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Josh Gigantino
by J05H on Thursday April 20, @03:33AM
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| I am a web designer and artgeek who lives and works in Boston. I'm from Maine, and like cycling and space. You can find out about my art, and get a pre-alpha release (ie, raw copy) of a chapter of the book I'm writing here:
http://www.shore.net/~gigantin/
My main interest for working on the OIP tools is the interface, and gluing the tools we have already into a usable whole. My main interest in the OIP as a concept is to be able to take part in intellectual challenges that have real-world impact. I am currently hashing through what will become the Mission Statement with Jeff. Sometime in early summer, I will start working on some serious revisions to the site's interface. In the medium term, I want to complete my investigation of realtime tools that we can integrate into the system. There are notes in my Zwiki (will open in new window) describing some of the enhancements I'm considering. Feedback is appreciated.
My skills are: HTML, some perl, graphics production, interface design. I also do both 2d and 3d animation and video work. Any graphics needs for the OIP or related projects can be sent to me. I also do (way to many) adbanners at my day job, so if we ever get some ad space on other sites (think PSA), I can make them as well.
Currently, I am learning Python, and brushing up on my stylesheets and DHTML. I'll be tackling zope's DTML along the way with Python. I am also learning 3d Studio MAX, but I'm not sure how useful that will be for the OIP.
That's pretty much it, for now. Any further questions, email me and I'll be glad to answer them.
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Re: Josh Gigantino
by Betty Gigantino on Tuesday January 21, @01:20AM
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Hi Josh,
How are you? I have been trying to locate you for a while. I would love to have your address to write to you. You can e-mail me at this address. I now have a computer at home.
Grandma Gigantino.
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Re: OIP members: please introduce yourselves.
by Ben Darnell on Thursday April 20, @03:42AM
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I'm a second-year student at NC State University (majors: Computer Science and History; minors: Cognitive Science and French). In my spare time I work on ThoughtStream, an associative information manager. Other (less relevant to the OIP) credits include LinkMaster, a protocol for linking data between different PalmOS applications, and I am a Debian maintainer.
Some of my goals for ThoughtStream:
- Ubiquitous access to ideas - with desktop, handheld, and web access to a synchronized database, all your information is readily available. Perhaps more importantly existence of always-available input access, since you never know when inspiration will strike
- Collaboration - I want to make it easy to refer to others' ideas, and integrate them into your own network
Relevant skills include proficiency with Python and the wxPython GUI toolkit, as well as PalmOS development (mostly C, with some Python code for synchronization). I'm currently learning about web-related technologies (Zope, MySQL, etc)
I'm in the Eastern US timezone (-0400), and am generally available in the evenings for chat.
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Jeff Archambeault
by Jeff Archambeault on Thursday April 20, @01:25PM
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I am a 34-year-old Lead Help Desk Tech and Client Coordinator for a Point of Sale software developer in the petroleum industry, in Denver Colorado. I work with hardware, along with alot of database stuff in SQL (Centura), DBase, and MSAccess. Although without much of a formal education, having spent 4 years in the USAF, and 2 semesters of Community College (toward Electrical Engineering), I've tried to make due.
The OIP machine(s) currently live at my house, supplied with ADSL to the Internet. There will be 5 machines on-line this weekend, only 1 being a Windows 98 workstation/game machine. The rest run various distributions of Linux. I got into computers in '79 and been with them since, although I really haven't specialized in any one thing. I've coded in Basic, Fortran 77 (WatFiv), some Pascal, DOS Batch files, and recently some Perl and Python. Thinking back, my years as a BBS sysop have probably led me to the OIP. My Web Site is full of other stuff I'm working on, including a "Unified Field Theory".
As I've grow over the years, I've realized, or perhaps envisioned, the Internet becoming more than another commercial market. Despite what form it takes, whether text-only, ANSI graphics, or with full, imersive virtual reality, the Internet has the capability to transform humanity into a community of beings sharing to advance the whole, with open, effective, and convenient communication. The OIP and other related projects are steps in the right direction. Sometimes I get the feeling we're building a VonNewmann machine. It sure beats studying for MCSE tests. :)
As far as OIP development goes, I'm learning as it does. I see a PostgreSQL back-end (for the data-types support), and integrating current Zope Products, such as GenericUserFolders, in the short term. Once we have the mechanism in place for 'userspace', we can start integrating other external/internal tools. Userspace will probably become the central part of the OIP, with everything else a framework of clients and tools for supporting it.
The concepts behind the OIP just 'blow my mind'. As a 'thinking man', having the means to co-think with my fellows, in an open yet protected environment, is surely a thought-come-true. Being able to contribute to such a thing, at the ground level, is pure joy.
Mondays are my official "OPI Days", but I'm usually around most week-day evenings. My ICQ (1764481?) is always active, and is a great way to get my attention. Weekends are a 50/50 thing, especially Fri and Sat nites. I like to camp and otherwise go on 'road trips' with only my Palm III as my link to technology. Sometimes I check in from work (like now), but not usually in chat.
I'm looking forward to working with all of you!
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Re: Jeff Archambeault
by Jessica on Thursday October 17, @04:32AM
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Dear sir,
Hello!I`ve read your website about the opening ideas....I find its great!I`m a student from Malaysia...I just want to ask you something...can you please tell me what actually "VonNewmann Machine"?what can the machine do to help us specially for all student?
Im hoping that you have the answer sir...and wait for your explanation sir.
Thank you,
Jessica
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Re: VonNewmann Machine
by Jeff Archambeault on Saturday October 19, @01:11AM
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Greetings Jessica,
I'd like to think that a VonNewmann Machine is an important mental exercise, one that requires thought on multiple, connected aspects of one unit. In particular, I've thought such a machine would exist as an autonomous, roving spacecraft that process asteroids and such to get fuel for propellant and electrical energy to process raw materials into repair and expansion. As it grows, it's energy requirements increase, so it needs to evolve so it scales it's systems in relationship to it's size, and replicates, perhaps evolving in the process.
Most biological forms we know of are VonNewmann Machines in one form or another.
Links courtesy of Sander:
Von Neumann:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/7233/521.html
Artificial life:
http://www.krl.caltech.edu/~adami/CD1/AL.html
Hope this helps!
Jeff
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Re: OIP members: please introduce yourselves.
by Robert Rapplean on Thursday April 20, @09:12PM
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Hello, there. I am a 33 year old software systems designer, programmer extraordinaire and rotten speller. I do primarily C, C++, Perl, and JAVA. I'm unable to take on Python projects at the moment, but am quite enthused to see this go somewhere.
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Re: OIP members: please introduce yourselves.
by J05H on Friday April 21, @02:06AM
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Robert,
Are you interested in working on the cothinking side of things, on directed research projects?
We are going to need to start doing some active cothinking soon, primarily for testing the best ways to structure the website and toolset.
Welcome aboard!
J
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Stephen Danic
by Stephen Danic on Friday April 21, @08:54AM
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I do computer stuff for a medium sized Canadian pharmaceutical company.
I developed Lucid, an open source web-based note taking and collaboration utility. It's similar to wiki but it has a little more structure.
I posted an open content page at memes.net where you can try out Lucid.
I consider myself to be a novice programmer.
Since I posted Lucid, I've become interested in patent law and intellectual property rules.
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Lucas Gonzalez
by Lucas Gonzalez on Tuesday May 02, @08:30AM
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Hi there!
I may be the only non-computer-sophisticated person around here, so don't expect much in that area. I may understand the ideas (that's not granted, either), but I sure get lost in the words (whatever is a 'class', an 'object', etc?).
I'm a physician/doctor working in public health in the Canary Islands. 37 years old. I did my PhD in sentinel networks, which is a way of epidemiologic surveillance (watching the spread of disease) based on voluntary notification by general practitioners.
I love outlines, mostly if I can use them in focused mode: whatever level deep you're in, you just see the (sub)title and its immediate siblings. When I was in my last year in Medicine I wanted to impress this young lady and wrote a program in Apple's Basic which showed a page of text with links to other pages in a tree manner - I even wrote an editor for that! I have a very simple outliner in C (GPL) in http://www.gulic.org/copensar/sole.html. (My "general" page is just http://www.gulic.org/copensar.) Sander - also to be seen here at the OIP - has changed the code to make it work - now I'm lost because it uses actual programming concepts and things. We'll throw away that Stone and keep the Soup.
From the manual of my favourite (commercial) outline editor, I read about Edward de Bono, and bought his Teach Your Child How To Think and then many other books. Then I translated his CoRT Thinking Lessons CD into Spanish (the whole 800 pages) - which has both languages (English and Spanish) in the CD. I'm an accreditted trainer in CoRT and Six Hats, because I like it: I find EdB's work simple, practical and useful. I have some reservations about copyright - but then I realise I have this public health bias which prevents me from seeing clearly.
I made a posting in Technocrat.net, and Jeff and Josh replied and created the OIP. I gave some ideas for links and icons. Apparently, I may have coined the word "cothink" (I looked at Peter Teichman's 'think' - of Gnome fame - and thought I wanted the 'co' part in it); if that's the case, then I'm glad because I can make if "free" as in GPL, etc.
I love to see all of you working around the code - "code" is another way, perhaps the clearest way I've seen, of "ideas that work". I'm interested in seeing the larger concept developing. Boy - I want the tools!
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Re: OIP members: please introduce yourselves.
by Magister on Monday May 08, @03:14AM
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I am currently working as a Tech for GTECH. We supply lottery equipment around the world. I have a Computer Sciences Deg from UM. Although it is now about 20 years old. I have tryed to keep up on new things. I am always interested in getting things started. I am gathering info on Python at the moment. I can only hope that it is easier to learn than english. :) So, let's get things rolling......
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Re: OIP members: please introduce yourselves.
by AlexanderVH on Saturday May 13, @11:18AM
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Hello,
I'm Alexander Van Heuverzwyn from Belgium. 35 years old , and since end january father to a wonderful daughter. see the birthcard.
I studied physics. I have a long lasting interest in complex adaptive systems, ranging from immunology to linguistics.
I'm in two 'clubs' , one concerned with creativity, and another one , consisting of intellectuals that spend way too much time philosophysing about the world (they'll smile when they read this).
Like Lucas , I've read many books of de Bono. Although my motivation used to be mainly the appreciation of beautifully designed concepts and frameworks (like Feynman!), I'm shifting towards actually using the methods.
I have been working as a programmer for 2 years, mostly C++,learning it on the job. I usually make applications on GIS and AutoCAD related things, combined with Access. I have some experience with SQL and VBA. The last year I also learned to use html and some javascript.
I joined this project because I think it's valuable and I see a lot of uses. I'm learning a lot. It's time well spent. I imagine a system resembling this one being used one day for 'audience participation to government'(instead of just 'critical evaluation and voting').
I learn whatever is needed here, Python and dtml.
My experience with Linux can be summarized this way : I installed it this week.
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David Kankiewicz
by Cyberrunner on Monday June 12, @12:37AM
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Hello all, I'm been slowly finding my may around OIP sense I found it a few weeks ago and joined because I've been thinking along the same lines for some time now.
I'm 20 years old, young :), from California and been generally interested in computers for a long time now. Not much programming outside of learning the basics and studying the concepts underlying the rational used to design what we have now, which included looking into many applications and learning enough to use them, currently using Linux... I know Zope pretty well and am looking at python more and more (haven't used it too much, though).
I've been working on a model of a central concept/everything database of sorts for the last few months in my spare time and have come to many of the same conclusions as OIP members have come up with/stated... I'm currently finishing up the database structure and hope to have it mostly finished up by the end of the month (alpha/beta if all goes well), it uses Zope for the frontend and PostgreSQL as the backend (for numerous reasons).
Hope I can contribute to OIP and be useful in any discussions I get into. I should be around for chatting as I get to know the site and what your all doing.
(P.S. I must say, I haven't been too much of a 'chat room/message poster' person before about ~6 months ago and am hopefully getting the hang of it, so let me know if I'm out of line or anything. Thanks)
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Re: David Kankiewicz
by Andrius Kulikauskas on Tuesday June 19, @09:42PM
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Hi David!
I've looked you up on the web today, and now I remember corresponding with you some time ago. I hope we can work together.
Andrius
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Re: OIP members: please introduce yourselves.
by Alex F. Bokov on Tuesday June 20, @11:20PM
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I'm the admin of a new Slash site, http://www.transhuman.memetree.com and am working on a couple of others that aren't ready to be publicized yet. I'm comfortable using Apache/mod_perl, Linux, and Perl.
I'm fascinated by spontaneous order, agoric systems, chaords, and other 'lazy' ways to coordinate huge projects and organize huge amounts of information. As a Transhumanist, this all dovetails nicely into my rather optimistic vision for the future of humanity, but that's probably off-topic for this posting. ;-)
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Re: OIP members: please introduce yourselves.
by Andrius Kulikauskas on Friday October 13, @09:05PM
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I am 35 years old and would like to live in Lithuania, but have found myself wandering around the world, working to build up the Minciu Sodas laboratory devoted to "caring about thinking". Our members include Ben Darnell, Stephen Danic, and Lucas Gonzalez Santa Cruz, from whom I found out about the Open Idea Project.
Minciu Sodas is a private laboratory that works like a networking club. We organize public research as a way of building relationships. A major contribution that I wish to make is to discover a business model by which people could participate in projects like the Open Idea Project even when they do not have outside support, which is most people in the world. How do we make our work "open"? And how do we create an economic system where people know that their work has value. It seems that the jobs where there is clear value - child rearing, raising food - are the worst paid, and the best paid jobs, in my experience, tend to have no traceable value.
Our focus is "caring about thinking", and I started with the wish that there be tools for thinking, by which we could organize our thoughts in sequences, hierarchies, and networks (an idea of Kestas Augutis). I concluded that there are many tools, but the entire industry will be stuck until we develop an import/export standard. We have a working group, http://www.egroups.com/groups/ourownthoughts/ to develop this standard. I have recently written up a vision, http://www.ms.lt/ourownthoughts.html and am working on a first draft that you can find there.
My vision emphasizes that users must think as designers, and designers as users. Designers will work together only by the joy that they have from users enjoying their tools. Users will enjoy their tools when their ideas can thrive, have a life of their own, in a network of their tools. Therefore I would like to focus on collaborative software like the Open Idea Project, and also Stephen Danic's Lucid, http://www.memes.net
I congratulate you on the success of the Open Idea Project, you are certainly building momentum. Rather than start something new, my choice would certainly be to participate in what you are doing. My experience in the Minciu Sodas laboratory leads me to want to automate some forms of participation. For example, we use questionnaires that help us get a picture of the variety of insights people have, such as "Do you organize your thoughts?" at http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/tooluses/990608surveyen.html
with answers at:
http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/structureuses/index.html
We also maintain archives, for example, tools for thinking:
http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/toolkinds/index.html
Our work is in the public domain, and you are welcome to copy and share it. In general, I believe in the importance of creating "public domain zones", where material is assumed to belong to the public domain, whenever it does not explicitly state otherwise. In other words, the default should be public domain. It would be great if the Open Idea Project were such a zone.
I would like to encourage our members to work on the Open Idea Project software, especially if the Minciu Sodas laboratory could structure certain areas for our archives. Would it be possible to work together in this way? Could the Open Idea Project be a "host" for some of our archives?
Also, if you are interested in our work, consider becoming a member, and write to me at ms@ms.lt We offer free membership to those who contribute to the public domain something that we think is useful towards "caring about thinking". In particular, it can be open source software, for working with thoughts, that is freely available to the public. Or you can answer questionnaire, "Do you organize your thoughts?" Or you can pay a membership fee! We are serious about attracting productive people that we can focus efforts on, which is why we have a threshhold for membership.
I hope we find ways to work together!
Yours,
Andrius Kulikauskas
Director
Minciu Sodas
ms@ms.lt
http://www.ms.lt
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