Here's the current state of people's reactions to each other's problem statements. If you haven't added your reactions yet, please consider doing so! If you haven't written a problem statement yet, please do so before reacting to those of others. I know it's a non-trivial bit of work. I tend to open Slack on two windows somehow to jump between the problem statement thread and the problem reaction thread 🤦🏼 But it does seem like something promising to think about. I've also included a very rough, very preliminary, very incomplete stab at visualizing clusters of people's problem statements. There's no reason to think this "space" is Euclidean or 2D, so take it with a huge bucket of salt. The visualization is in no way mapping status relationships. The intent is not to exclude anyone, but a very narrow instrumental purpose of finding opportunities to collaborate. If you need an analogy, a better one might be a star chart. It seems safe to assume we're all light years apart given our track record of collaborating 😄 This picture is an initial attempt at making a map based on imprecise measurements from a single point. If you spend any time thinking about the map, try to build your own from the raw data to avoid my inevitable biases. I started out with

Kartik

at the origin (no objectivity here!) and positioned first my 1s, then my 2s, then 3s and so on all the way to 6s. Then I tried to go through others similarly and resolve tensions in a very rough, very manual way. I might do this a few times to try to get better at it. Even though this "data set" is almost certainly high-dimensional, a few 1-D relationships popped out at me: •

Kartik -> Tom

+

Tom -> Paul

=

Kartik -> Paul

•

Kartik -> Tom

+

Tom -> Nilesh

=

Kartik -> Nilesh

I responded by putting the 4 of us on a straight line. There may be a spectrum here that bridges the incomprehension between the ends. This sort of bridging of incomprehension is a common pattern. I initially had

Ivan

as far away from

Kartik

as

Paul

. But several connections drew the `Ivan`/`Eli` cluster closer.

Dany

too might be as far from me as

Paul

, but is just 1 away from

Jimmy

.

Guyren

too, but is close to

Tom

and

Dany

. So some of these edges have more "tension" than others, and I haven't come up with a way yet to show that. (I'm currently showing edges labeled 1-3. If we get more data I might need to prune that further. The edges are directional but unfortunately my tool doesn't have arrows.) Anyways. Add your problem statements and reactions!

Where are we with this interesting project, Kartik?

Just waiting for data atm. It's only been a day and it seems like that's shorter than your time between checks of the Slack? There are probably others like that.

@Kartik Agaram Not yet. My knee-jerk reaction is to think in terms of line-thickness, colour, transparency, size, off-page linking. I haven't played with the data yet - still procrastinating. After watching Orion's use of tldraw, I wonder if assigning different values of -ve gravity might result in interesting results? (but, Kinopio doesn't do that kind of thing). Or, maybe Obsidian's "graph view" would (finally) come in handy?

That was a fun experiment, I hope people don't put too much weight into the numbers, the problem statements were often just too short / vague. Maybe a more comprehensive survey would lead to better numbers?

I'm building up to a retrospective thread for people to leave comments, ask for clarification, etc. And then maybe a synchronous conversation?!

“Make easy things easy and hard things possible”