The opposite of a filter bubble, this directly taps into a universal need for agency and our newfound capacity to cooperate by the millions.

Hat tip to the perceptive Priya Parker.

@Ragesoss: It is a mathematical notion applied to ideas. A conceptual space around a theme is full of different concepts, each related to the theme in some way. Such a space can be described in terms of facets that can be used to describe a concept: for instance, you might describe ideas for laying out a garden in terms of their complexity, suitable climate, or total size… or many others. Complexity and size are sometimes linked. You can imagine the conceptual span of a set of facets, or their dependency on one another, as corrolaries of the span and independence of vectors being used as the basis for an abstract space.

A mesh is a limited set of elements that can be used to effectively describe an infinite space of ideas.  Human languages are full of concept meshes.  The easiest to discuss are one-dimensional meshes (ideas that span the spectrum of a single facet):

• color words – the spectrum of visible colors is split into a set of common colors.  this set of names is a casual mesh for the visible color spectrum. (casual in that there is no explicit metric used to determine whether all parts of the visible spectrum are ‘equally’ represented by words)
• shape words – shapes may be described as circular or oval, square or rectangular.  There is a humorous ‘proof’ that the only skew triangle has angles (45, 60, 75) – that all others are roughly equilateral, isoceles, or right.

Higher-dimensional meshes include texture words (smooth, rough, bumpy, prickly, soft, firm, sticky… – covering facets of friction, give, tangible local structure, and more).  Most higher-dimensional meshes in language are incomplete (we rarely form words for concepts whose realizations are not in common use).

If you define a metric for the distance between two points on a spectrum, you can construct an “equally-spaced” subdivision of the space, or a balanced mesh.  This splits a space into a set of characteristic elements (here, concepts) or nodes which can be used to describe anything elsewhere in the space.

Choosing a metric is important and difficult.   For instance, once we found a way to measure color by the wavelength of its light, we could ask for enough common color words such that every frequency of visible light is no more than 50nm from the wavelength of one of the characteristic colors.  In practice, humans see different parts of the color spectrum with differing degrees of sensitivity, and we become familiar with certain constant colors in our environment .  So while the rendered spectrum does not devote much space to Yellow or Orange (in contrast with green and red), we have many more characteristic words for yellows and blues than a straight “wavelength subdivision” would suggest.

It is also difficult to define facets that are independent of one another; but this is not necessary.  It is mainly important for each facet to be easy to observe and agree on.

For a given metric, you can describe the fineness of a mesh in terms of the maximum distance from any concept to the closest characteristic element.  (or sometimes twice that distance – as a description of the “largest” concept that could “slip through” the mesh without including any of the characteristic elements.)  If you have different metrics for each facet, a synthetic combined metric must be created that is consistent with each.

A balanced mesh is then one in which the fineness of the mesh is essentially the same for all subsets of the conceptual space — so, a set of color words that provides equal facility in describing perceived colors at all points on the color spectrum.   (Again, a suitable metric here might be one that stretches out the spectrum in regions perceived very well by the human eye, or colors that come up frequently in human life — the latter a metric that changes with social context.)

One can often have a clear definition of a mesh without having words for some of its characteristic elements.   This happens often with a multifaceted space, where the intersection of well-known values of each facet is an unknown combination that has no word to describe it.   One common way of constructing a balanced mesh involves creating a balanced mesh for each facet, and then defining a concept for every combination of those single-facet ideas.  Building a “complete” set of characteristic concepts can be thought of as mesh completion.  It is a way of thoroughly grokking a space of related concepts.  And the fineness of the resulting mesh is a measure of how effectively one has used language, imagery, or other methods to illustrate the limitless variety possible within the constraints of that conceptual space.

(More after the jump…)

One way to complete a mesh is to identify characteristic concepts that are familiar, then to look for the nearest familiar concepts for each remaining node and to try to imagine something combining their qualities / falling in-between them.   Sometimes new words and imagery need to be defined for concepts that can be conceived but do not have their own common phrase.  Other times, there may be theoretical concepts that ‘exist’ in the synthetic context of a given mesh, but do not match anything that seems real or that one can conceive [at the moment].   Identifying and clarifying these concepts can expand ones capacity to differentiate and perceive the surrounding cluster of ideas; can point to a poor choice of facets; and can point to gaps in the language used itself.   To the extent that developing words and phrases for important topics is the fundamental unit of language-building,  creating and completing meshes to describe sets of concepts offers a step towards describing anything truly new.

The practice of picking out facets that seem meaningful in a situation and viewing the situation in terms of them, can be seen as considering a variety of perspectives.   Generalizing from a particular situation and perspective to a related mesh offers a way to characterize different perspectives — even a way to measure their applicability or flexibility in the context of that situation.

Exploring how granular one can make a mesh before running out of obvious candidate concepts for each node offers an estimate of how effective one’s current language/dialect is for describing related concepts, and how nuanced one’s analysis using that language is liable to be.  One can also pick facets based on some context-free reason — for instance how accurately, quickly, or precisely they can be measured, or how extensive and well-defined they are — to produce meshes with very precise matches in one’s personal experience, and with many gaps.

The practice of naming and illustrating new concepts to fill gaps in a well-defined mesh is a creative part of mesh completion.  Supporting this process — building complete, balanced meshes rather than using the best available unbalanced mesh to describe a situation or idea — is what I mean when I say I am a mesh completionist.

This involves identifying current perspectives and measures, assessing the effectiveness of current language in new contexts, connecting a patchwork of partial local meshes into a whole reflecting the entire space of concepts under consideration, considering the fineness of the familiar parts of the mesh and the gaps in its new parts, filling in the mesh with existing concepts where possible, and creating new language where needed.  Often the unknown parts of a mesh cannot be made as fine as its well-worn parts, at which point it is important to decide whether to give extra weight to the familiar parts simply because they have more named nodes.

17 soluciones arquitectónicas fueron seleccionadas para participar del encuentro titulado “La gente se encuentra en la arquitectura”… Los proyectos, que ya fueron construidos o lo serán en el corto plazo y se expondrán en un gran biombo de 130 metros, siguen tres pilares de reconstrucción: patrimonio, prefabricación y organización social.

17 architectural solutions (to destruction) were chosen to participate in the Biennale, where this year’s subject is  ”People Meet Architecture”.  The projects, which have been or will shortly be built, and displayed on a 130 meter screen, focus on one of three pillars of reconstruction:  heritage, prefabrication, and social structure.

There are some perennial projects that take more than a single barnraising to understand and plan for. One is the issue of supporting different languages equally — the world’s largest and smallest languages are both underrepresented among the projects.  While I would like to see Wikimedia become a model for the rest of the online world in this area, how a global community can provide support, bugfixes, and advice to different/new language groups is an issue for many multilingual projects.  So I offer these questions to all readers – feel free to answer them for the projects you are most familiar with.

• What technical and other support do various language projects need to become awesome?
• What variations are needed for projects whose main goal is language and cultural preservation?
• What sharing of advice or practices would make starting new projects easier?
• How can established projects help new projects with outreach, communication, and planning?

Let me offer one example of how this has been difficult to grasp within Wikimedia: discussions on the early international list were generally in English.  This led to a certain founder effect among participants, and in how the projects are today framed to the world, from elaborations of the vision to interface design.  And this has forked discussions of what language projects need – those in the language of the project, which can happen easily and fluidly among its participants and contributors, and those meta-discussions in one or two shared languages with the potential of setting Wikimedia-wide policy or affecting all projects.

As another example: non-Latin character sets, and cultural differences about editing and participation across different parts of the world, have always been part of discussions about how Wikipedia and its sister projects should advance.  Nevertheless, the early language communities drawn to the project were largely European, and issues that only affect non-Latin readers can still take a while to fix (for instance, replacements for Roman-alphabet captchas, or fixes to javascript and css layouts in corner cases).

What are your examples? What am I leaving out?  How can the global community and the Foundation better support small and underrepresented languages?  Feel free to leave links to current or historical discussions about problems and opportunities.

Thank you also to Philippe and the elections team, and to all candidates who took time to run.  I was particularly glad to see Góngora running, as a new face in meta-affairs, and I hope to see more participation in meta discussion by active es:wp contributors.

I will help the Board be more open.  I have revived the Wikimedia meetings page for suggested agenda items – please leave your ideas and comments there, in any language.  (I know this is a tough thing to request in a monolingual blog.  Suggestions for making this blog more accessible are welcome.)  I will post my own thoughts about agenda items there in advance of future Board meetings.  One of my first efforts will be getting all foundation resolutions and policies translated into Wikimedia’s core languages.

The next one is coming up in a few weeks, during Wikimania – I don’t officially become a Board member until we meet.  I am looking forward to Wikimania, and hope to see some of you there!

I have also updated the old Wikimedia Reports page, as one way to better coordinate organize information – please help add new reports to it, and translate it into other languages.

Meanwhile, my friend Kat Walsh has not yet stood for re-election to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, though I hope she will!

Update: she did, and she was reelected for another term!  Congratulations

She is among the last of a certain breed of board members who have been strong advocates for community involvement in key decisions, and we could use more.  The current Wikimedia Foundation is strongly in support of openness even without nagging from the Board – for instance in framing the upcoming year-long strategic planning as a process to facilitate and crystalize plans from the many communities – but without active community trustees we might no longer be so lucky a few years from now.

My official statement, and throwback to an earlier era, after the jump.

Here is what I said in my brief statement, the blurb every candidate offers which is translated into dozens of languages before the election begins

Wikimedia should be a model for open, scalable organizations.

As a Board member, I would be a strong community voice, communicating regularly about the Board’s work, holding open meetings and soliciting public input. I support developing expertise within the community.

I would also

• fight for better support for translation and multilingual communication across Wikimedia, particularly for planning discussions
• represent the technical and practical needs of smaller projects
• encourage careful use of funds and goodwill, planning for long-term availability of the projects (with an endowment and core services)
• encourage delegating outreach & community development to chapters

About me: I am an editor, translator, steward, and public advocate for Wikipedia. I started the Meta translators network and the Wikimedia Quarto newsletter (in 5 languages) in 2004, and was secretary of the Special Projects Committee. I founded the Boston meetup group and helped run the first two Wikimanias, hosting Wikimania2006 in Boston.

Outside Wikimedia, for 3 years I have been director of content at One Laptop per Child, working on local partnerships for free content and offline distribution.

I greatly enjoyed Aaron Swartz’s regular blogging in 2006 about important ideas, and mean to follow his example for the coming weeks.

UPDATE:  Our street was lucky.  Our house is good as ever, having no enormous trees nearby.  My mother reports the only noise it made was a loud humming from the gutters at a certain windspeed (I could hear it over the phone!).

UPDATE 2: A house across the street had its roof aerated by falling trees from both adjacent properties, and the ancient oak in the open lot next to us (vacated and cleared after the last big flood) was ripped down.  Flooding wasn’t bad; only 2 ft of water in the street.  The local bayou is far from the main channel, and was a good 3 feet from flowing over when high tide passed at 4pm.  10 blocks away things were worse…  Now everyone just has to make do without power for the next fortnight.

UPDATE 3: Only 1m are still without power; we expect to do without for another week.

And this is why we went into space 40 years ago: an image of Ike from the International Space Station… with a little ‘station finger’ over the lens.  Great buildings such as the Pyramids and the Wall are, despite what they say, hard to see from space.  But massive atmospherics?  You can see those from Saturn.

More below the fold.

From the coast:

How Texans prepare for the London olympics.

I can’t seem to stop editing new wikis.  Here’s one that’s even gotten me to journal…

Wikis abound …

Both first and last on my list. First, because you have been on it for a decade; were its founding member. I have long owed you the impossible, or at least a calligraphed letter to that effect. Last, for celebrating less warmly than deserved your liberation from the far side of the pond.

It held plumb, level, solid, square and true for that one great moment… The key to Dugan’s lucidity is that it is really hard to nail even one hand to a crosspiece yourself, whether or not you are a carpenter. Those asking a great deal have often sacrificed a great deal first. Thankfully, by that point it rarely feels like sacrifice.