Green Light Mock Exam & Quality Emergence (2)
Saturday, June 3rd, 2006Mock Exam
Yesterday I’ve passed for my mock exam. The mock exam is a half-way test to evaluate what I’ve done so far. Not passing would have meant not being able to do your exams in August.
Interesting remark by one of the teachers: Don’t people rather search on a topic/mission instead of a charity? For example, maybe I’m searching for a Yogyakarta help page and not for the page of an organization.
At the moment it’s ‘in the system’ to make that happen. If you have a personal page you can start a charity page. A charity page could link to other charities, so you could set up a charity page called Help Yogyakarta. Where the owner of the page writes about what charities are helping Yogyakarta and links to all the charities that have missions in helping Yogyakarta. This would then become a portal for this particular problem.
Semantics
I’d love to see this sort of self-organization emerge. And while I believe this is ‘in the system’, it does bring about a problem in semantics. Can I still call this a ‘Charity Page’? The Help Yogyakarta page has a mission for helping others, but it would only be a portal, not a charity by itself.
Do I want to design the site so that it is pointed out that you can build portals, or will that clutter the interface and the mental model people will need to build? It could be a layer for ‘expert users’ to discover. I could give people the option to set up a personal-, a charity- and a portal page. But I don’t want to pre-organize too much. If people find new ways to help others, I’d like Helpalot to be flexible enough to cope with that.
Network mechanisms
To explain further, I’m going to talk networks. Here’s the link to my earlier article on networks and emergence: Emergent quality