Groups and their practice always have outsiders, and insiders who have not seen everything
Justin, Your reply came to me without a link back to where you were reading. My concern is the whole Internet. With 5 Billion using the Internet, practices of groups of a few 10,000 or even a few million are often isolated and communication blocked by assumptions of groups. “Everyone knows that” might be true inside the group, but billions excluded or blocked while they try to find simple thing not clearly stated or accessible to the Internet.
I have tested many thousands of groups looking at instances where insiders forget they learned things some time in the past. They did not know “what everyone knows”, then, often by chance they know. With global scale on everything now – human languages, subject and topic jargon, and bad writing cause delay costs much larger than the present value of the Internet itself.
Even in fairly coherent topic groups, there are often a few who are exploring things that most of the rest of the group do not know, have never heard of. If the few speak in jargon, or use tools and methods in their topic, that no one knows – if those few speak a private language for their “practice”, that blocks communication at larger up to global scale.
I am glad you wrote. I looked at @jbkinney and see many interesting things. But I need better tools to organize and standardize my view of the things you are doing, and to put them in context. If you glance down anyone’s page tweet on Twitter(X) it is likely you will need some hints – even something you know very well might not be obvious, if you only get a partial or casual hint from things out of context or simply that you only see every few years.
I apologize for writing so much, and without clear reference to what you are responding to. But I am trying to write down some insights from 25 years of research for the Internet Foundation. There are not many working at truly global scale, mostly groups only care about themselves. Perhaps I need to wear a hat that says, “Now I am working on millions of groups 10,000 and larger”. 8 billion humans taken 10000 at a time is a rather large number. Even 8E9 taken 2 at a time is large.
I posted this in my notes as “Groups and their practice always have outsiders, and insiders who have not seen everything.”
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
