I figured it was about time for a more off the trodden path post. I have been tackling some fairly complex models and what ifs around Folknology's up and coming projects, particularly WebacUs. You see WebacUs has a really import social aspect to it. It is at heart social software. Although I understand it is such I have difficulty in imagining what the social effects will be if it becomes successful (I am hoping that their will be a modicum of interest here of course).

Heres how I think a some of the positive effects play out in social software. First it happens at different levels or scales. here is a low level example :

Your coding (or concentrating on something complex) and you hit a brick wall, you just can't figure out what is wrong, you try everything in vein it's really frustrating. Eventually you stop what your doing and go off and do something else, this is often, get up and possible talk to someone else, listen to something or just break of for a period of time long enough to forget the issue. You then return and bingo the solution is obvious, it's like magic. But actually it isn't because what happened before was you got stuck into a domain rut, deep deep down in a big hole that you couldn't see out of. One of the easiest ways out of such holes (apart from a long break) is random, just think of something else at random or do something random. In fact the best sort of random is someone else not involved with a new task or idea for you, people are really good at random, they are rarely in the same domain rut.

It's the same sort of thing at greater scales with many eyes looking at a complex problem space or subject matter - an open source project, a wiki , the blogosphere or WebacUs, Sure WebacUs is numerical, actually that doesn't really limit the problem space, it can be used in so many unimaginable ways that I couldn't possibly conceive. But everyone between them could, that the benefit of social software it solve complex multidimensional problems naturally in a distributed fashion, thats the key.

Thus my solution is simple, I must let go of it, just get it out there and let you folks have your wicked way with it sooner rather than later, cast aside my embarrassment about it's quality and immaturity and just let random take it's higgledy piggledy course, so that is what I will be doing next week.............