The current system is a protoype, and hence it's our job to learn the rudiments of how it works. An alpha will be available in september. See also the process card and its context to see how tent may fit in to the overall scheme.

Tent prototype

Because of the flexibility of the system, users will find a variety of ways of structuring their self-organisation. Certain sets of types will emerge appropriate to achieving specific objectives in the real world. For example, a collective that wish to accrete information on organisations will derive a different taxonomy than a collective wishing to effect agile innovation over a week.

Ideally, the methodology of evolution is that the script input feeds back through the search and filter facility, informed through direct experience of results in the real world. That is, real world results are contained within the feedback loop, thus escaping the standard reason/argument/opinion loop.

irc client input

Without learning anything new, every comment made on Freenode IRC channels, #esp and #sole are monitored by the bot shaila and written into a database log on google apps. There's a little syntax for defining functions that are related to how that log is accessed:

!projection <2020worldpeace> creating the realistic opportunity world peace for the year 2020

where

• !type defines any aspect and must be placed at the start of the statement
• and <name> creates a label/topic/area of whatever is discussed

and with additional options of

• ~user/name reference link to a name defined by a user
• ~/name reference link to a named topic

webapp search output

Searching for any word will bring up traditional search results. The syntax used in the irc input gives rise to the following search syntax options:

• <@user> all messages by this user
• <~user> all definitions of types by this user
• <+user> all messages by this registered user

• <~/name> all types of this named topic by any user
• <~user/name> all the messages written by the specific user on this specific named topic
• <#tag>

• period:today, day, week, month, year
• sort:asc, desc
• limit: number the number of items in the search list
• merge: true, false, on, off delimit searches to the latest definition or show all messages

Tav's own description of the search language is described in a sequence in irc (and he mentions this will change).

input convention

What words do we specify for !type and ? This depends very much on what we are using the system for. It is as easy to write !help as it is to write !tent , and we could as easily write . We will be experimenting with this for months, and hopefully useful convention-sets will emerge that evolve to achieve specific objectives. This is less to do with how the system is designed, than it is to do with the use of a community. If we are careless, we will use Tent to reproduce the organisational and thinking forms we have evolved with other technologies. The trick is to make the jump to manifest alternative self-organisational and collaborative models.

The following set of terms define the confluence set, and they seem to do ok with the current configuration but needs to be tested in real world applications, eg http://www.prezi.com/148667. (OH and <> seem to get deleted from the following list for some reason...)

Tent:

!intention --a task for today orientated towards an objective; with merge:off, one can see all intentions

!projection --the perceived goal; since every message is relative to the user, a search for <~/name> will result in the diverse perspectives on the same target

!introduction --an invitation for people specifically for the objective of working together

!observation --a comment on the ; remember that a search will only result in the most recent message from any one user unless merge is set to off

!declension --a value-set defined to assist people to decide who they will actually collaborate with; responding to this with ~/name enables others to see specific value-set for a user

!condition --current attitude and status, perhaps enumerate to give some idea of the enthusiasm and effort put into it

Clearly, the words we use will very much define the shape and structure of the ongoing project/collaboration/thingy we are dealing with, and things can soon get out of hand and become messy. Be careful with initial terms. With current system, projections can linked from one to another using ~/confluence-set so that we can see how one projection leads to another. This is not intended to be definitive, but observing a user's list of projections should give an idea of the dreams and aspirations and thus an invitation to share big-picture without actually arguing.

output convention