Negative Results Part II: Owning your misconceptions

I had a nice long chat with my partner in crime on the KnowWiki, where we looked at the answers to the Ten Questions, and dissected what's happened since then.

One thing you might have noticed right off is that we didn't answer "what problem are you trying to solve".  Part of the reason was that I was only working with ten questions at the time. I didn't add the "plus one" until later.

The other part was that to us, it was obvious. The really cool stuff we were putting online wasn't being used or even found by people looking for it.  That was a bug in the software we were using at the time.  I wrote about our Evil Plans before: I wanted online collections to live, and Joy wanted the collections to be a part of the Semantic Web.

What I found out over time was that if someone didn't care if their material was accessible online, it wouldn't matter if it was or not. If they did care, they weren't going to tell us about it.  They'd share it with their own monkey-sphere and leave it at that.  Not everybody wants to be a wiki editor - or any kind of system editor, for that matter.

What Joy found was that the Semantic Web was happening in an unanticipated way, like most things do.  With the normalization of hashtags as the world's informal folksonomy, material we had available was becoming part of a semantic web-like thing, independent of any metadata that we'd entered.

We'd both fallen for the hasty generalization or unrepresentative generalization: if we thought it was cool for these specific reasons, so would others. And, it followed that of course other people would do what we thought they'd do.

That turned out not to be the case.  But if nothing else, doing something was better than doing nothing.

So we did something, and it turned out pretty cool, if not in the ways we expected.

Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest

This is about the Big Red Question (BRQ for you acronym lovers; BBQ was taken).  It's a deceptively simple question that's terribly powerful.  And of course with great power comes great responsibility.

Even writing about writing about it is frustrating because I had no idea where to start.  My notebook page is full of crossed out sentences because there were too many things to say.  I ended up in the ridiculous position of asking myself what problem I was trying to solve - which was of course trying to explain how to use this damned question responsibly.

I can get as meta as anyone, but that annoyed the daylights out of me.  Something I'd thought would be pretty straightforward turned into pencil scratches and erasures and exactly three two useful sentences.

Plus that little rant.

So, anyway, the useful sentences were these:

1) It's a hardware interrupt.  By that I mean any thinking or talking that has been going on is immediately stopped and all processes in your brain or someone else's are dedicated to focusing on this question.  If you're working full steam on something, a forced interrupt, however useful, is going to be annoying.  Getting past the annoyance is a key component to being able to use the question in a good way.  Not provoking annoyance in the first place is even better.  So, if you're using it on yourself, take a deep breath (or several) and ask yourself the BRQ.

If you're using it on someone else, make sure that they're not already mad enough to spit nails.  If they're annoyed by their perceived problems and/or their real ones, the BRQ can possibly calm them down.  If they're mad at you, forget it.  At that point, they need someone to listen to them and take them seriously.  Give it between five and ten minutes and then see if you can interject the BRQ very gently, maybe with, "Well, that's a big load you have.  What one thing is the biggest obstacle/problem to solve/insert metaphor here?"  If you don't have that long, schedule an appointment.

I'm getting off track. Here's the second useful sentence:

2) It forces a perspective shift without a clutch; this is jarring and disorienting.  Say you've been working all day on some code that needs to do some pretty esoteric stuff and it's just not. coming. together.  There's something missing or something not behaving the way it should and you really really need it to do what you want.  You're describing this in detail in the break room and someone asks you, "Well, why are you doing that instead of this other thing that has that function built in?"

(Side note - I got this all the time in my Digital Logic class.  I'd construct some circuit out of SSI chips and Fred would put a circle around most of it, write "MUX" or some other readily available chip, and tell me "You're working too hard."  Thanks, Fred.)

In the hypothetical break room, you might have known about that other thing and decided against it before. Maybe it's still not a good idea, or maybe something has changed to make it a good idea.  Maybe you started the day working on a short cut that's already taken you longer than the other route would have.  All of that adds up to frustration.  Now the coworker above didn't actually ask the BRQ, but it's worth asking it of yourself, if only to climb out of the rabbit hole and get some fresh air.

So, this supposedly simple question packs a lot of power.  Try to use it for good.  It's much less messy.