Work and Play — Giogo e Gioco in the hills of Italy
It has been more than a decade since the idea of Meedan sprung from a conference room at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technology Institute. Shortly thereafter we began working on a social network for crowdsourced translation of Arabic and English language media, designing one of the web’s early social networks and developing one of the first hybrid translation platforms.
Amid the flotsam and jetsam of tech bubbles, revolutions, and other maladies of the heart we are, incredibly, still here, tinkering away on tools for making and sharing meaning on the global, multi-lingual internet.
Perhaps this fortuitous run owes some debt to the love of sentimental poetry and Om Kalthoum music which occurs at unnatural rates among Meedanis. Maybe this surfeit of nostalgia has mutated our genetics to the point that we look for and trust the meaning that emerges from serendipities more than the hard-coded analytics that reveal click-paths and conversion-rates.
Whatever the explanation, it is clear from the simple fact of our Checkdesk team and partner retreat last week in the tiny Italian village of Coldigioco, that our experiment called Meedan has transcended its beginnings and now simply exists as an engine of self-revealing serendipities, unbounded good vibes, verdicchio appreciation, and innovative colander dancing (this photo has been removed at the request of the colander dancer).
On the surface we chose to hold our 2015 Checkdesk meetings at the Osservatorio Geologico Coldigioco because it was an inexpensive, beautiful, and relatively central meeting point for our globally distributed team. Little did we expect that the story of the naming of Coldigioco would itself supply the missing metaphor to chart our organizational course for the next decade.
There are actually three relevant aspects of the place-name ‘Coldigico’ that contribute to the metaphor.
- The literal translation of the current Italian Coldigioco which means ‘hill of play’
- The history of the naming of the place which is a short lesson in the mechanics (politics) of linguistic evolution and the play between a spoken language and the written requirements of a bureaucracy
- The historical name of the place which was Coldigiogo (with a g) or ‘hill of the yoke’
If we think about networking and collaboration in the abstract it is hard to dismiss the yoke as the first technology for networking collaborative systems.
According to the good contributors over on the ‘yoke’ page on Wikipedia English, yoke derives from the Proto-Indo-European *yugóm (yoke), from verb *yeug- (join, unite).
“But, Ed,” you say, “the yoke is the symbol of servitude, bondage, forced labor and all the most negative aspects of collaboration.”
Which is why it is a fortunate thing that the learned engineers who were tasked with the duties of mapping (and naming) the remote villages of the rural Marche misunderstood the local dialect. For when they came to Coldigiogo to break bread and deploy their cartographic tools they assumed the locals were speaking the dialectical version of Gioco and so set into the historical records a new name for this village set on a yoke shaped ridge, turning hill of the yoke into hill of play. As our host, the great Geologist/Explorer/Folk Singer of the Marche Dr. Sandro Montari explains in the audio recording.
So, there we have it — our work to build better collaborative systems for work is an attempt to build the digital equivalent of a playful yoke — a tool we can use to help till the fields of the web with context, fact-checking, translation, and general sense-making. With the current state of the world as ample evidence that the best efforts of our political systems and ideologies have failed, perhaps we should turn away from the political struggles and just try to improve — make more humane, more playful — the systems we use to get work done.
Coldigioco in this regard serves as both a compass point and a fond memory as we set off on the next leg of the Checkdesk project — Andiamo, belli.
