On a clear day one might choose to encapsulate the mission of
Blue Oxen as "the collaborative fostering of coevolution". (01)
I can make that statement, pulling it fully formed from my mind,
and have a strong intuitive sense of what it means; however, I
cannot give a concrete definition of the statement nor of the
words within. (02)
Who will help me? What is the definition of collaboration? What
is the definition of coevolution? In what ways to do the two
concepts overlap? Do they support one another? Does one
predetermine the other? (03)
The evaluation of H2O stumbled on the definition of
collaboration. How are we to evaluate collaborative tools if we
don't have a definition for collaboration? Eric Armstrong has his
person definition, yet it is in a particular context: persistent
collaboration for the creation of document. Do we always
collaborate to produce something or is that too specific? (04)
Wordnet provides the following definition for collaboration (05)
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn1.7.1?stage=1&word=collaboration (06)
1. collaboration, coaction -- (act of working jointly; "they
worked either in collaboration or independently")
2. collaboration, quislingism -- (act of cooperating traitorously
with an enemy) (07)
and nothing for coevolution. For evolution they have (08)
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn1.7.1?stage=1&word=evolution (09)
1. development, evolution -- (a process in which something passes
by degrees to a different stage (especially a more advanced or
mature stage); "the development of his ideas took many years";
"the evolution of Greek civilization"; "the slow development of
her skill as a writer")
2. evolution, phylogeny, phylogenesis -- ((biology) the sequence
of events involved in the evolutionary development of a species
or taxonomic group of organisms) (010)
"Co" as a prefix comes from latin for together or with. (011)
So that works out to: (012)
working together (013)
passing by degrees to a different stage together (014)
That's too literal. What I want to know, and what I think we as a
group need to choose are the connotations of the terms, the full
conceptual picture they encompass. (015)
Tag, somebody else is it. (016)
--
Chris Dent <cdent@burningchrome.com> http://www.burningchrome.com/~cdent/
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and
hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." --H. L. Mencken (017)
--
This message is archived at: (018)
http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=yak&i=Pine.LNX.4.30.0303110347330.3120-100000@hot.burningchrome.com (019)
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