…the simple but difficult arts of paying attention, copying accurately, following an argument, detecting an ambiguity or a false inference, testing guesses by summoning up contrary instances, organizing one’s time and one’s thought for study - all these arts - which cannot be taught in the air but only through the difficulties of a defined subject, which cannot be taught in one course or one year… must be acquired gradually in dozens of connections…
same world together
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
Here is a first shot at a Intro/How-To Video for Wirite. We are currently changing the functionality of the site, so the functionality expressed in this video will certainly be different in the upcoming months. The old site is still up at the Wirite beta page to test out. Check it out and send any feedback you might have. There is also a written How-To here. Thanks so much to Mark Pare and Justin Almeida for making the video!
Settlers vs. Citizens
Recently, everything reminds me of Wirite: community organizations struggling to gather support for their causes; people in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen being left with the enormous task of replacing old ways with new better ways of living; anything on the news about a liberally minded person getting riled up by a conservatively minded person, or vice versa; news stories that show someone frustrated about something – not able to breathe about something in their life… some injustice; every time I hear someone saying that they are frustrated with the roles that our leaders are playing in our country, and throughout the world; every power struggle that just moves and moves around and around, and every time the people that should make the real decisions about things, since they are the ones most influenced, not feeling empowered to express themselves.
If I studied politics, government, or business, I would have a set of tools that would allow me to wrap my head around these things – to be more comfortable and level headed when talking about “the way the world is” and “the way we can help or do good”. It’s tough not having this set of tools. But therein lies what is so valuable: if you can be strong enough to be frustrated and struggle to understand something that makes absolutely no sense to you, you can come up with special ways to help.
In his book “Democracy in America”, Tocqueville seemed to capture a sense of what the United States was and is. What I gather from his writings is that townships in the United States were founded on a set of strong, clear, meaningful ideas (equality among all citizens, decentralized decision making, citizen ownership of the rule of law, and trust within communities and governments). I notice that the arguments being put forth by the current leaders in the United States are all loosely based on small remnants of these ideas, but the bigger picture of how all of them fit with each other is being lost.
Wiriting the Pillars
What is the best tool available, within current limitations of technology and communication, to allow a large number of people with disparate ideas and backgrounds to coherently interact with one another on a large scale when the need arises?
The purpose of Wirite is to search for an answer to that question. Its goal is to allow the editing by and contributions of people to a single document at a scale that is unsupportable by traditional document sharing platforms (such as Google Documents and wiki systems). The platform attempts to allow 2 people to 7 billion people edit, contribute, and feel a sense of ownership in a single document that could be as short as a paragraph or as long as a novel, thereby allowing more people to be invested in a collaborative treatise of shared interests and action.
We are most familiar with one person creating a document that expresses their ideas, thoughts, and proposed actions to the world:
The tools that allow a person to do this are numerous: a piece of paper, a typewriter, a word processing editor such as Microsoft Office, an Internet publishing tool such as a blog, an email account. Since a single person has complete control over the creation of the document, she can write the document in a way that she sees as valuable as possible for herself and the people that she wants to share it with. Many of the editing tools created have focused on one person creating content and sharing the content with the world.
So say hi to Wirite
Hi Wirite! Here is a FAQ/Introduction/HowTo that may be useful before I get a more official page together.
Wirite is a new type of editor that helps any number of people, anywhere in the world, speaking any languages, write anything together. Let’s see how it tries to do this.
Document Search
The first page is a list of documents that can be edited with the website. There is a search tool so that you can try to find a document that has already been started which discusses a topic that you are interested in.
Halfway Down
This is my first blog entry ever, so here is the ubiquitous one liner that tries to sum up my feelings or intentions:
I didn’t grow up on the Internet, but I’ll grow up here.
This first blog entry I am exploring why I spent more than a year developing the ideas of the Document Project (dp) before discussing the concept with the web community, before talking to possible end users, or talking to potential investors, even though these things are very important to creating successful websites.
What is the point of asking? We have recently been approached by a US State Senator that is interested in evaluating the dp to see if it is a useful tool to connect with the senator’s constituency. This made us realize that our first market could be constituent services offices at all levels of the US government. Constituent services is a good market since they could benefit from a new technology that allows the collective voice of a constituency to be expressed in document form, similar to the bills and resolutions that are debated in government, and similar to petitions that are written to a representative. It may be advantageous for first adopters at all scales (town, state, country) to advertise in campaigning that they are using such a tool, and the size of the groups using the tool can naturally scale with the development of the technology.
