer patients to find available treatments – illustrates how the space can be used without the need for any rules or algorithms. Users just click their way to a meeting place where they have an opportunity to meet others who have a special interest in the same particular narrow area of knowledge as themselves.

There were reservations from some readers about the success of some of these meeting places. Would they attract a viable number of people? The answer is: nobody knows. The outcome is statistical. Some will work, others will fail.

This can be compared to many night clubs opening at the same time in the centre of a large city. Each night club owner would have planned to make their establishment successful and popular, but, it is unlikely that they would all succeed. Probably, nobody would be able to predict in advance which would be successful and which would fail, but, to the people who go to night clubs this is irrelevant, they will be visiting only those that succeed.

A people space with designated meeting places should be looked at is this same way. To view any particular meeting place in isolation would see all kinds of reasons why it could fail, but, from a statistical stand point, it is unlikely that they would all fail (conditional of course on there being a real need for the kind of information that the people space can provide).

For instance, a people space designed to create meeting places for people with various types of cancer could not be expected to succeed in every category. Some categories might not click at all, while others, for no accountable reason, might be a roaring success. The fact that there might be failures in amongst the successes does not invalidate the overall concept.