Thinking Past the GUI

Bill Anderson posted a few days back about what he calls craft and what others might call technique.  I love to eat and cook, my wife does as well, and we end up watching a lot of Food Network on quiet nights at home.  I like it because it's sort of an info matter stream - you can turn it on and do something else while it talks about food and, when necessary, you can really sit up and listen.

My wife is an incredible person when it comes to food, she makes excellent pastries, cantonese food, and anything involving chocolate.  Some of my friends may like me only because of my wife's chocolate. 

But it's because she knows the techniques.  Many things we see on Food Network she takes issue with.  "No one," she will say, "can make that just from watching this, they won't know the techniques."  And often the techniques are time consuming, so the Food Network person will gloss over them in the interest of getting the show to fit in its time slot.

So Bill noted that there is a growing number of wikis out there that are trying to capture technique.  One of which is OpenWetWare.  Says the site:

OpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information,
know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in
biology & biological engineering.

Even with this type of a site, though, having a guiding hand is vital.  Just the presence of a person there is important and the wiki may only give the base information and introductions.  No matter how much software we develop, we still have hands and are social - which means we like to learn hands-on.

I'm going to look into exploring what OpenWetWare has done and copy it in some other areas - but I'm also going to try to match people up.  Get existing experts around the world to meet up with their peers and those less experienced and create improptu workshops. 

We have no guilds any more to store the techniques and distribute them to new entrants to a field.

People who share techniques are a community, they end up having conferences, but it's not quite the same.  Technique or craft can be facilitiated through tools like the OpenWetWare wiki - it provides the base information one needs and has a community of humans behind it that, assumably, really care about the trade.


PRAXIS101: Craft, it's everywhere and it's not all written down.

Comments

[Nancy White]

We love you for far more than chocolate reasons!

[Jim Benson]

Blush!