Re-Launching the CTA - Proposal closes 19.08.17

Hi all :) good to see you. There is much to say about this. Thanks @gregorycassel for tagging me in. For starters, I might mention that I worked deeply with Edward on Hylo throughout last year until this June, and that the last months I've been along the West coast of the US with Ishan. CTA has often been swimming through my mind, I have always been unsure, and too tentative to re-approach it, having had some challenging (as well as many great!) experiences of working on it. So I find myself excited, yet tentative about this. Obviously I still believe in the cause. I have always been happier to have my sights on the ecosystem as a whole than any singular tool/platform/focus, though I see it as necessary to zone in to more singular focus periodically.

I think that interoperability on the technical level is far easier than interoperability at the social level, the level of organizing ourselves and doing collective sense-making of conversations and developing coherence. For anyone trying to develop the CTA, I have learned that the time investment that must be made communicating with the really interested people is a huge commitment. Without being able to hold the coherence as a group (having never mostly met one another) the load of holding coherence and communicating it falls on to individuals.

A useful thing is to learn, through revealing, what everyone's deeper intentions are in being present. What motivations are at play? Some may have the desire to see and develop immediate and applied progress on an actual technical level. Others may have the desire to foster broad participation and the community itself, aligning many parties. To me, both are valuable and we could benefit from progress on both in parallel, if people can find their best avenue to contribute.

To myself reveal, I would say that I have more passion to see and develop the social side of the CTA, finding a way, first and foremost, to foster a shared identity and community of intent/practice through 'signing up' and adoption of some principles, seal, etc. For my own personal well-being I have been trying to distance myself from the more technical things, including coding, but would have ideas to contribute there if I were asked, having focused intensely on that level early last year.

I appreciate all of your optimism (the fact that there's conversation here at all) and your efforts.

@connorturland thanks for answering @gregorycassel 's call.

I understand if you don't want to contribute technically, but for everybody else's info, Connor created two of the very early Open App Ecosystem experiments, Personator and Communal. Communal (if I remember correctly) was something like what @funkycram is working on now: SSO and navigation over a bunch of community apps. So any ideas you have in that vein would be really interesting.

And I have to agree, that the social side is harder.

Thanks for sharing those Bob. To clarify and add one thing, the SSO aspect was not Communal, rather I deployed the Stonecutter tech by d-cent at ctauth.com to test it out.https://github.com/d-cent/stonecutter

Thanks @connorturland for your encouragement and wisdom.

I echo your sentiment.

My passion is for building more effective collaboration between a much wider and larger group of participants than fade in and out of this group, in order that we can approach the task of designing the OAE in a much more structured and effective way than we'll ever manage through this Loomio group alone

I think you're right but i'd go furhter to say I think to be effective we are required to:

foster a shared identity and community of intent/practice through 'signing up' and adoption of some principles, seal, etc

i.e. An "organization for collaboration", and the CTA would still seem the best vehicle for that imho.

It's great that you seem to feel I'm not out of place, suggesting we build on your work to date :)

Sorry not to have more time to answer other questions right now...

@lynnfoster

The first ever mention I saw of the OAE, being discussed was in 2014 by the awesome (Enspiral crew)[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lfy9Q2OdssTMPm-mZ23UVDutfsCYhH_z0qz1bpsOfco/edit#]

@bobhaugen yes, lets learn lessons from the past this time round ;)
We seriously need to get better at collaboration.

It's clear that some people want to work on tech, some on vocabs, protocols, other's on indexes, others on SSO or systems architecture, which bit comes first...? whilst others suggest the 'social' side, and governance, which turns off others and visa versa etc etc. and round we go...

We are not being effective as a collaborative group.

So I propose we "relaunch" the CTA, or actually "Launch" the CTA, since despite all the valiant work, which I absolutely applaud, the CTA (as far as I can tell) never actually got to the point of agreeing a shared vision / purpose that people could sign up to...

Really, that's all it takes. Perhaps we should boil this down to just a single sentence to start with, something everyone is happy to sign up to...?

Then we can split out into self managed groups, to refine "Governance", "systems architecture" but whilst (at least!?) working under the unifying banner of a shared purpose.

Hi all, it's really great to see everyone poping into the conversation carrying all their experiences and good will in create this common movement. very well described @connorturland , I recognize a lot of my personal experience in what you shared. And like the optimism it carries.
@olisb There's a lot of cummulated value in all this, all our works and experiences put together, is really overwhelming .
I see you strongly pushing to launch the CTA entity, I ask myself, isn't that what's already going on here? CTA or OAE or COSystem, OpenSystem ... whatever the entity the process seems the same to me , I don't think one is based on people and the other on code and processes. I beleive there's a lot of people behind the code in the OAE and as much code behind the people in the CTA, and I beleive all this is the same energy. One or the other, doesn't really make a difference. The important part is not in the WHO we are , but WHAT we are all doing and the most important part is , WHAT are we doing TOGETHER ?
@bobhaugen It's more important to see what we have in common, than listing our differences, don't you think ?
Based on that, a real ecosystem lives on real exchange processes ( as described in all those rich theoritical documents ). The Will has been around for a long time in various forms and places, and the reality is, it's far from easy to implement.
If we're all here again, i guess we can happily say we're all dedicated (or addicted) to a common vision.

To keep it as simple as possible, For the moment i think OAE is the right (simple, open and neutral) entity to carry all this. I find we loose a lot of energy around branding, the most important is the Flow and the Energy we all create together.

@bobhaugen It's more important to see what we have in common, than listing our differences, don't you think ?

Sorry about that. I was trying to explain why I thought it was a really bad idea to try to have a revived CTA try to manage OAE work.

Beyond that, I participated enthusiastically in both CTA and OAE, just doing very different things.

practical matter:
It would be great to get more of the 123 members of this groups to share some thoughts in this thread - and on the vote. Does anyone know how we can 'ping' them to let them know we'd like to hear from them - apart from @mentioning them one by one, which seems silly/like lots of work!?

Also, on the vote itself, I have tried clicking "REMIND" for the undecided 25, but the page only loads about 10 of them and then has a "LOAD MORE" link, which doesn't work for me... - any ideas?

any ideas?

I would think that one excellent way to get your idea of a re-launch out into a large group that would be interested is to post it in the CTA itself. I'm not sure why you didn't go that route in the first place, actually. The CTA may have more to say about its own re-launch than the OAE. :wink:

where do you mean when you say "CTA itself"?

where do you mean when you say "CTA itself"?

https://www.hylo.com/c/collaborative-technology-alliance

(sorry should have linked)