PatternSmithing Alliance Blogs

The Thingk.com private beta will open up in May 2010.  Here are some details surrounding the private beta:

• This will be an invitation only beta, which means:
  • Some colleagues and friends will be asked directly to join – please feel no obligation but your feedback will be greatly appreciated if you can assist.
  • Throughout the last few years, I have been looking at interesting individuals who may be interested in patternsmithing and Thingk persistence – you will be receiving a hand-crafted email as a personal invitation – once again, no obligation please – only do this if it brings you value but if you do your feedback is greatly appreciated.
  • As expressed on this blog, if interested feel free to contact me at the contact form http://xri.net/=joel.kotarski and I will be able to accomodate you.  Also if you think you know someone who would be interested from the category above, please contact me here as well.
  • We’ll probably have limited invitations to spread around among private beta users – these will probably only be on a request-only basis, however, to control capacity initially.
• For those in town, we will most likely host an in-person meeting where we will go over some details about the site and what is being accomplished – for out-of-towners we may also host a teleconference as a separate event.
• Since we will be testing privacy and security (with potential bugs to be found), I ask that you put the kind of ideas you may spontaneously work on but not your actual work and certainly not anything you would consider intellectual property at this point.  Much of the data from the private beta will be wiped clean on launch so that we can fully test; however, I am planning to make an easy mechanism to tag content you wish to transition over to the full system – also, I will be soliciting feedback on making this process as painless as possible for those generally interested in getting value from the work they do in beta testing.
• As always, being asked to participate should not imply obligation to participate, and participating should not imply obligation to give detailed feedback.  Anything you do is greatly appreciated and will be rewarded in some manner.

• (0)

I’m happy to announce the “launch” of DreamSpawn, which effectively gives an overview of this company’s overarching strategy for the next few years, as well as how all of the products and initiatives will work together.  Essentially, the concept of ThingKs and the practice of patternsmithing (crafting ThingKs, whether they are your own or others,  into physical or virtual reality using your innate talents) are central to everything.

Thingk.com will be a free community product; however, we are looking to encourage a revenue stream by offering premium tools for crafting the representation of the Thingks on the site and for patternsmithing them into the world.  I have neither the delusion that this company will be capable of inventing all of the possible ways of expressing or creating representations into the world nor the desire to corner that, so we will be looking to offer partners the ability to sell their tools on this site.  Now that brings up a few questions and all of them relate to if the site will immediately become littered with commercialism and the answer is a firm no.  That means the following things outright:

• The desire to give the web community an incredible free basic toolset for persisting, discovering, and using thingks will be fully realized — this base functionality will always be available for free.
• Opportunities to buy more powerful tools will be non-intrusive – the screen real estate will not be littered with it.  It will only be available when you really seek it out, tucked away neatly in the user interface.  Also there won’t be annoying intrusions on experience, trying to prod a user into upgrading – people are quite intelligent enough to seek out things they want.  This is not to imply that it will be difficult to find what you want or that there won’t be a good user interface once you begin seeking out premium tools.
• Users with premium tools will not have an obvious advantage over others, its just a matter of preference.  As a physical analogy, think of an art community where everyone is given a sketchpad, a basic set of pencils, brushes, and paint – the refined artist may choose to purchase an easel, premium paper, brushes, oil paint, etc; however, this doesn’t imply that either will produce better art – it is up to the artist to use the tools given or purchases along with their creativity.

The intention for DreamSpawn is to give the clients who use this service the full array of premium tools as they are made available — which brings up another point: companies and individuals who choose to do so may purchase the full array of tools available (with royalties paid to each of the partners who are represented as well).  This will be done for DreamSpawn for a reason that is explained below:

DreamSpawn is a concept I’ve been trying to tackle for years – probably since I was a teenager.  I wanted people to unlock their full potential but it would take me a long time to see the pieces of the puzzle and even more time to put them together.  I believe that once people reorient their mind toward viewing their larger dreams (which might span a large problem/solution domain) as a set of ThingKs, or thoughts on their way to becoming things, they have a whole new way of tackling the problem — this is typical analysis; however, there is a new spin on it:  By giving the dream itself (and thingks in general) value once persisted, people will begin to move forward with bringing their dreams about.

The other pieces of the puzzle attempt to solve three other problems:

• Dreams and thingks are often kept internal – and often get buried or forgotten.
• People don’t always find the right connections with other individuals and concepts – when this ’serindipitous event’ happens in life we usually witness the great events (company foundings, product launches, etc) that we all have come to celebrate.
• We all constantly work on skills to complete our vocational work, but all too often we don’t have the general skills or specific schools to create the dreams (set of thingks) that inspire us from time to time.

These needs are addressed by thingk.com, fluxpoints.com, and patternsmithing.com – not respectively or exclusively, but overlapping in interesting ways.  DreamSpawn brings all of this together by flipping it around to one individual – giving incredible attention to that client (and forcing them in turn to give attention to their dreams) to ensure no impedances keep that from happening.  As individuals choose to invest in time, attention, and money into their dreams, I want to give them a literal arsenal of tools to obliterate potential impedances.  I want their creativity to flow and want a full support network to wipe those three bullet points above off the table for reasons why they may look back and regret not creating this or that dream.

This blog entry is not a sales pitch to get you to sign up as a dreamspawn client – in fact, we’re not ready for you – that’s why this is an announcement of the “launch” of the sister site.  This is meant to only give a larger perspective of what’s going on behind the scenes, and I’m choosing to do what future users of this site may or may not choose to do – I am persisting out publicly a set of Thingks I am actively working on to bring about as a reality.  That is, I am releasing the concepts out there to spark interest, keep myself accountable, and get the dream in front of myself and others.  Collaborators, angel investors, future partners, volunteers, and future employees, as always, are always welcome.  Contact me at http://xri.net/=joel.kotarski or on the contact form on DreamSpawn if interested (also, feedback in general is welcome).

Finally, the PatternSmithing alliance — anyone interested in joining this alliance or learning more, contact me as well.

jdk

• Comments Off

As the core infrastructure is being put together for the site, I have made an initial technical decision that will also enable a (future) marketing campaign.  Without being able to seek his permission, I am tweaking one of René Descartes’s most famous expressions ‘I think, therefore I am‘ to signify what I want to represent a fundamental shift in our relationship to thoughts and creativity.  Admittedly, I think that the term ‘thingk’ is catchy – it finally came to me after six years of using a far more technical term in other work; therefore, I am anticipating that it may give us a useful way to describe  both an expanded approach to the creative process as well as more coherent and reusable artifacts of the creative process.

Once the framework is in place, I want people to be able to exclaim:

I thingk; therefore, I am creating…

as a representation that they are participating in being intentionally connected to the entire process from thought => think => thing or from thing => think and by expressing the entire process they are likewise engaged in inspiring others to create as well.

In order to express that notion across the web, I want people to have an online identity that succinctly expresses that.  I am a big advocate of OpenID and am building provider support for OpenID into the site in the beginning.  Therefore, anyone who has an account will be able to use this URL as an authentication mechanism for OpenID-enabled sites:

http://i.thingk.com/UserName

This URL will also correspond to the user’s public profile which will expose out any Thingks they have released to the public (or if an authenticated thingk.com user lands there, any Thingks they have exposed out to the appropriate group(s) that individual is in or uniquely to them).

Also, as aggregated identities centered around intention become more commonplace — tightly knit groups would be able to appoint delegates who could authenticate under the identity:

http://we.thingk.com/IntentionName

The intention for this is not to simply add to the growing list of URLs that a person uses to identify themselves* in the current internet ecosystem (though in a way it will do that and unfortunately add to that list); instead, it is a way to identify that which is being created by them beyond the current internet ecosystem – which as a whole other dimension we all now participate in to varying degrees is interesting in itself.  This identity represents not only them, but the thoughts which activated them enough to become thinks and have received intention enough that they will on their way to becoming things (or the opposite case things which they have created which have received intention to be expressed as thinks).  In essence, this represents not just the person (in an abstract way), but their intentions being manifested (thingks-in-formation) and the creations they have accomplished (thingks-as-artifact).

* Current examples span blog URLs, social networking for fun sites, feed aggregation sites, professional networking sites, etc.

So, depending on context, it may or may not be appropriate to use this provided online identity.  There are two lines to draw where it will or may be appropriate to use this online identity and a third class where it is up to the discretion of the user:

• The intentional web+ - a grassroots initiative started around this about four years ago and hasn’t gained a significant amount of momentum; however, this project embodies one aspect of the spirit of this movement.  Where people are using technology to actively aid in carrying out intentions (e.g., aggregating information based around a certain intention, or using technology to carry out an intention).  As these sort of sites begin to multiply again, it will absolutely make sense to use this sort of identity as those who see the URL will be able to use it to intentionally aggregate information or use it to find inspiration for their own intentions.  [This will be further amplified by the FluxPoints project later]
• The semantic web - an initiative that is slowly but surely gaining a lot of ground and I believe will soon cause a groundswell of potential on the web.  Due to the fact that semantic web technology is being built-in to Thingk.com from the ground up, semantic information will be exposed at this identity endpoint – so if a user chooses to express this online identity at sites which are likewise rich in semantic markup or have active semantic agents, the mutual information exchange available by simply exercising the identity depending on the context may bring benefit to multiple parties. [This will be further amplified by the FluxPoints project later]
• The third class I spoke about is the myriad places where someone can express identity on the web currently via OpenID- posting a comment on a blog entry, setting up an account on a forum, etc.  Depending on context, it might make sense to use one of several options available for authentication (several are shown below if you comment on this post) instead of this identity and it might make absolutely no sense to use this new identity at all (except of course to spread awareness of the new initiative).

+ Here is the homepage for the intentional web initiative established in 2005: http://intentionalweb.org/

Another post is forthcoming about the place for a site centered around Thingks in the current web ecosystem, as well as long term discussions about where Thingks will be hosted in the future if all goes well (that is, will they have to be hosted at thingk.com forever or like web sites, blogs, etc. can they be eventually decentralized).  Until then, if you’re ready to start wearing the T-shirts or hats, let me know. 

• Comments Off