Democratic collaborative thinking is enabled by Thortspace
Working on the surface of spheres ends linearity and enables Thought Democracy
“For Cusa, nothing is at the centre of the universe, which means that everything is at the centre — from it’s own perspective. Even those stars that we see at the outer edge of the universe occupy the centre of creation from their own vantage point and see us at the outskirts. Thus there is neither centre nor circumference, but a shifting series of cosmic configurations depending on the observer’s point of view.” ~ From of ‘Many lives of the Multiverse’ by Prof. Mary-Jane Rubenstein. pp78
There may be many organisational circumstances that call for dictatorship. If I was on a sailing boat in a storm I would do whatever the captain told me to.
But more complex organisational questions such as where do we take our business next may benefit from a more democratic collaborative thinking. How can we achieve this?
Perhaps we could do our collaborative thinking in a google doc, in a facebook comment thread or hierachical discussion thread? All of these are in way collaborative. Perhaps we could even use a conventional mind-map.
Below is an example of 3 friends discussing the merits (or otherwise) of fake Pooh and Piglet quotes. Please excuse the bad grammar (y’know how facebook is) ! We join the discussion part way through:
Possibly we can see this as a good example of a conversation that is going nowhere. Each of the speaker’s have their opinions, and value somethings and don’t value other things. The conversation progresses linearly from a starting point to a finishing point. Facebook supports a single level of comment threading, but that is all. And having followed the conversation through, we are left with very little. We followed a single path of thinking from a beginning to an end.
Google Docs
Here is bit of a redacted negotiation document that was collaboratively worked on in Google docs.
Google docs enables collaborators to comment on sections of a document, as well as collaboratively edit the document. You can see examples of comments appearing in the right side-bar.
Again what I would like to draw attention to is the linearity imposed by the document structure that the thinking is required to fit within.
Conventional Collaborative Mind-maps and Concept maps
Here is an example of a conventional mind-map built in Coggle, which does support collaboration.
Such conventional mind-maps and concept-maps overcome the linearity of comment threads (such as Facebook) and collaborative documents (such as google docs) but they still impose structural limitations, the consequence of which is to fail to deliver on Thought Democracy.
Because these conventional mind-maps work on flat spaces, the structure of the flat space restricts the thinking that can happen within it. Flat spaces have centres — places that are structurally more important.
So how can we achieve Thought Democracy?
So how can we achieve Thought Democracy? The answer lies in Spheres. Why spheres?
Because the surface of a sphere has no centre. It has no structurally priveleged location. Every point on the surface of a sphere has the same structural priority — that is to say no more priority than any other point on the surface of a sphere.
So by doing our collaborative thinking on the surfaces of spheres, we are both ending linearity and enabling Thought Democracy amongst collaborators.
My point is that spherical surfaces enable democractic collaborative thinking — in a way it is similar idea to how round tables enable the collaborative killing of dragons.
To find out more about Thortspace and how Thortspace enables democratic collaborative thinking, you can read more about it here:
