Information Transfer

Conferences share the same problems as any method of one way communication.
They exist in a vacuum. There is nothing to define the pros or
cons or the alternatives or what the questions are or where in the
spectrum of things this piece of information fits. The purpose of
discussions during or after each presentation is to help those in
the audience gain that perspective. Yet many times the things that
need to be said don't get said due to time limits, politics, or verbal
gaming. And even when they are said they are forgotten over time
and not available at all to those whose only access is to the conference
reports.

One of the most seriously disturbing meetings that I ever sat in
was a NASA meeting about an information management system that was
being developed by a large contractor for Space Station Alpha. The
contractors basic design was to convert all documents (CAD, software,
word processing, spreadsheets, slide shows, etc) into the lowest
common denominator. This meant that all the latest forms of CAD
information would be transformed into the oldest form of Macintosh
draw thereby losing everything that made a CAD document a CAD document.
This was way before the internet and plugins for browsers which
would have made the whole discussion moot. Without knowing the history
of this particular contract and some information on what was going
wrong. Tens of millions of dollars spent with nothing to show. Someone
sitting in the room would have thought that everything was going
fine. In reality the room was seething in hidden agendas and tension.
The contractor was removed from the contract several weeks later.
After this meeting and a similar one about space station construction
using / not using the robotic arm, my outlook was changed from a
naive believer in NASA to disgust at their complete incompetence.
The point of this aside is that none of the real information ever
showed up during the presentations, in the documentation, during
limited discussions, or in the print media. You simply had to be
in the know or you missed the entire point of what was going on.

On this list and others we go over the same arguments that have been
made many times before because everyone was not sitting through the
previous discussions and have no way to know what the arguments were.

To fix the problem we need to be able to associate information with
its supporting and non-supporting arguments and relate both to other
information in some regular system that is in a form that is accessible
to everyone and updateable by anyone. (Shameless plug for InnerTransit
follows) Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS) is a concept that
I have implemented at www.InnerTransit.org. The sole purpose of
this system is to provide the matrix in which information exists
so that it can be related to other pieces of information. That way
a source document (like a paper given at a conference) will have
the arguments for and against, related ideas, questions, and where
in the scheme of things this document exists available to everyone
over the internet. Anybody who would like to sign-in and extend
the matrix can. An example is at http://www.innertransit.org/open/ibisview.
php?IBISnodeid8>.

Conferences might be improved but information made available on the
internet embedded in an IBIS matrix can change how we communicate.

Mitchell James
mejames@...
http://www.InnerTransit.net (Email distribution for multilevel organizations)
http://www.InnerTransit.org (Homebase for collaborative engineering)