Group Karma++

It's a great feeling being in a state of flow. Sometimes you can get into a state of flow with a group of people, a kind of 'group flow'. This is where the team is working well and everyone is excitedly making progress while the technology is supporting their communication and ability to stay productive. I've been watching developments in the Perl6 Pugs project and the IRC log shows moments when the group hit productivity gold and achieved group flow.

One of the preconditions for flow is feeling progress being made. In the Perl6 pugs IRC log this is achieved by giving each other karma++. As you make commits to the pugs project you get a small pat on the back in the form of another point of karma++ - the more contributions you make the more karma++ you collect. You can see progress being made as the karma++ points tally up in the log.

I've been designing the scoring system for The Goo and I think karma++ is a really important part of feeling progress being made. But to help achieve flow we also need small mentally manageable tasks - atomic todos. So to help the system converge at smaller task sizes a user receives karma++ when they create a task - this should motivate them to create todos, and they receive karma++ when they complete a task too. When you view a person's context you see what channels they are tuned into and how much karma++ they have.

Sensors vs Censors

I'm reading Marvin Minsky's, "The Emotion Machine" and he makes a strong case for the role of "censors" in expert cognition.

Experts can arrive at the correct answer quicker. But how? Minsky suggests it's because the expert brain blocks unhelpful information and is not slowed down by useless processing. He refers to these automatic blocking agents as "censors". Censors, he suggests, free the expert brain to think about the important stuff. An expert learns from the mistakes of the past and censors help to avoid them in the future.

So far The Goo has been sucking in perceptrons via positive "sensors" but there is also a role for "censors" too. Spamassassin, for example, does a great job of filtering emails before they become email perceptrons. Spamassassin acts as a blocking censor.

But actively blocking events before they become perceptrons solves only part of the problem. There are still too many perceptrons coming in to stay in a state of "flow". They need to be channelled in light of your current mental context to prevent needless context switching.

So channelling perceptrons is the next step ...