Re: Impact of outliners - technography

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 266

Posted by nubuckaroo
1999-08-27 14:19:47

I’m still pretty psyched (anyone still use that term? For awhile it was stoked, what is it now, jazzed, jiggy?) about technography.

Hurricane Dennis has occupied much of my attention today, but I’m home now and I think I’m going to put some thoughts to silicon or ferrous oxide a little later on today and this weekend.

Something Dave Winer mentioned in a Userland Discuss thread on Perl and its virtues or lack thereof in comparison with natural languages resonated with my thoughts on communication.

While there’s too much to go into here at length, what is appropriate for this topic is something like this: Meetings are a specialized form of communication. When we use a tool like an outliner, and incorporate a facilitator, we make better use of our organic bandwidth. We receive information both visually and aurally, so more of our mental processing power is devoted to the task at hand. You’re not doodling while you’re listening to someone drone on. The picture on the screen isn’t static, you can change it if you wish. You’re empowered (to flog an overworked but underappreciated term). Your mind is engaged in the structure of the dynamic document before you and it’s looking for connections not reflected in the structure, patterns in the data, errors in the data, because that’s what we do best. We’re pattern recognition creatures and we’re communicators.

The outliner allows that structure or pattern to be displayed, altered and reviewed at varying levels of granularity appropriate to the nature of the discussion at hand. It’s an extremely powerful tool in that environment.

I get to use it again next week on a somewhat new audience. It’ll be cool.

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