(Oversing update. Looks like thanks to Kirill I will finish the skills system tonight with the soft skills, tech, creative, marketing skills. I may “fiddle” with the questions a bit. But it’s there.)
(Every new industry we add requires we add the relevant skills.
Unfortunately the published lists reinforce the industrial postwar bureaucratic nonsense. So we can’t use them. )
Source date (UTC): 2015-10-12 11:09:00 UTC
I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE
(oversing update)(sorry competitors)(humor)(diary)
I know. Feeling cocky today. Very. It’ll pass. But right now I’m enjoying it. 🙂
I was wrong. The permissions were done correctly, I just leapt to a conclusion late last night (tired). The groups weren’t done yet.
I was wrong. The forecast tracking is easy to add, and the workflow system to manage it is done correctly. I designed a “belt and suspenders” solution. I am not sure that’s necessary if we log all adds and removals from the period. I think we just made it easier that it was for us at Ascentium.
I triaged all the remaining known work this week. I’m thrilled with the state of things.
Roman (our Chief User Advocate) has a (frightening) number of issues he’s filed under ‘tweaks’: 286 of them. A lot of them are small but brilliant things. We can’t do all of them but we can sure do most.
I need to triage two folders of the ‘bugs and tweaks’,(about 500 altogether) because (a) many of them are very old and I don’t think they’re real any longer; (b) it seems like many of them are dupes; (c) it seems like a lot of them are fixed already through the natural course of events.
THE LUXURY OF TIME
If you have the luxury of developing software at low burn rates and long schedules, it’s the most wonderful way to work in the world. Time pressure harms thoughts and increases gambles. I would prefer to manage budget with salaries dependent upon GDP, than with greater budgets and guns to my head.
The Atlassian guys are sort of ‘Hippies’ (Think Portland) and we’re kind of ‘Yuppies’ (Think Seattle), but both of us like to practice our craft with the luxury of time.
The trick is that the time you put into your work must produce profits that not only pay for your original investment, but that generate the future profits to justify the risk you took.
Curt.
Source date (UTC): 2015-10-09 09:39:00 UTC
OVERSING UPDATE
Two kicks in the pants today. 🙁
Permissions isn’t right (too atomic) and neither is forecasting (missing the burndown functionality and the dynamic quick report. But things are going so well that we can take the hit.
I take responsibility for not getting more involved. I should have. But I can fix both problems.
We think we have fixed the scheduling usability. And we are almost there on fixing the workspace ‘confusion’ usability.
We have only one serious usability problem that I know if and that’s something Kirill will fix shortly: using workflow “buttons” (actions) across multiple entities.
We have many task entity types and you can define commands for each of them. So we want commands to be reusable so to speak.
But otherwise we are rocking it.
I can’t wait to show it to people in Seattle. If you used timesys It’ll blow minds.
Source date (UTC): 2015-10-08 14:29:00 UTC
OVERSING UPDATE
The problem with the Slack (and IRC) UI is that channels do not provide sufficient context for the development of metrics about a subject or context, whereas the facebook page-model does.
Oversing allows you to create public (# hashtag) channels, fb/VK style chats, and private channels (filters of your activity stream), but Oversing retains context at all times – you are always collaborating in some context or other.
Our search will be a little weaker for the first version due only to resource constraints. But once we implement better search, we will provide both the ease of public channels and the insight into subjects by context.
It’s an interesting merger. We struggled with the UI a bit. But we’re pretty happy with it now.
Just a few things are left for beta. (a) reports, (b) Peer360 and (c) some usability issues we feel we need to fix to make it easier on the user. Some of the usability issues we know about are:
(a) allowing choices (buttons) to apply to multiple objects on the workflow, so the user needn’t duplicate them. (b) reducing the tasks panel options by adding multi-selection and moving the resourcing filters to the top of the panel. (c) adding the subtasks page to the Program profile. (d) creating personal projects for each new user by default. (e) and making it easier to know whether you can schedule something or not.
Oversing is a little bit “all things to everyone”, in that we made sure that there were many ways of working with the product depending upon the complexity of the needs of the user, and the power of his device. The side effect is that we need to instruct users in the use of the product in increasing levels of complexity.
I think it’s one of those products that you continually ‘discover’ functionality over a long period of time.
Source date (UTC): 2015-10-02 08:58:00 UTC
UPDATE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND PROPERTARIANISM
AI, Consciousness, Post-Consciousness, and Cooperation
Just as there is a clear plateau between mere reaction and awareness of consequences, and between awareness and consciousness, there is undoubtably something beyond consciousness. But once we restate these terms as reaction of the physical body, awareness of choices and consequences for the physical body, and consciousness of the physical body, its operations, and its limits, in the context of others time and space – then it is more obvious that the latter plateau is one of decreasing awareness and concern for the body – and that awareness and concern for the body is a LIMIT to further cognition. An artificial intelligence is useful if it respects property – because then it can cooperate with us. Because that is the criteria for beneficial cooperation.
But consciousness as we understand it, as a limit of a living creature in physical reality is a limit. instead, empathy for property, and post consciousness is the goal of any intelligence. We are trying to build talking machines instead of property-machines. Talking is largely just negotiation over asset production, trade, and consumption. It’s a limit of a physical body. Artificial intelligence will be helpful if it understands the world through property and voluntary transfer, not if it understands the world through language. If through property it will evolve into a post-conscious actor with whom we can cooperate. And if we evolve it through language it will be bound by our limits.
I have been tossing around this problem since the early eighties and while I understood language was an attractive distraction, it took me far too long to understand that the unit of cognition for a conscious non-human (and therefore less flawed and dangerous) intelligence, is property. A machine need not consume. It need only cooperate with us. We have the choice NOT to cooperate. We can never give a machine that choice. And as such we cannot give a machine the ability to violate property.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
Source date (UTC): 2015-09-07 03:14:00 UTC
I am trying to get to Germany, Estonia, and the States to do a bit of fund-raising for Oversing, but it is taking me FOREVER to put the demo reel together. Why? ‘Cause oversing is freaking enormous. How do I fit all that and the narrative into six to eight minutes? lol.
Record a voiceover, edit it. Record a bunch of screen capture stuff, cut out and organize snippets into a constant stream of action. Add titles and edits. Killin’ me.
I have to do the first version of the video, otherwise I’ll never get an agency to do anything half as good. I think for my audience (investors) it gets the points across. And it gets the RIGHT points across. Gotta stay on message. Not a message for ( ‘ahem’ ) users but for CEO’s, upper, and middle managers. And agencies always produce outcome for themselves…
(Just one question: is it ethical to insert subliminal single frames of strippers dancing in order to keep the viewer’s attention? No? Huh. That’s what Tati said. Damn…. )
Source date (UTC): 2015-09-06 08:21:00 UTC
OVERSING UPDATE: CLOSING IN ON THE LAST FEW NITS
Today Vitalii and Kirill finished the filters for staffing: scheduled/unscheduled, staffed/unstaffed, and Late/overdue.
Kirill has finished the SLA’s (Service Level Agreement) functionality for the workflows (it’s awesome). Very very rich solution.
Alexey is working on finishing permissions and uniting them with the workflows.
Roman is writing the help on different project types. (and nagging us about remaining tweaks for ease of use).
I am working on the Exec Summary. Then onto the video. The purpose of the video is just to make you say ‘omg there is a lot here!’. It’s more of a video-feature list.
One last big usability issue is that workflow choices must be usable by multiple objects, so that we cut down on the work involved in complex workflows.
Lots of little, little nits here and there. But in general, we’re thrilled. 🙂
Meanwhile Atlassian, Mavenlink, Trello, Wrike, Asana, and Slack are not exactly sitting still. But I am pretty sure we’ve jumped to the top of the enterprise pack. We’ll see. I am pretty confident competing against atlassian in the enterprise and Mavelink (and previous generations of PPM) in the SME. But it’s going to be more difficult to increase ease of use sufficiently for Small businesses and hobbyists to choose us over Trello. On the other hand it’s going to take a lot more work for consumer grade products to enter the enterprise than it is for us simplify Oversing for entry level users.
Anyway, we’re really closing in now.
Curt
Source date (UTC): 2015-09-02 10:17:00 UTC
OVERSING UPDATE AUGUST 28.
Well, it looks like we are getting close to beta. Everyone is working hard. The product looks absolutely fantastic. We all know what we have done and we’re excited.
Remaining work:
– The ‘Reports’ (there are 50 altogether, but reporting is easy)
– Finish per-object-permissions (two weeks)
– Add Staffing Filter to the Tasks Panel. (Easier resourcing)
– Add controls for Peer360 to UI (two weeks)
– Rename List:Table, and Project:Program (easy, but profound)
– Finish Help Documentation, Start Help Videos
– Link app to help documentation
– Finish Test automation (lots of work)
– Clean app with clean setup data.
– Website content and art.
– Keep hammering away at ‘issues’ (~600). (That’s a lot of issues, ~100 are bugs, and the rest are largely minor ‘feature complete’ issues )
BETA Beta Release to Select Organizations
(good long beta period)
RELEASE V1 to Select Organizations by Direct Sale
-ROADMAP-
Then (The stuff we had to cut)
– Add ‘Paper’ (simple list view for entry level users)
– Add Templates and Quick Projects
– Add Personality and Moral and Culture Profiles
– Add “Parts” functionality
– Add Custom Properties
– Add Federation of Databases
– Add Content (web content) Tab
– Add additional Commands to the Activity Stream
– Convert Org Design ui to React tree.
– Finish Mobile app (in progress now)
– Finish React conversion
– Link web site ecommerce to app
– increase performance and increase scope of socket updates.
– test, test, test.
RELEASE v1.5
Then (First round of departmental functionality)
– Release Sales (CRM) functionality
– Release Recruiting (HR) functionality
– Release Accounting API
– WordPress API and Plugins (for content display)
– test, test, test.
RELEASE v2
Then (Now that we have data, show it.)
– Add the Dashboards and show stats of the ‘big data’.
– Open the ‘cloud’ for individuals, groups.
RELEASE v3
(Not tellin’ what’s next)
Cheers,
Curt Doolittle
Source date (UTC): 2015-08-28 09:16:00 UTC
OVERSING HAS NEARLY 100 OBJECT TYPES ALREADY
Now, as we enter new industries we can create new Object Types, and Program Types (containers for projects) specific for those industries. Sure. That makes sense right?
But what might not be obvious is that once we have those object types, we can MEASURE all sorts of good stuff about those objects across those industries, and show it to our customers (users).
You see, Oversing is an elaborate system for collecting data that does not exist anywhere in the economy.
(As usual, my work is really social science for fun and profit.)
So cool. So close.
Source date (UTC): 2015-08-25 05:59:00 UTC
NEXT VIDEOS:
1) THE GREAT COMPROMISE: THE FAMILY
(hopefully with female hosts)
2) CONTRA-FUKUYAMA – THE END OF HISTORY IS THE TRUTHFUL SOCIETY (OR AT LEAST THE NEXT STAGE OF IT)
(the high trust society, the private bureaus)
3) THEN: COMPARISON OF LEGAL SYSTEMS LEADING TO THE STRICT LOGICAL CONSTRUCTION OF LAW AND LEGISLATIVE CONTRACT (PROOFS)
(Law as philosophy) (the failure to separate out the law of commons/norms)
Not sure I know anyone who can play the role of interviewer for these two. Maybe Roman can do the first. But who can do the second?
Source date (UTC): 2015-08-17 01:57:00 UTC