All right, this is a design from a trust call on Monday, September 2, 2019. Our topic is why haven't wikis eaten the world. And I think there are a few of us on the call who are wiki enthusiasts. I know that there's a couple of wiki ninjas in fact here. And just trying to figure out wikipedia eight encyclopedias why aren't we all using wikis to collaborate. And that's kind of the starting point and Dave Witzel who's on the call had asked this question on a mailing list that I run. Hey, there's Graham with Travis. And, and basically it's a great question and there's lots and lots of people on this list who care about the topic so we started going at it and I thought hey why don't we just put together a call here about this thing. And what I'd love to do is just, hey Pete, what I'd love to do is just right away. Invite people to jump in and ask questions actually one thing first Dave okay if we share a link to the document you started with this group and do you want to post that on the chat. Yeah, that'd be great. Awesome thank you. And I'll just can I just say one word about what the where the question came from. I think I'll hand the mic directly to you. Okay, now I just because because I ended up in a conversation with this group that's doing a kind of a global collaboration network around the new economy called called the well being Alliance. And they're trying to do a tools kind of component of the service they're offering to all these different organizations. And they're in the process of designing these tools. And, and I was laughing because like wow these are exactly like the websites we would have designed in 1995. You know, the, and, and I'm and I'm saying well this, and it won't work right we know it won't work. And then, and then he said but you know what will work and it was like well, I don't know actually. So, so one is he's got a real question that it's really interesting project and I'd love to help him answer it. And I did send him the document and I'll do better to edit and stuff and then I also gave him the link to this chat so it's possible that he'll drop in on the chat but it was very less minute. And anyway, and then I also thought there is something interesting, I would love to be able to take questions like this. The group answer was so interesting I thought that if you could capture it and use it again. It just seemed like it would be a valuable thing. So, I thought this would be an interesting test to see if we could come up with a, you know, interesting answer the question and then just publish it somewhere. So, that that's it. That sounds lovely so I think one of our one of our potential objectives here is to co author a post that we can place on the design from cross website on wherever wherever we'd like we can cross posted lots of places but I think that the Google Doc that they've just shared in the link is possibly the seed for such a collaboration or maybe it's a series of small, you know, of six small articles, each of which take a bite out of the question and we pair up and decide which parts of this we're interested in but keep that in the back of your minds as we talk just in case. I know that we are all like guys here it's funny that this invitation didn't kick up any women and I know that there are women on the retreat list who are like ninjas for this kind of collaboration so I'll just I'm going to say that out loud. And cross my fingers that that some of our women friends join the conversation. Bill, you've been, I think, wicking more intensely than anybody else I know besides Michelle Bowens and word himself. I'll just jump in and say a little bit about your personal experience and share the link to sites wiki on in the chat so you know anybody can who doesn't know what you've built can go wonder. Sure. Interestingly, or not interestingly, my personal focus has been on what some people wouldn't even call a wiki because it's really single author environment. I've been doing most of my writing for the last 17 plus years and I have a wiki what I call a wiki log which is basically a blog that's built on top of a wiki engine so it has the hyper text the aspects of a wiki, but I'm the only person who can write in this. I gave back the version that I was using allowed anybody to append a comment to the bottom of it, but one of the patterns with public wikis is that they get spam magnets. And so people end up even the even more original wiki basically doesn't operate anymore as an interactive site because they just gave up on fighting the battle of attrition with spammers posting to wiki pages. And then the other parallel thing that I have is I private wiki notebook, which is basically just my daily journal and sort of, you know, life management process which, again, because I'm really just a hyper text junkie wiki is the medium I found most effective for that. And then every job that I have, if they don't already have a wiki in place I put one in place and I probably end up right 80% of the content in there. And so that again is kind of a data point in terms of the difficulty in getting other people to engage and stuff it and even when there'll be a couple people that'll do some adding to wiki. And I sort of have to fight the urge to nag them, because it's a fragile enough, you know, engagement that even though they may have horrible page titles and not linked to anything else and not style anything at all or just sort of dump a bunch of word notes in there. You know, it's better than nothing in a sense of creating some sort of record and sometimes I'll fix it, you know, sort of fix the title or add a link in their page to some other related topic or something like that. So at least it's not a completely, you know, orphaned Google Doc, you know, that happens to be in a wiki page. So I've, you know, in my private writing, in my wiki log writing, I was part of various communities like Lion Kimbrows group that was talking a lot about social technology tools and things like that. And my model very quickly became basically the attitude of everybody should have their own wiki and essentially look for ways to connect across those spaces. And Ward's recent work is actually in that direction with his federated wiki model, which basically uses a single platform. But then that platform encourages people to essentially fork every page so that they take, they find one person who's written a page and they essentially copy it into their own space, and then they can make changes to it to suit their particular needs. And then that person can either copy it back into their space or you can sort of follow that in sort of a platform-wide recent changes model so you can see all the different flavors of a given page that exists. Strangely enough, when I look at the work that's been happening there, number one, they tend to spin off a lot of sort of short-lived single topic wikis. And so there's not a lot of sort of building of an intellectual at over time. And the other thing that I notice is that they tend to have rather sort of long, strange page names. And so therefore nothing would ever link back into it. Like every page is kind of like a hub that could link into other general pages, but those other general pages don't tend to exist. My style of writing is typically to start with kind of an anchor page and then have articles that link into it. And most of my sort of original writing happens in that anchor page, which is sort of like my gloss on it, which then links off to other stuff. And in a lot of the sites that Ward's platform has encouraged, I see the Bush pages without the hubs. And so you end up with, again, a series of kind of not connected pages. And so that to me seems like it doesn't get a kind of critical mass of attention either. And I think what all these things are trying to fight with is the issue that any document is essentially a gloss or a model of reality, either current reality or envisioned reality. And if you don't have a process that creates a group kind of convergence of thoughts around that, then it's going to tend to devolve into sort of different incompatible ideas trying to mesh on a page, which either results in one document that has 20 different visions and separate paragraphs, or somebody becomes the obnoxious editor who's imposing their view on that page and everybody else gets pissed off. And so the place where I would expect to have more success are in those product building business wikis because they're driven by having to actually build something. And so somebody's trying to converge kind of a vision there, and then that should be driving the model, you know, and then makes it makes variations on that vision, more explicit and resolvable. But again, the other dimension is that fact that most people don't seem to want to think in terms of sharing information. And so there's kind of like, no matter what you hit the scale problem or you hit a divergence problem. Absolutely.  Do you want to jump in and you also just posted a whole bunch of stuff on the on the treat list about a sort of reflections on this whole thing. But if you just want to put a stake in the ground here and then I'll just open the mic to whoever wants to jump in. Yeah, sure. So for better for worse, I ended up getting what I wanted to write down shipped to the list 10 minutes before this call so nobody's gotten to read it yet. I think at least some of us have a vision of kind of a, there's, there's a thing out there, the thing without a name maybe, which is a collaborative wiki where it's kind of a group brain working together. And certainly we had that in inside the corp wiki at social text. We, you know, we ran a couple year experiment with social text, having most of the, most of the communication and collaboration for the company working through a wiki and and also a set of IRC channels. It turns out you need some asynchronous as well as asynchronous. But we replaced email we replaced word we replaced PowerPoint with just wiki corp wiki. And we had that success with a lot of our customers to not not every customer was able to to kind of get the uptake and make it into the same kind of experience we had with our own wiki but there were. I thought it's kind of a surprising number of folks who did. We also had customers who took our wiki and made something different from it. One of those patterns actually I really like, which was we had such a simple technology at the beginning that people would invent normal people using the wiki would invent essentially applications on top of the wiki like a workflow manager or an order user or things like that. And from that I learned that giving people a limited tool set and the power to kind of innovate with, you know, within that tool set gives them a lot of power empowers them and creates things that you wouldn't have imagined, you know, as as use cases, because people who are using stuff know their use cases best. So, that's kind of the good news I think the bad news is after 15 years of thinking about wikis and how they work and why they don't. The thing that I learned is that people don't look really collaborate as well as it seems like they ought to. And there's lots of reasons for that there are a large number of kind of accommodation techniques you can use to turn low performing community low, you know, low collaboration performing community into a higher performing collaboration community. And I think collectively kind of we all know what those are I think they haven't been shared widely enough and maybe this is, you know, the beginning of something where we can share more and more of those I would love that. And I also observe that even though that the the technologies that know how is out there, the will to do it is lacking, I think I see time and again I'm working with an organization. I push a little collaboration technology into their thing and it actually works. And between, you know, the collective team and the management structure, there aren't incentives to replicate that. It's like, yeah, okay, that's great. We have work to do. Let's get back to work. People collapse into non collaboration very easily, and they move up into collaboration with difficulty. I think I've kind of come to the conclusion that that's the way people are, you know, which makes me sad a little. And so, so then I apologize in advance, you'll read in my, my email I go into I get off onto AI stuff. I realized afterwards, after I wrote that and sent it. I use machine human hybrid.  My favorite collaboration technologies is actually the stop sign. You've got, you know, two crossing paths, and you need to make sure people don't run into each other people and, and, and cargo and horses and things.  It's not embedded in the sign or anything it's actually, you know, abstract. So, I think of those things that's the sign and the embedded information on how to use it is actually a kind of a technology. A stop sign and the attendant people and cargo going and animals going through it is, I think, kind of a cybernetic organism. So, when I say machine, I basically manage some technology that's automated and a stop sign and an intersection is a machine human hybrid to me.  We're just all operating as humans when it gets to be a 1000 person corporation or 10,000 person corporation or 100,000 person corporation. It's actually a machine. It's moving by rules that that humans set up and maybe that humans didn't set up. And that, again, is a machine human hybrid. So I think, you know, there's, there's, there's ways that we can kind of cheat and augment collective intelligence. So that's the good news. I think the bad news is, or, you know, I've got, you know, in my old age, I'm getting to the point where it's like, turns out humans don't collaborate as much as we could. So I look forward to teaching more people how to collaborate better for more wikis to, to rule the world. And, you know, I'm not actually as hopeful as I wish I was. Kevin, you're really muted. Your voice is really kind of like you're talking out of a cheesecloth bag. He's looking for his earphones. Go ahead and, Kevin, go ahead and unmute. We can hear you. You're just really fuzzy. And you're muted now. I see you've located your technology. There we go. Plug in. Unmute. Sorry for all that. It was just when you said that humans didn't set up the rules. Are you also of the opinion that HR is not human? In ways it is, and in ways it's not. You know, the rule set that HR operates by, there's, there, I would say there's a distinct lack of humanity in, in some of the ways HR works. And it's not necessarily bad, you know, when you have, you know, if you're Google and you have 100,000 employees or whatever, HR has to do things a certain way, which is different from the way that you would work with your family and your close friends. So it's a good question, Kevin. Anybody else? Where would you like to, what would you like to add to the mix here? Because we're sort of adding ingredients to the soup. I was a social tech user and really liked it. And why it works for me and Google Docs don't is because I could see this next to that, you know, I could go up and I could be the taxonomy level and I could say, oh, here's food, here's water, here's, you know, a river. And on Google Docs, there's this row and I just, I hate it. But at social tech, I could go up and I could find the connections and I could make the connections and I could weave them. And then I would assign an employee and say, oh really, come on, can I just send you an email or Google Doc? And I never got anybody who worked for me to really understand what I was trying to do with a wiki. But I really loved it. And, you know, I think I'm more like Bill Sites and it works for me and I, even when I'm paying them, they said, this doesn't help my job. Almost all my employees said that the wiki did not help them do their job. It was like, please, won't you help me do the job? Anybody else? I'm struck by the, one of my favorite sayings is culture eats strategy for breakfast, which may not be attributable to Peter Drucker, we don't know, but anyway.  And there's maybe three or four different aspects of culture that we're poking at here. One of them is people's willingness to collaborate, just the willingness to share a document and to open up what you've done. And as opposed to I have all my documents and then every now and then I issue a command or a report and that's all you see, you know, of our interaction. Wikis are really about, here's my work and here's the work in progress as it's sort of nakedly unfolding. And so that's one, to share first. Number two is to collaborate while sharing and to edit well together. And one of the things that I love about Google Docs is that I find that peer programming over a Google Doc is much is really productive because both people are watching exactly the same document in peer programming. And I don't have a lot of experience of peer programming actually where one person has the keyboard and the other one is walking around watching and help and they're collaborating that way. But to me it seems like a very highly productive way to do it. Unfortunately, in traditional Wikis which use markdown or some kind of lockout, you know, record locking for pages, you don't get that sort of tight collaboration on the page, which I think makes it harder to actually do the collaboration at a page level. And then there's this whole, will you step up and think like a wiki kind of social thing, which is you have to learn a new dance. And this new dance is about wiki naming conventions and how we do this wiki and, you know, this is why pattern languages work so well on wikis is that people who are willing to consider a pattern language are already willing to consider how a wiki works, because there's a series of sort of steps of how the wiki dance actually kind of happens. So, and I think that you guys can probably put in three or four other kinds of types of cultural interaction that get provoked by this whole conversation about wikis. And I'm saddened like Pete was a moment ago that that more people don't want to step up and do it because when you learn the dance and you make an interesting document. It's, it's very the flow is there the document is really cool.  And they're not they're all like home, but they're not really the same home right and they don't collaborate they don't share resources they don't. They're not really actively in that in that sharing mode and I that mode is a little bit like you know the group flow of some sort that that I think is lovely to get and is rare because as we're saying, somehow something about the tool the combination of the tools and the culture is not letting this flourish. Why are you talking about culture Jerry I just can follow on from that. And these are only observations I've been making while looking at the future of work and personal development through collaboration. So I'm quite struck by Peter's observations and disappointment the collaboration kind of doesn't seem natural at the at the moment. What I would say though is we do need tools online tools to be able to do this at some point. And where we are in terms of evolution. The tools that we do have really are primitive. Quirty keyboards. Markup. It's it's it's technology that makes sense to a minority. I think collaboration will take a step change because it's going to have to happen the economies are going to change power shifting from west to east. Anything can happen. Which will affect us all on the way we work. Also modality or the user experience. I think he's going to change or it has to change for broader adoption. And that includes things like conversational UI. So rather than text based interfaces. It's more agent based. So you speak to and I know it's controversial at the moment. But this is how I see things you talk to a device such as Alexa. But they will be populated with open source autonomous agents. So you can then say go fact check this story or go find this product and organize the logistics for me. So it's this intermediation at the same time. I've used because it's great that it's open Wikipedia data so you can download the entire corpus as a several gigabyte file. And then you can train machine learning algorithms. One I enjoy is word embedding. So you can end up as long as a model is it's biased and it's but this is all experimental for me. But you can end up where you can ask the model a question such as king minus man plus woman. And the machine will tell you queen by training itself on a Wikipedia data. So I think what may need another enabler of this is decentralization. So Wikipedia is a encyclopedia. Maybe we need other silos of collective intelligence, which are just about music or just about politics or just about the old the intellectual dark web, which you can mine and make sense from. And although we need to move up the stack so that the kind of network or sorry graph databases that these systems will be built on what we will interact with is voice. And as we were talking before Jerry just to finish on is video and audio mashups that you can make sense from while you're doing while you're multitasking. Using Wikipedia you have to focus on you have to do the work to find things. There's no notion of context. It's all about link for this to link to that and you're doing the work. So as the world becomes more complex in order to deal with the complexity. Intelligent agents will be required. So that's what I see and actually see it's going to happen a lot quicker than most people think you know in the next five. Definitely the next 10 years. I'm very intrigued by the notion of what I've used. I think of them as listener apps, which are basically either watching a text stream or listening to you as you go. And they're responding they're saying hey, I think you talked about this is this useful and should I do this and oh you just did this we usually do it this way or whatever I think that could be really super useful in this context and that would take considerable I don't know I don't know who's making good listener apps other than the obvious Siri Alexa, you know Google Assistant, which are absolutely listener apps because they're busy listening to us and sending our streams of private intimate family life somewhere on the intertubes. But you know they're doing their best to try to figure out how to make a simple conversational interface at that level but they're not. They're not helping us manage a particular task like editing a collaborative document yet clippy could be good here but I'm not sure we want to revive clippy Dave.  So one of the another one of the things that's coming up here john you mentioned decentralization and I think there's a really really interesting sort of topological conversation here about you know the single user using a wiki who is using the wiki because they like the inter twingularity of wiki names you know wiki words that create page links and the usability of that to create their own corpus then there's sort of collaborative wiki then there's words smallest federated wiki which I have to say I just don't understand. And I had lunch with word recently and we didn't specifically talk about this but I know a couple people who were exploring fed wiki and and running with it, but then go, you know, go peek over the fence at github. And there's things like get book and so forth. The idea of fork and poll as a topology for collaboration seems to have taken off like crazy. I would say that github is a is a pretty resounding success and github killed source forage because because I think the collaboration methodology was different and fork and poll beat benevolent dictator gets to say what it what goes into his or her code base and that's it. Right, which is kind of the source forage model I don't know what they called it. So, and then we're looking at dweb daps distributed apps and that whole world, some of which are trying to do what some of these new all in one kind of applications are doing. And this this all gets kind of wonky. But, but the cultural dynamic of how we share and whether it's very promiscuous or not, you know, fork and poll says here go make a copy, and you will be inspired to come back and submit the copy to the original creator because that's where the crowd is. Unless you can somehow create something about enough value that a bunch of people follow you to some other, some other places a little bit like Queen bees and a hive, you know, and the setting up of a new hive kind of thing I think metaphorically that's not completely bad. Anyway, any observations from any of you on on either the architectural side of this or the more of the culture. One of the things I was struck by Jerry is like the question the guy's asking the questions that academic to and and a couple of the other people in the in this group are also academics. And I think there's kind of an academic bias around I mean one is I was all the, you know, the right only stuff that academics to, you know, it's like stuff that nobody ever reads. You know, is your paid to produce it, you know, and it's not, you're not paid to have anybody use it. And so a lot of the ideas that were coming out of the group were of that right only model. You know, we put it somewhere then it'll be that's good enough that's our job.  It's a sort of version of this.  So it's funny, but I do think there might be these cultural enclaves where, you know, the knowledge management problem that you think about a business is the same as what the academics are trying to do.  Go right ahead. Yeah, just on collaboration. I'm working oddly with, or not only whatever, with a Somali immigrants in Minneapolis on a housing solution. And it basically is, hey, we don't need a they don't, they can't live with interest so even if they could buy a house they don't. My, the entrepreneur who's leading it said, you know, he gets six kids and he has a good job and his wife does too. And he said, you know, let's just go ahead and buy a house and she said, you know, Said, we sleep in the same bed every night and would you want me to sleep in this in a bed soaked with sin and he said, okay, I'll find a solution. That way. So he came up with 200 people putting up $2,500 each to buy the first two houses. And when we go and talk to Somalis, he said, would you invest in your neighbor's mortgage? Of course I would. Do I get on the list?  And then you talked to like some of my friends who live in Minneapolis, you know, where would the property line be? I mean, I have a fence, you know, you get into stand my grand stuff. And so I was trying, I did a dinner and we were trying to explain why they did it and it was, you know, half Somali half white allies.  He said, you know, the only Somali I ever knew, you know, to know was a Lyft driver on the way to the airport. And these are like hardworking, smart people highly educated. And he's they're donating because they become human. But they can't imagine the culture but but almost any immigrant group, especially if they have saving circles, which they all do. And we're just doing saving circles here with in a totally new way with some allies leverage around it. So the Somalis have boys in boat, and the allies don't. So that, you know, the Somalis keep doing it, you know, it makes sense to every immigrant because that's what they're doing. And it's like, as somebody said, you know, Mike, this is totally new, but it would make sense to my grandmother. So if there's a cult, people who have been displaced, collaborate because they have to. And then people who think in property lines don't think that way. But they can still give once they realize these people are people like me. I'm Michael jump in. Thanks Kevin. This brings to mind a recent piece by Daniel Schmacktenberger, the war on sense making. I can put up a link to it. And he talks about the rivalrous and anti rivalrous nature of the process, and that we're so rivalrous in our culture that the notion of collaboration is something about risking losing, putting joining together in an effective way. And he stands to the concept of a substantial DAO. Though it wasn't autonomous organization. What was it? This, this, now it is decentralized autonomous. I thought, I thought that is my being just exactly that. And he was pointing to the ability to extract information from the composite of multiple credit publications. And I think it very much like federated wiki. So then instead of people looking for contention to argue about, or to reject to abandon dismiss, you know, oh well, obviously not, you know, forget it. You instead we're finding the, the seeds of a common sense making. And that I think speaks to this entire issue of the Peter raised, you know, but collaboration, which we did. There's a it's very funny it feels good to dip back into the stream of collaboration because this is I think been a crucial and interesting topic for everybody who's on this call I think it's what drew us to this call. It's surprising how little progress has been made and yet along the way wikipedia ate the world for encyclopedias and is a known thing like when I give speeches I use wikipedia a lot as a as an example, even though it's a little risky for a couple reasons I'm happy to go into. But I use it because my first question is who who has touched the wikipedia even just to read a page in the last month and 98% of the hands in the room go up. You know who has edited a page, but way fewer hands go up. Right. But but there's contact people understand it.   Right. And that's a big conceptual blockbuster for people so to ground this conversation a little bit in the design from trust context. And one of my premises is that we are so and here, Michael said rattle risk, I completely agree, we are so buried in layers of how things are supposed to work how we do things that when we hit a moment of vulnerability a moment of risk when we hit a moment of collaboration that looks like it. I don't get ownership of this or they're going to do what or whatever we balk we we start because we're not we're not accustomed to it. And I would submit that long ago on a planet far far actually on this planet. We used to live like that all the time that that was how communities actually were raised and this is kind of knowledge we've successfully ground into the dust, because it's important for our current cultural scripts for us to be, you know, greedy self interested individual economic units the home or economic us so we can go out and do our thing every day and, and in the end the invisible hand basically shepherds this also it works. That's our that's a different act of faith that we are perfectly comfortable with, apparently, Michael go ahead you were. Except for people who've experienced community who live and who live in it and who who understand or also except for people who are who are sort of under some form of oppression economic or bias or something like that, and who realize that unless they pull together they may not all survive. I mean, this is partly why the Korean Community of the United States has tons and tons of grocery stores and Taekwondo studios. They figured out how to do Taekwondo and stamp it out, put a little Taekwondo dojo in every town they could and support each other to make it financially viable. Right so so they figured out a particular economic niche, and then filled it. The collaboration was in some sense necessary, which takes me to another little premise I have which is that prosperity breeds laziness and sort of in sort of inward focus and and sort of you move away from community because you don't really need it, and stresses actually help create community that that maybe everybody needs to be under a little more stress so that we will bond more and collaborate better. No. Okay, that they got plenty. No, I think one, one, two things I'd pick on their excellent agree with all of it. Understand. Forget it. Let's not try and do this by understanding. And the other distinction is, they did it. The Somalis are doing this. The Koreans did it. It wasn't just a theory. It wasn't the right brothers to pick up on their comments about being right, white, ancient and male. So is the key and I think that gives vitality to any such context the ecology collection of agents. Just to follow your right brothers mentioned over into a neighboring pool that I think is super interesting which is about intellectual property. The right brothers appear to have been legitimately 10 years ahead of everybody else and figuring out aerodynamics and pitch you on roll and how to do control surfaces and all of that they invented the wind tunnel they were experimenting with the shapes of propeller blades and all that, even though they had the elevator out front and you know wing warping. But they were way out ahead. Then they started seeing people show up and take pictures and early movies at the fence outside their property in Ohio, and they basically stopped flying and then tried to protect the property, tried to sell planes to the American army who said no, the French army said no, the British said no, the Germans said no, everybody said no, and then Lewis, this other guy shows up and starts selling actual planes to the military and puts the rudder in the back. But the right brothers basically blew a fabulous intellectual lead because they were unwilling to cooperate around the emergence of a market. They completely blew it, like deeply blew it. And so they're famous for having invented the thing but not famous for having made it an industry which other people did after them. And so another one of my bugaboos is IP over protection, which is peeking over the fence at us here as we think about who owns the words, we're creating a shared asset, how does this work, you know, all that kind of stuff and there was a little startup more than a decade ago called Mixed Ink. Anybody remember Mixed Ink? And Mixed Ink allows you to collaborate on a document except every person's contribution was tracked, so at the end of the document you could see who's who was attributed to what stretches of the document. And I'm not sure I like that I think that I think that I prefer the communal making of like a sourdough starter, rather than here's a piece of bread and this loaf is Pete's and this loaf is Kevin and this loaf is Travis, and this little loaf here is Graham.  Go ahead, John. I just want to bring some of this, I think it's related and just to throw this into the room and it follows on from what you're saying there, Jerry, I think, and it's to do with why collaboration isn't working. I went to a festival on Friday in the north of England called Wuthering Bytes and the keynote speech was about lurkers. What do we do about lurkers? How do we bring them in and help them feel part of a community and to contribute? I'm going to use a profanity now, I don't mean to use it, and I've since looked up the dictionary definition and it actually means fake or fraud, but it's a book by David Graver called Bullshit Jobs. And it's something obviously I'm interested in the future of work, but he talks about this idea of financial feudalism and what we have are producers and consumers, then this huge hierarchy of middlemen or agents that build a hierarchy and also drain a lot of wealth out of the system. And that hierarchy is propped up by status. So again, that's another thing that stuck in my mind with what Peter said is I think a lot of people are reluctant to collaborate online because of feeling, you know, making a mistake or saying something that's offensive to somebody else, or just feeling generally inadequate. And the problem I see is there's so many people are trying to make sure that this hierarchy doesn't shift the collaboration on a much wider scale isn't going to happen. I mean, David Graver actually talks about it's a strange thing to bring up, I know, but it made sense to me when I've read it, but this idea of sadomasochism that humans are actually almost wired to keep other people in their place, you know, they won't allow them. And to me, when you lose that freedom to ask the question to put your hand up and make a fool of yourself, almost, that the idea of free speech just to say, what do you mean when you say that, no matter how good the tools are, people won't collaborate. They will be still remain lurkers. So, John, thank you very much. And I meant to do some brain sharing earlier on several things that have been mentioned here because I've got a lot of stuff in the brain around these kinds of topics. Go ahead, Pete. So I love, well, I love when people talk about economic feudalism because a lot of people don't. I think one of the things that always strikes me about feudalism or economic feudalism capitalism. It seems counterintuitive at this point we can see a lot of flaws in it we can see how it disintegrates cultures, you know, things like that. I also go back and think that somehow at some point feudalism or economic feudalism got selected for it one. So I can kind of there's a there's a fuzzy thing in my head where I can see collaborative societies kind of get to a certain point and capitalistic societies get higher peaks. Maybe they have higher peaks and lower lows, but the higher peaks can end up kind of rolling over essentially, you know, taking over smashing collaborative collaborative cultures. So there's an interesting kind of, you know, fitness for purpose thing that capitalistic societies have provided us they provide higher highs much higher highs at the expense of having lower lows and probably a lower, you know, much lower average or something like that. So there's a guns, drums and steely kind of question here that's been one of my big questions in the back of my mind, which is how do collaborative cultures survive the onslaught of militaristic cultures, because capitalism goes hand in hand with violence, right. So there are people who enforce capitalism and it used to be that East India Company had its own army.  So when Yacobor Benz in Panama decides to nationalize the fruit companies, sorry Guatemala, the CIA, the Dulles Brothers basically the Department of State and the CIA send in a coup. And we overthrow the government we overthrow legitimately elected democratic government that is about to nationalize what is now Chiquita banana Chiquita International, right. And so we do this over and over again this is just a pattern a pattern that we do so. So in some sense, Pete, my question is, is your statement that this system one, a long term thing or are we going to figure out durable remedies in the meantime to how how actually to shelter and protect collaborative culture where we protect the commons where we do whatever else because this is one of the big questions of the day is do we just do we release do we do what Trump is doing and release and war for anybody to come in and dig and drill. Or can we find some way to be like a puffer fish where when you try to eat like when you try to eat the commons, it spikes out and makes you know makes itself very unwelcome in your intestines so you have to barf it back out. This is what the Hong Kong protests are trying to do this very moment. They're trying to say, there are so many of us that Xi Jinping, if you do a Tiananmen here which was one large square and some other city blocks.  So rains, please jump in. And you're muted. Thank you as a lurker here. I found a way to get me engaged. What I've seen is living in cooperative community and advising on it is there is an art to Communitizing or we like to say communifying to helping people think in the transition from me to we how do we get to where people are say okay, there's greater benefit from cooperating from letting go of the need of ownership, the feeling of control of the confidence that okay the results are going to be better. It may take longer to get there but you know we get farther together, maybe not faster. It's really it's, it's a personal journey and a collective education and I see all of us including myself on the staff and easy to leave reluctant to let go of what the culture surrounding us and what we've been trained in that you need to hold on. You need to control whether it's your home whether it's your work style. And even in the wiki context, I was seeing this with a neighbor that we were starting to use a wiki for internal documents are so has a community. And so neighbor, you know, reluctantly using technology was pouring in the meeting minutes that she was taken. And when I was ready to say oh great, that's there I can add value to it I can add the metadata. She was like what are you doing changing my document and a little bit of an edit war until it was said let's have a policy of not editing each other's documents for a while. And just, you know, the understanding is perceiving the ongoing some of the journeys that other people around to make it possible. That's really interesting.  Basically co housing and they help co housing groups all over the world I think get started and figure out what the hell this is and get some some culture going. And I'm reminded a little bit to connect this a bit to wikis of word Cunningham's early trick. This was on an early social text advisory call. He basically shared with us that his, his way of getting some groups started on wiki is to start a page in the wiki and intentionally make a few errors. So put something in this blatantly obviously the opposite of what you just heard them say.  Right, because you really don't want them to need you you're not their editor to create the wiki. You're in fact merely the the fire starter to get them started started in the culture of wiki. And so this is a culturation. This isn't just a software sale, just like Reigns, you're trying to get people to think about letting go of the need to have separate ownership of all the things that they mark as home ownership and community membership and whatever else. What seems to work. That was a long question. Sorry. I like it works said, you know, not showing up with a complete solution not saying okay it's up to me to figure it all out and deliver something that people can stand yes or no, but something that has room for engagement and process and meaning for them and that's hard for me to overcome, you know, professional writing like oh I better get it exactly right and perfect and so well crafted that there isn't there on cracks that people can pry open as easily. But more generally, yeah, I'm showing up with empathy showing up with a question, you know, it's like okay not here's what I want to do I want to put a electric car charger in the parking lot, but where do you see your future in cars how do you share my value about the environment. What can what do you think our possibilities and then from there built to our collective network say okay, wow we can get a grant. Okay is that enough of a character help us change our behavior collectively and do something different. I love that. Thank you. I'm greater than the parts. So I posted way up higher. This is reminding me of like wiki nomics which is Don taps got you know best management best seller about hey look the Wikipedia so cool let's do management like this, which I never read but I know taps got personally. And then Beth Cantor and others talking about working weekly and much more the softer side of the culture and what it means to work in this way. And I think we have many maybe many different cultural interpretations of what it's like to live in this way and what it's like when you start trying to occupy the culture in this way and we're seeing a whole bunch of things that are having a rough time like Holocracy has had a hard time showing up in the world because it goes into places there's too much focus on on the thing. Things break and then you go elsewhere and valve software has been one of the companies pointed to as as a success story and it turns out that you know valve culture ain't so ain't so awesome. So, just trying to try to find our way toward what are the stories we tell because maybe another thing that people are fearing letting go of here is their historic culture and their grip on how we're supposed to do stuff. We're asking them to take a step into thinking of themselves differently, and it's contagious it's, it's, you know, once you start doing this with how you set hours for staff, then you start looking at how we set salaries then you start looking at how we set boundaries then you start looking at something else and then personally I love that string of ahas and the thing that hopefully results at the end of it, but I think it's really scary to a lot of people. What I was just thinking that some of it because you're right about economics and I think it we're actually touching on some of the stuff that came like they church he was writing about with your comes everybody and things like that. Yep. Again, it's probably 1015 years old right. At least. And I kind of, I was just, I mean, I was like Bob Franks and had that question about why are we still using email and it's like, well, why do we still listen to rock and roll, you know, it's like, it's what you grew up with, I think. And I kind of feel like, at least for myself, my thinking is stuck about 15 years ago. This is why I think which users look good. But they don't work and we haven't written the new book, you know, there's, I mean, I guess that's that's your charge, Jerry, we need the new book, man. But, you know what, the stuff that I kind of accepted is like obviously good, you know, here comes everybody. I love these parts, you know, and, and you know what I look back at them it's like I actually, you know, it's not happening. So, and David Weinberg is small pieces loosely joined which Pete just put in the chat.  Howard Travis, any Howard please. Just to turn this conversation to a more instrumental level, I would point out that we're not using a wiki right now. And yet we're conversing and collaborating. And so, you know, the one of the questions that I think about is what what tool is right for what job that's at hand, right. There are certain cases when the group that I'm with, we would use slack or matter most and we wouldn't use a wiki to do what we would do on slack or matter most right. And so, I feel like personally, 10 or 15 years ago, I was a good guide to the various tools that were out there. I used to keep up on this topic pretty pretty well. And I don't feel like I'm a good guide to it now I see a lot of new things and I'm not quite sure how this particular tool would function and but then something takes off like zoom and then we all see oh wow that you know Skype was so limited what we can do on zoom now is pretty great. And so, you know, I want to learn more about the various tools that are out there and how they work for the various, you know, jobs at hand and you know speaking of Travis, you know, you know, consider it is is you know it seems to me it's designed very particularly and very specifically and that's a strength that seems to me. Versus you know what consider it does versus what you know any type of smartocracy type platform would do. So I wonder what Travis would think say about that. You're there. Well, yeah I mean you need tools for the for the job. And I haven't really been keeping up on all the different technologies either. I've been struggling a bit in this conversation trying to figure out kind of where some entry points are because we're jumping between a lot of different topics obviously because it's a pretty hefty thing. The question is focused around. Why haven't wikis eaten the world yet. And then of course we get down in the cultural levels and we're talking about largely it seems like why haven't, or what would be necessary, or actually more just why haven't we been able to create a collaborative one's based society and how would it actually emerge into the world. So this question to me of like whether is that the necessary thing for technologies like wikis. And other I think Jerry framed nice at the beginning other kind of participatory thinking collaboration technologies to become really dominant in the world. So I'm not sure, like, that's kind of one. One question I have here is like it is that kind of big culture shift, or almost like a necessary requirement for some of these things to emerge. Or is it that it's probably the answer is probably more like, well it's recursive right like, you know, you kind of make some inroads the tools. It's easier to do some of these things and move you along the way, but ultimately do need to be moving culture in a particular way. But anyway, so that's kind of where I'm at with this conversation trying to figure out where to how to track it. So, so thank you and in. I think I think we're gnawing on a giant social change issue, which which a bunch of us have bumped into before and care a lot about. I just posted a link to the video that I did a long time ago which was a book review of the great transformation by Carl Polanyi. And the reason that's one of my favorite history books is that he describes the shift from pre industrial society to industrial society. And, and, and the shift is so profound that we can't imagine now living in the way we used to live and yet that's how everybody used to live before everything had a price before you had to use money to get everything. Everybody's like, well it's either capitalism or communism right that's that that that's the only set of choices.  But but if you have to go, you know, buy and read a book that's this thick and people aren't doing that so much. So trying to figure out how do we. How do we reimagine how we used to live the cool thing is that online, we've started to have experiences of the kinds of sharing and collaboration. That's sort of mirror how we used to live together like the commons the information commons is is not weakened when you share it blah blah blah. So Wikipedia, which is the start of this conversation is a lovely example of that, even though it's way too centralized, right so I think we briefly touched on decentralization and how much how that might happen but. But we're getting one of my beliefs is that if we get enough tastes of design from trust, which is what I think of as the magics the secret sauce that makes Wikipedia work that is part of what we're talking about here is is letting go of the need to own everything and sequester it for yourself because you trust that it will come to you later when you need it in some other fashion that we might have a phase shift just like we had a phase shift into industrial society. And so industrial society needs a home or economic us all those kinds of things and one of one of my favorite Polanyi quotes, Polanyi is the author of the great transformation is that market economy requires market society. Like like so market economy to get to get markets everywhere you so before the industrial revolution, there's no land labor and money. Like you can't go to century 21 and buy a plot of land for your factory land is not free it's owned by the king or the church or inherited through generations or whatever. You have to tear land off the land so you can buy and sell it there's no free labor force everybody is attached to you know through feudal relationships or indentures or whatever whatever. And yes there are coins but everything doesn't have a price money isn't the way we value like like like wealth. And so those three fictitious commodities come in and take over the world and take over our worldview. And we're kind of at a point now about like rethinking all those things and there's, I'm trying to finish an op ed piece, basically to rebut or to comment on the business roundtables announcement, you know, 10 days ago that hey, the principal reason to have a corporation is no longer only to feed the shareholders it's now to feed the stakeholders and to take care of them. Anyway, it's kind of hard because that piece I'm writing is exploding in my head just as this conversation is sort of exploding into all these different neighboring issues that are all connected in this lovely inter twingled way. Right, I think I think we're not. I don't think we're wandering really far afield into into distant lands where man how did we end up talking about, you know, major economic models and economic feudalism. I think these things fit hand in glove with the reason why there's a reluctance to understand how to use wikis and collaborate well in a company. I think these things are all tied together. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. It's just what it. You want to try to find places where there's traction to make steps. And I think when you go into like the big issues. It's easy to get lost in them and then not be able to kind of trace your way back. Another another area that we I don't think we've talked about too much here that I think is another aspect of why wikis are adapted more or more just more broadly like not just wikis but like being able to collaborate together. Ironically, I wrote a post that I haven't published about trying to engender a culture of open thinking, which is kind of where you're you're writing and, you know, they're kind of like you think openly and other people can, you know, react and and also start to collaborate in there. And that's uncomfortable. It's all kinds of different ways in which you can trample and other people starts but I don't want to point out it's kind of more the psychology of this kind of thinking of like open thinking integrating from an individual from your mind takes a lot of work to move from your mind to articulate articulation work very difficult like you can be you can have a great ideas in your mind and then you go down to write it out and it's it's that you know it takes a lot of time to try to formulate something well. Now you take that over time, and you yourself just articulating stuff is very challenging. I know a lot of people here obviously have a good practice around that. That's a high energy state though. And then you start to try to integrate with other people's thoughts. That's even harder because we have this medium that is language that is just it's just not. It's not the greatest. It's very lossy and has lots of problems with it. So then integrating articulating your thoughts and then but also integrating them with other people integration work is another major component of of effort. So what we have right now is we have collaboration and collaborative writing collaborative thinking collaborative discussions organizations are very high energy states. So in the and I think someone brought this up earlier that like the default would be kind of go into more individualistic kind of thinking because that's a low energy state. Um, so one way to frame this might be to think about okay we're places where collaboration is actually a low energy state or collaborative thinking might be a low energy state. And I think that one of the places that we've already talked about a little bit is when you talk about kind of conflict or communities under pressure. That's when the cost benefit ratio kind of really shifts and maybe even look at it like an individual state is a high energy state compared to being collaborative. I just want to make the connection between the kind of psychology of thinking out loud and incorporating and collaborating out loud with the just kind of effort there that is required and kind of tying it to why these things might not have taken on. Love that Travis really. Absolutely. And the sad note here is that stress seems to make collaboration cheap in some interesting ways. And you're reminding me here of Danny Kahneman's book, thinking fast and slow where he talks about system one versus system two thinking where system one is your impulsive reaction, your knee jerk reaction which is often wrong. System two is when you start to ponder and try to solve the puzzle and whatever. And one of the things I love about using the brain for all this time is that it forces me into system two every time I hit something interesting. It makes me go, oh, what is the logical type of this thing, which means where do I put it. What do I call it. What is it related to what else can I learn from it. Oh my God, it's a little bit like this thing I just put in a while ago so I go find that and I figure out what is the bridging thought. What is the, you know, what is the collective concept that I can put both of these things under or do I just connect them directly because it's such a cool visible thing. Right. And at one point I was looking up I was trying to find anything Brian Arthur had written on on virtuous circles and there wasn't much he just does not he's not a prolific writer. And then I realized that virtual what's a virtuous circle for one player in the market is a vicious cycle for everybody else. When Microsoft Word, when Microsoft Office wins the Office Suite competition. Lotus that goes away word perfect and those guys go away that they just die. Right all because of a bundling strategy. And so I connected vicious vicious cycles and virtuous circles as being sort of alternate parts of the same dynamic and the same situation. For different players. That was that was a really interesting thing for me by forcing myself to think through what I was trying to find and put in. So, I think I share this a lot with Pete who, you know, in the dictionary of the future where the definition of Maven is there'll be a little dot graphic of Pete in the margin because he's like the world's greatest Maven as far as many of us on the call can tell. And there's something about being curious about the world and then and then the willingness to report back about it in some way in some fashion that that is maybe too unique. I don't know. Thanks Bill. Jerry, have you ever come across Martin Shephard's paper on Daniel Kahneman. I wrote about it on my blog and I'll post the link. How do you spell Shephard's last name. S C H. Yeah. And so he he's, he's part of the broader kind of resilience network. And so he writes about Kahneman system one system two in terms of the fitness landscape or adaptive landscape, where system one is exploration and system two is exploitation. So this this John Holland's phrase about exploration and exploitation right exploitation is is digging, making building resilience in in one's a custom custom ways of being and then exploration is is getting outside of one of customs way ways of being and it may lead to as Kahneman emphasizes it may lead to biases or false conclusions but you don't get you don't get creativity without getting outside of of your your current basin of attraction as it were. One of one of the things I come to believe is that actual innovation. Hold on that. There's lots of improvements there's lots of sort of sustaining innovations that makes some things lighter faster cheaper, but that actual innovation usually involves breaking taboos of the old system that you're actually shattering something that the old system is true. Meaning, if unless everybody's hungry and in the imminent danger of starvation they won't try to find a job. That's a belief system on the conservative side of economic policymaking. I think that's called the innovation paradox. Is that the way it's, is that the way they frame it. The innovation paradox Dick farsons book, the success of failure the failure of success. I've never read it but I've got it in my brain. Collective intelligence perhaps. Yeah, and so so collaborative sense making and collective intelligence are two of my favorite kind of thoughts in my brain and things that think about and try to figure out why where we're nearing the end of our time for this call. And do we want to set questions we'd love to sort of examine or what would what would make the time we just spent more valuable. Well, I got two pitches. So one is I was going to try to finish up this document and just have something that's like, I don't know, releaseable or something and if anybody wants to play please do. I've gone too far not far enough in terms of structuring and so that people can participate or not. You know, don't work just go ahead do something. It could be much shorter should probably just cut out. There's so much stuff going on now that they I probably easier to truncate and then have everything but anyway I'd love to just finish it and say we did it. And I can imagine if it works for this one we could do it with more right there's a I can imagine like using the list almost as a way to answer questions like this on the line. If you make it cheap enough and you know, we could probably make it happen. So anyway, I'd love to finish that. And then the second one is I just have this feeling like we need the new book, you know, I mean I was so moved by by here comes everybody or and economics I read it very carefully. You know, a lot of my thinking, you know, 1015 20 years about a generation ago was formed by these books so we need a new one. You know, what what about doing the book writing sprint with the group or something and, you know, grabbing a weekend virtually or in person and, you know, writing the next generation. Why can't we collaborate book or how do we collaborate book in a collaborative way. Does get book work. Does it is GitHub usable as a fork and Polish substrate for writing books. Pete, do you have any experience on that or have you seen anybody do that successfully or is there is there a different platform that works well. I do not have specific experience with get book GitHub and markdown is perfectly fine. Mark and Paul is a model that is amazing and a cultural innovation, you know, that's going to stand for centuries. For this I would recommend real time editing sessions together and and a wiki for, you know, asynchronous thought and longer longer thought and and distillation and annealing. I didn't have a chance to talk about the all in one tools like notion and Coda and there's a bunch of these other things that started out as being spreadsheets on steroids and are now becoming sort of collaborative work environments where you can put anything on any page. I just wanted to spend a minute on that my own reaction to them is, Oh my God they're beautiful where were these 20 years ago when spreadsheets started. The second reaction on it is I very quickly get turned around in the spaces I don't know what page anything is on because you can mix anything on any page. I get lost real fast. Yeah, air table exactly. And so anybody have great experiences with these or love them. They seem super duper incredibly powerful because you can build lists you can do charts you can like you can embed kind of anything in any place and it's remarkable. It's a trade off thing right when you can do everything and it's super easy you get lots of participants participation at fairly low sophistication. When the tools are, you know, harder and and more to the point more specific and and more powerful. You get less participation and deeper participation. And I think that the air table slash notion sites that work really well. They work really well because there was one human who had just a really great genius brain for starting the organization and then gently enforcing people to stick to the organization so that it would live over time. I think that's a that's a big piece of it as well. Yeah. So nobody but nobody's charged up about these tools like none of you seem really like oh yeah yeah I've been I switched my whole life over to notion or anything like that. Not happening. Or maybe you're all using grep and awk and said and pine and Elm and like these tools are just way too modern for you. I think with notion. It's ice. I'm seeing a pattern so we had the browser wars. And history tells us that Netscape lost the commercial war, but Microsoft lost in the courts. But what it did mean is Netscape then open source the rendering engine, the browser engine. Now I think the same should happen to Alexa, the core technology Alexa and the NLP model that they're using for language needs to be open sourced. And it's the same with notion. If they made notion open source, what they provided was the bullet proof hosting environment for everybody to use cheap. I think it would be adopted. Maybe quicker than it does. But the fact that it's closed source. That's what makes me reluctant. Right. That doesn't help I've been trying to convince Harlan to turn the brain into that version of what you just described for 20 years and that has not. I got into wikis because the brain was close source. I shot a quick shout out first in this vein, Scapal and Scrivener together. Scapal is an amazing brainstorming tool and Scrivener is actually kind of an outlining and document creation tool that tool chain that I can use. It's not perfect. Scapal, for instance, I dislike the hotkeys and they're they're non standard. But so so if somebody could dump a bunch of, you know, effort onto to Scapal and Scrivener to make them prettier and a little bit more user friendly and things like that. I'd be super happy. So just a comment because I've been trying to use Scrivener to write a book and I like it and I hate it. It's totally not intuitive about what goes where I have every time I have to teach myself how to move a module, but really worse than that is that modules live inside of a book. And what I really want is for it.  Kenneth Tyler, who last is not on this call, but he was the founder of seed wiki, which I played with seed wiki a whole bunch. He basically changed the code so that I could make seed wiki look like PowerPoint, and I could make seed wiki look like a blog, which is sort of what bill what bill does with with sites sites wiki. But basically there would be one page in the wiki was a table of contents and it said, this is a presentation or this is a blog. And if it said this is a presentation then all the pages mentioned in the playlist basically would be put in order and a left right arrow and you make it basically take over the screen. And it would then look like PowerPoint. And if you said this is a blog, then all of the things in the playlist got put in a thanks Travis. I really appreciate you being here. All the things we get put in reverse chron order so it would look like a blog. Awesome. Fantastic. So where was I going with bringing up Kenneth sorry I just I just noticed Travis was leaving and I hopped off my thread. Scrivener to create a perfect thank you. So what I really want with a Scrivener like tool to write a book is a table of contents that floats over a whole series of modules that can be used and reused and repurposed in any book that that are basically shareable across books. And if I wanted to then fork, you know fork one of them out and adapt it to be to so that it connects with the chapter before the chapter after fantastic. But, but that's the tool I really want so Scrivener is also proprietary and has me completely stuck because I'm like, I now have like eight different kind of books or articles kind of stuck in different lodged in different places. I now don't know where I put that module that has this interesting thing that I know I wrote. Is it in this one or in this one. And I really can't stand the enforcement of these boundaries between documents, right. I want a document to be just like a pointer to a series of things that connect that I that I'm connecting on the fly at runtime. And I will I will customize them so that they actually flow like text because, you know, as I said in chapter two blah blah blah you need to do that. But but I want to do that on the fly kind of at runtime. My hypothesis and I have not tested it is you can do what you want with get and fork and pull and something called Sphinx or make docs mk docs. And then to get what you really you're talking about I think you'd you'd write some custom templating on top of the output of Sphinx. And Sphinx is basically a runtime compiler for modules and get for text. It's they're both book assemblers. Oh, that's really interesting assemblers but yeah. Huh. There are big commercial equivalents to them to which I forget what they are for documentation compiling basically. Yeah, technical technical docs. Yeah. Yeah, there's one really good one now. There's some ancient ones that are unfriendly and unhappy but there's one really good one now. Sweet. Any last words on this call for anyone want to put a bow on it. We haven't had the last of this. Yes, that's right. You haven't heard the last of us yet. We still have some energy to sort this out. I got to say I stuck a I stuck a note into this document that I wrote you know a long time ago and one of the things it has is a table of like Internet pioneers that were made that I used in the document. 15 people and they're all white men and it's great to see a bunch of old white men on the call. We do own the future. So if we do run another call like this what should the title be and can we each bring a person who is not a white male to the call. You can call it the right brothers is is the next format I would think the next format is a few working sessions with smaller smaller groups. Yeah, yeah. And so let's use the design from trust list is everybody here on the DFT list or not. I don't think I am. Okay, I can put you on it or we can use some other things to coordinate this.  But let me just send. So David Pete, let me get you on the on the list reigns are you on DFT. I don't believe I am. Would you like to be sure. Yeah, and on diversity. I'm torn a little bit. I think I think on one hand it is what it is. So this call was great, even though we're all white men. I missed I missed the diversity in some of my efforts now or another hypothesis I have is that some efforts aren't worth pursuing until they're diverse enough.  There's another part of me that says, it's not worth doing unless, you know, unless you've gotten you've you've grown a rich and diverse enough community to start moving forward.  Yeah, architecture is destiny and basically when when architecture gets poured early, it persists and it doesn't do well when it doesn't match other people's needs. I agree with you. All right, so let's try to let's have another one of these and let's try to diversify the conversation get a little, a little better at that. But thank you all this has been completely completely fascinating entertaining, hopefully useful, and a great way to spend a piece of Labor Day. Thank you for being here. Thanks everybody. Fantastic. Bye for now.


Hello and welcome to module 31 of chemical kinetics in transition state theory. In the last module we solved a numerical problem. Today it is a continuation of that we will continue solving more problems. Today our problems will although be more not numerical but more focused on concepts ok. So, let us start the problems. So, the first problem is a relatively simpler problem, but a conceptually very important problem. So, I really want you to take a pause draw the potential energy for along the reaction coordinate and a coordinate that is perpendicular to the reaction coordinate sitting at transition state. So, this please do take a pause and you should be able to draw do these plots do take a pause now ok. Hopefully you have taken a pause. So, now let us solve it together. So, for the first one we have to draw the potential energy along the reaction coordinate. So, this is the figure that you have commonly seen probably in every single textbook in kinetics right. So, you get a figure like this where this is reactants, this is products and this is the transition state the maximum struck point ok. So, this is your very familiar figure. However, what I want you to also understand from this course is that if I choose a coordinate perpendicular to reaction coordinate at the transition state. I will get a energy surface that is going to look like this and this is my transition state. This is a very important concept transition state is a minima for any coordinate that passes perpendicular to the reaction coordinate alright. So, once more a contour plot if I draw these kind of contour plots that I have drawn a few times now. This is reaction coordinate. Let me just change the color in color red. This is a coordinate that is perpendicular to reaction coordinate. So, this is reaction, this is perpendicular to reaction. So, along the reaction coordinate you see a figure like this along a direction perpendicular to reaction coordinate which is if you are walking along this you will get something like this alright get back to black color alright. Second problem is slightly harder, but it is an interesting problem and it shows you how to include quantum mechanical effects in transition state theory. So, let us imagine I have only a one-dimensional well and somehow a temperature is maintained at some temperature T. Let us say the frequency is given to you omega here and the barrier height is much more than kT. This ea is much greater than kT and we are going to include tunneling in this question now. So, in a module some modules ago 5, 6 modules ago we solved this problem without any tunneling. So, you can go back to that module see how we solved this problem and now the question is can you also include tunneling effects in it. So, what I have provided you here is that the probability of tunneling at an energy e less than ea is given by this formula where alpha is some constant and for energy greater than ea you can assume that the transmission is 1. So, now can you estimate the rate constant? You can make any approximations or assumptions that you want to make pause the video and attempt this problem on your own alright. Hopefully you have paused the video and you have attempted the problem at least this is not an easy problem, but we will you have to make at least attempts. So, let us try to attack this problem well we have to go back to our fundamentals. How we solved this problem earlier? Well idea is the same this is what we are going to do let us say my and I am set some energy e at that energy e what is the rate constant and what is the probability of being at that energy e. If I integrate this together I will get the total rate and energy cannot be negative because I cannot be lower than this minima. So, this is what I have to calculate fine rho I am going to approximate as we have always done in transition state theory as the equilibrium. So, that is given by e to the power of minus beta e in one dimension. So, we will find this n as always as 0 to infinity this should be 1 so now this is easy to integrate this if I integrate I get something like this. So, you can quickly show this easily enough. So, the first part I am good I know rho of e second part how do I calculate this k of e start by saying that this is equal to at least for e less than e a and e greater than e a we will calculate them separately. So, this is equal to nothing but omega over 2 pi for e greater than e a. So, if my energy is above this point then my rate is omega over 2 pi and once back we argued this in some more detail in our module it is omega over 2 pi because omega over 2 pi is the frequency of hitting the transition state. So, this is my transition state I am sitting here the probability that I will hit this point it is one time period in every one time period I will hit this exactly once in the forward direction. So, again this is approximate I am making the transition state approximations here. So, transition state approximation is that I only looked at rate in the forward direction and in the forward direction I will hit this transition state once in one time period. So, what about e less than e a. So, we are going to approximate that as omega over 2 pi that is. So, my energy is let us say here I am sorry this was e for e greater than e a and this is e less than e a well in one time period I am going to assume my tunnel once. So, I come here and then I have some probability of leaking through. So, again this is somewhat open ended problem it is doing estimates and so this I am going to say is e to the power of minus alpha e a minus. So, that is the way to estimate things. So, k of t then becomes 0 to infinity d e rho of e which we showed is beta e to the power of minus beta e into k of e. Now, k of e is divided into 0 to e a omega over 2 pi e to the power of minus alpha e a minus e plus e a to infinity d e beta. So, what we had discussed several modules ago was that we ignored this part the first part because we were assuming no tunneling and we had only this second part, but now we have the tunneling contribution as well. So, let us solve these two integrals the second integral is easier. So, that I will start with beta e to the power of minus beta e omega over 2 pi. So, this is beta omega over 2 pi which are constants I integrate e to the power of minus beta e. So, this will be equal to omega over 2 pi. So, this you can quickly verify this is not hard at all e to the power of minus beta infinite is 0. So, you are left with only e a part. So, let us also do the first part now alpha e a minus e. Well, this is also not hard really beta omega over 2 pi you have to just be careful 0 to e a d e e to the power of minus alpha e a into e to the power of alpha minus beta e. So, I have just taken the exponential separated this term out because it is a constant and taken the parts that had e in common and taken them together. So, this is nothing, but beta omega over 2 pi e to the power of minus alpha e a into e to the power of alpha minus beta e over alpha minus beta from 0 to e a. So, this is nothing, but beta omega over 2 pi e to the power of minus alpha e a into e to the power of alpha minus beta e a minus 1. Well, so the total rate is nothing, but the sum of these two beta over alpha minus beta and I just take this thing inside. So, I get e to the power of minus beta e a minus e to the power of minus alpha e a. So, I have just simplified the second part a little bit here, but that is not very important like the important is the concept how to set it up. And so, the setup was we calculate the rate constant as integral over all energies and for e less than e a we estimated it to be omega over 2 pi multiplied by tunneling probability for e greater than e a we simply took omega over 2 pi. And once you have that the rest is just numerical. So, now, the next problem I have for you is that I have a particular reaction which is of importance for atmospheric chemistry C H plus n 2 going to some transition state to H C n plus n. And people experimentally found that the rate constant fits this formula. So, you use transition state theory and estimate what alpha must be. We have given you a few things to assume, you can assume transition state to be linear and vibrational and electronic partition functions to be independent of temperature. So, take a pause and calculate alpha. Hopefully, you are back you have a value of alpha with you, we will calculate it together and see if we are results match. So, we are going to use this formula and we are going to look only at the temperature part. So, I am going to use proportional to first I have this t coming from this. Then I have Q transition state. So, that Q transition state will be Q sorry Q translational into Q rotation divided by Q CH translational into Q CH rotational into Q n 2 translational into Q n 2 rotation. I have gotten rid of vibrational part or electronic part. So, this is proportional to temperature and again I am not going to look at any other factor other than temperature. Translational part that is dependent on t to the power of 3 half. Rotational part. Rotational part we are assuming the transition state to be linear. For linear, I use this formula. So, I get t divided by CH translational. Well, all translations are 3 half rotational of CH. CH is also linear 2 translational n 2 rotational or linear molecules proportional to t. So, this cancels with this, this cancels with this, this cancels with this and I am left with t to the power of minus 3 half. This implies alpha is remember I still have that exponential factor that I have simply chosen not to write so far. Other common factors there that I have been not writing all the mass and 2 pi and m and all that. So, if I compare this formula with this, you can easily see n 5 minus 3 half. This is a conceptual question. For the following one dimensional surface, I really like one dimensional surfaces in solution at some temperature t, where should I draw the transition state which is the best line representing transition state? Is it A if I draw it here and do my transition state theory with this dividing surface? Should I draw it at B and do my transition state theory with this dividing surface or should I do my transition state theory with the C dividing surface? So, take a pause, think about it and come up with your own answer. So, hopefully you have thought about it and let us so, let us discuss it together now. So, the correct answer is B, this is the best choice why? So, you have to look into the assumptions made in the transition state theory, this is what this question is about. A, this is my reactant, this is my product. If you draw the dividing surface at A, you can have trajectories that are going up and they just have a more chance of reverting back compared to B. You can have that happening at B as well, but at B, a trajectory that crosses here sees a force that looks like this. So, this is more inclined to keep on moving forward. So, at A, a trajectory that is going up might not have enough energy and it just turns back. So, A more recrossings, which is not good. In transition state theory, remember our assumption is no recrossing. So, the best choice is where the recrossings are minimal and A has more recrossing compared to B. What about C though? In C, I have this kind of energy surface, I have my trajectories coming here and they are simply falling down. Isn't C better than? No, here the other assumption comes in picture. The equilibrium assumption will be bad. Remember that we also assume that transition state is at equilibrium with the reactants. So, transition state will not be at equilibrium. Well, again you can think of it intuitively, you have these trajectories that are coming up and they are just forward crashing into the products like this. So, there is no reason that at C, you can expect a good Boltzmann ratio, good Boltzmann distribution, e to the power of minus beta h, that the velocities are much more faster because trajectories are coming up and then crashing like this. So, the transition state will not be at equilibrium. So, the other assumption does not hold very well. So, B is the optimal point where you will get minimum recrossings as well as the equilibrium assumption will hold better. The final question for today, you think of a reaction like O plus HCl going to OH plus Cl and this is again a conceptual question. Calculate the total number of frequencies that are needed, assuming transition state to be linear versus nonlinear. Again, take a pause, solve this problem on your own. This is an important problem as far as this course is concerned and get an answer. Pause this video now and solve this problem on your own. Hopefully, you are back. So, let us solve this problem together. Remember that for transition state, I need frequencies of reactants transition state. I do not worry about products, reactants here O, well that is an atom, atom does not have frequencies, that is there is no vibration there, no frequency. HCl, one frequency, the stretch, right. So, HCl can vibrate one frequency only. Linear transition state, how many frequencies are required for a linear transition state is the question. So, I have OHCl, 3 atoms. For 3 atoms, I have 9 total degrees of freedom, right, x, y, z corresponding to each atom, out of which I have 3 translational rotations. Remember that a linear molecule only has 2 rotation. So, whatever remains are the number of vibrations. Now, there is still a little bit of trick. At transition state, we need one frequency less compared to the total number of frequencies. Why? Because in transition state theory, the frequency of the reaction coordinate is not considered. So, minus 1 reaction coordinate frequency which is an imaginary frequency. So, 3 frequencies. So, if the transition state is linear, I need to calculate one frequency for HCl and 3 frequencies for OHCl. Now, for B, nonlinear, I will do the same math. I will have 9 total minus 3 translational minus 3 rotations. So, a nonlinear molecule has 3 rotations instead of 2. So, I get 3 frequencies. I subtract 1 reaction coordinate frequency. So, I get 2 frequencies, okay. So, for A, I will need 4 total number of frequencies, 3 for transition state, 1 for reactant and for B, I will need 3 total number of frequencies, 2 for transition state and 1 for reactants, okay. So, we will stop with this problem session now. Hope you got to learn and hope you tried these problems on your own. Thank you very much.


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Thank you very much. It's a great privilege to speak along with such distinguished other speakers in this session And the reason why I picked up my bag is to say that I've started by doing the right thing my tie matches The color of this bag. So at least what I'm doing in terms of color is politically right but I'd like to start with a generalization and That comes from the fact that I think over the years The forestry profession has yielded a lot of space in the policy arena to other disciplines And to me that's a fundamental problem. I See dr. Swaminathan here in the audience, and I hope he agrees with me. I've seen in my own country in India the forestry officials and the officialdom in the forestry sector was Extremely important five or six decades ago But over a period of time they have yielded that space to others essentially generalists and I think this is a crucially important issue Because as I'm going to tell you a little later The drivers of everything that happens in the forestry sector Essentially come from other sectors of the economy and I would submit that if we want to bring about a proper balance of forestry activities as they relate to others We would have to ensure that we do some hard thinking and come up with means by which this institutional Imperfection can be corrected Let me first start by talking about the importance of forestry and The impacts of deforestation on the climate of this planet Deforestation accounts for seventeen percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions And of course the single largest source of emissions higher than the transport sector In this context, I'm happy that in this particular session that's taking place in the Bella Center We are talking about reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation now popularly popularly known as red and this must assume significance Because it is by far the most cost-effective mitigation action that could be adopted and In the fourth assessment report the AR4 of the IPCC We had estimated that deforestation is occurring at a rate of 12.9 million hectares per year leading to a decrease of about 4,000 million tons of co2 absorptive capacity and in terms of reduction of the global net carbon stocks in The forest biomass. I was in Brazil a year and a half ago and addressed the Brazilian Senate and I was told by Miss Marina Silva who earlier used to be the minister for the environment and responsible for forests and Others who were there in the Senate that in the last one year alone I believe deforestation had gone up by about 13 percent across the country and this is not Isolated only to the case of Brazil. It's happening in every other part of the world but we must also remember that as Professor Ostrom who I Have the privilege of meeting for the first time and it's such an honor to sit next to her because all of us have admired all that she's been doing over the years and I'm happy that the Nobel Prize authorities have decided to give her and give her the Nobel Peace Prize Nobel Prize for economics because This is really a major departure from what the economics profession has received recognition for in the past and thank God it's happened So what I'd like to say is that? forests really provide you with a range of Benefits that everybody knows about but unfortunately this issue never gets highlighted adequately If you look at the ecosystem services such as water storage increased rainfall nutrient recycling Biodiversity and its preservation soil stabilization and of course even issues like flood control and boosting agricultural productivity. There's such a wealth of benefits That are associated with healthy forestry practices and the maintenance of forest stocks And yet somehow this doesn't get highlighted that this doesn't reach the policy arena when it comes to national development plans and The forestry sector of course is not an isolated system It's impacted by policies in several sectors of the economy And often use the phrase is that the drivers of deforestation lie outside the sector and Therefore, I think nations must look more deeply into the problems of the forestry sector And I think what Professor Ostrom has said is entirely correct. This is an area where top-down policies are not going to work I think Yesterday we had an event of the Cromberg Castle where one of my colleagues said that we need a new water religion the management of water resources Has to develop like a new religion and I believe this is precisely what we need in the forestry sector Because you need grassroots efforts and you really need to see that you build from bottom upwards and Policies should really flow in the opposite direction rather than top downwards What I also want to highlight is the fact that when it comes to goods and services Forests are huge providers You know that forest loss can lead to profoundly negative costs to society in terms of Forgone goods and services and I'd like to emphasize the fact that if we don't recognize this reality We're going to get social disruption on a large scale. In fact, it's happening several in several parts of the world because where communities Tribals and others lose these benefits They are left completely in the wilderness so to speak and Therefore, there's nothing but social tension and protests which takes on an ugly form very often We know that according to the UN Department of economic and social affairs More than 1.6 billion people live worldwide Depending on forest resources for their livelihoods. That's a huge number 25% of the world's population