I strongly support your position on Hypertext, Al... in fact, when I first
encountered it with Ted Nelson back in the 70's, we viewed as a form of
"hierarachy busting".. so it seems strange to me that it has got itself
labelled as being hierarchical.
Back in 88 in Adelaide we created a Hypertext editor called IdeaBase which
also had different views over the organization... i) plan --for projects
and presentations, including courseware, ii) pad -- for arbitrary network
structures, iii) trees -- for hierarchies, and iv) associative --
automatic keywording in the style of the old Community Memory. It was
attractive as an educational tool for supporting writing, and I used
extensively for my own work, but at the time we lacked the resources to
market it or even keep it uptodate.
But I would like to raise another issue which is embedded in your
comments, and an active concern of mine at present as a designer of
modelling software. That is, in my judgment an important quality of
software is its balance between a) the sense of "open-endedness" which
free networks gives You, and b) the use of structural restrictions which
give You a handle on complexity. Anyone interested in the network
organization of teams would I believe encounter this dynamic balance as
well.
What is the best way to structure our organizations which enables Us to a)
enable various network/team structures to emerge with their concomitant
freedom, while balancing b) to usefully handle complexity so that
navigation and management issues can be handled effectively? It seems to
require either a multi-dimensional approach or some structure which gives
Us the best of both worlds ?
-- Doug Seeley: Compuserve 100433.133 Fax: +41 22 756 3957 (Geneva) "Are there places where networks do not exist?" Doug Seeley <100433.133@compuserve.com>