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    21st Century Ideas: Seeing the Forest, Not Just the Trees

    Discussion Group for that Superstruct

    Started by: Tony Fisk Raves:4 Badge Winner! Emergensight

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    A visual display of the interactions between the various superstruct components has much to commend it The flare tool mentioned demonstrates a number of ways to display information (I think 'circles' is most appropriate) Before we start fantasising about how it look, however, we'd better find out how it can be made to work.

    The superstructure is #297, here: [http://www.superstructgame.org/SuperstructView/297]

    On #297, copystar pointed to the Whole Superstructure Catalog on the wiki: http://superstruct.wikia.com/wiki/Whole_Superstructure_Catalog Someone (who?) is doing a bunch of work to scrape the data over to the wiki. Maybe we could crowdsource that work, and use it to make a database that could drive the visualization?

    Ah, it is copystar that is gardening the wiki page. Nice work, and lots of it ;-D

    OK, any feedback on my test page on the wiki, that builds copystar's idea?: http://superstruct.wikia.com/wiki/Catalog_Test_Page

    The catalog looks good (I particularly like the column sort) The problem is that there's too much information to edit manually now. (and don't speak of mobs, the data heap has dispersed them!) Can we get read access to the superstruct database? I'll ask avantG Flare looks interesting, and I have an idea for a layout. First though, I'd better see how it can be made to operate

    +1 for database access. I imagine a read-only account could be created to protect from those gosh darn griefers. And as an aside, while filtering content a la 'signal to noise' is great, its always better not to ignore the noise.

    A quick look at flare shows it to consist of a number of readily accessible components and build environments. I'll try and make some use of it when time permits. (Any other takers?) I've asked avantgame about database access... we'll see if she has time to respond. Even a simple csv dump would be of use. How can one *not* ignore the noise!!? (It's really a question of defining noise to suit the occasion)

    Hmmm! Flare, while a really cool looking app, will probably have too much overhead to get operating in the time frames we have. Not to be too disheartened, I'll see what I can achieve with SVG and a bit of PHP

    I'm afraid I can't contribute too much to the coding aspect, but I'd like to help with the visualisation. I think there should definately be layers of information. You don't need all information to be immediately accessible. Perhaps at the top level, each superstruct would be represented by a node, with it's alignment to the superthreats determined by it's position and it's amount of raves by it's colour. A mouseover would reveal the name of the superstruct over the node, it's connections to the superthreats and other superstructs and perhaps its description in a designated explanation part of the page. A click or gesture would move down a information layer where the name of the selected superstruct and it's neighbors and collaboraters with their connections shown. Information about the superstruct would be shown and of course, relevent links. Hopefully I've been helpful. I looked at the flare demo and I think it would be possible on the engine, though I'm not sure about information layers.

    Hi all : A very simple idea: One blog per Superstruct. Members' blogs linked in blogroll, pages for goals, strategy and tasks (..visual..) members can edit and post - all SuperSTruct blogs linked to on greenblip - or other hub, where active SStructs report "summaries" - more details here. http://greenblip.info/2008/10/greenblip-as-central-hub/ I can't delete that post, but I want to edit it, as soon as Jorge re-appears. Too much Lilo... Whatever you plan can be easily realized integrated into this structure, you agree ?

    Thanks, Lilo. This sounds like it could be done in sswikia already. My notion is to give an overview of what structs exist, and how they link. Navarre, could you post your visualisations somewhere? (Mine are simply to represent each struct as a circle, with links. Some smarts to pull linked structs together in display. It could get fancier, but time is against us Oh, SVG is supported by every browser... *except* IE!! (you can get a plugin however)

    Posted my idea on the Superstruct page.

    The Whole Catalog Test page looks great so far! I hope it continues to build out. When we think about visualization and searchability, I hope that coordinating and bundling solutions will be part of it. I have started an effort to bundle like minded superstruct solutions: http://superstruct.wikia.com/wiki/User:Maroon88 If folks have suggestions on how to merge what I've done with the test page or other visualization platforms in teh works, let me know. Ultimately I am hoping to produce a series of bundles for each of the superthreats. Although (despite much effort) the people with similar superstructs don't seem to have too much interest in reaching out to eachother, even if that's the case, having bundled solutions will allow us to have a modeling database that feeds directly into the OpenSource efforts on solution models and information exchange. I'm not personally invested in starting a superstruct, but I am invested in coordinating data and helping other people expand the reach of their structs.

    I'm thinking that a lot of struct builders, storytellers and bloggers have a willingness to promote their work that might be a little higher than their willingness to do more work (collaborating cooperative structs etc). There are also several meta-struct efforts that are happening, but which sometimes overlap in the sense of reproduction. While the visualization of data site (for layering/ updating/ coordinating) data gets off the ground, does it make sense for people to start encouraging struct founders, bloggers, storytellers to post the links to their pages directly onto the Wiki superthreat page that their ideas and stories address? So incorporating Headlines for 'Blogs" 'Storytelling' 'Discussion Threads" and 'Superstructs' into the main wiki page for each threat. Then a handful of facilitators can take responsibility for sending out emails to the different categories of SEHIs for each heading group to get them to post their link directly onto the Wiki page. If we include directions for how to edit and post their link into the wiki, there might be a lot of uptake. With each superthreat page giving a full documentation of all the ways people are working on the threat, the visualization data folks would then have an existing data bank to go when the platform is ready for data imports

    SVG update: I'm still working on a struct display overview, and should have something to show in the next day or two. (enough to give some proof of concept, at least.) I *can* report that SVG supports an construct, so a certain level of interaction is possible. Meanwhile, if someone could agitate for a data dump of the struct table, it would be nice to display some real data.

    Foundation has built a cool data service at http://sehi-cens.us that is a database of SEHIs and Structs. He's scraping the superstruct website ~once a day and dumping the data into a Rails database. I met him at the IFTF meetup last night and he's open to working with folks to mine the database or make it available for Visualization work. So Tony, I bet you can get a dump of his db to play with, yeah!

    Thanks, ubik. avantgame has also just announced the availability of data structures, so that's one thing less to worry about. (Next thing, of course, is how to read it...)

    First attempts at a display are here: http://tinyurl.com/69bb8x

    The SEHI census is really helpful. I'm glad the foundation put that up. I can't unfortunately see the visualization site and the 'fix it here link' doesn't quite indicate what one does to be able to 'cure ' non visualization. As I struggled to figure out (without success) how to be able to see the page, realized I couldn't and also realized I would not be able either to contribute to work on it since I clearly don't have the right digitools, I was struck by my SEHI moment in the great DIGITAL DIVIDE. While many people diligently worked on the digidivide issue in the early part of the decade, it has only grown bigger in our 2019 world. I'm glad to have experienced being on the 'other' side of the divide for a day because it's reminded me of the significance of the issue.

    This is a really great convo here. Please spomehow get the word out when you get the http://tinyurl.com/69bb8x operating on a level rank amateurs such as myself can comprehend. If anyone here has wind of some sort of SS news network being established I would love to read and contribute to it.

    Shall do PonyXpress, I'll be away for a few days next week, so won't have time to update the display. I might cobble together a simple query engine, however.

    There is now a (very!) simple database viewer here: http://tinyurl.com/5vugzp 'show tables' gives the list of tables (as above) 'describe {table}' gives the table structure Otherwise, you will need to know a little SQL (ie select statement)

    (work in progress): Something like this? http://marcoantonio.org/uploads/by-threat.jpg I'm working on similar things as part of the New World Report... is this the only place where discussion is taking place? Is there a place at Superstruct where we can continue discussing? http://struct.ning.com/groups

    Meta Superstructures

    OK, I hope this isn't a lot of duplicate work but I made a user friendly database viewer at http://www.fredshouse.net/ss/index.php so you no longer need to write your own SQL queries to look at some data.

    Good work, ubik. I need to try and get my view set up to show the real structs now. Also think about how people can clearly indicate links to other structs (the obvious link index isn't there... oh well)

    We should consider how to group similar structs together manually -- like you would if you had a huge list of brainstormed ideas on yellow stickies on a wall. Come up with larger categories as a result of a collaborative sorting process. Not sure how best to do that though, given how dispersed our efforts seem to be.




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