Way-New Collaboration

May 25, 2008 by Chris Peters

Update: I wrote this blog post because I was fired up. Of course, I realize that you're looking at the blog about Rails for ColdFusion. I was merely trying to get you to see the significance of what we're doing here. Apologies if anyone thought that I was slamming the project. It really is a great thing!

I've been addicted to TED Talks for the past couple years. Recently, I caught up with a talk by author Howard Rheingold, called Way-new collaboration. (For those of you in RSS Land, click through to see the video.)

We're at an interesting time for the ColdFusion community. Unless we start opening up and collaborating more, we're going to get swallowed up by the competition. I know that we're all used to hearing that the sky is falling in CF land. But this is something that we need to do.

Where's our WordPress? Where's our Rails? It's all up to you to get this moving. Volunteering is about more than writing code. How can you contribute?

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John Farrar's Gravatar
So... how would we would turn the power over to statistics gathered by administrators. And we we would all trust these statistics like we trust the statistics of the gulf war? (Or would it take some great tragedy like 911 to move us beyond validating information and to act rashly when in reality we just don't know?) He sighted that early cultures the administrators had the power. Egypt was an example of this and soon the Pharos became the gods. I am for human equality... but how to exercise this by a culture is the bigger struggle. Optimistic presentations of statistical implementations we have never tested on a global scale are bound to sound good next to the bad. When they don't work... what is the outflow? Look at our educational situation just in America and you can see we cannot even solve a struggle on that level.

In summary, the motives are great... and optimism should not be the basis for action. We need to know what we are doing rather than trading a faulty system for a scheme. I am sure another good debater could come out with a Marxist theory, explain why it failed and talk most of us to trying that also. We could reject it because of fear or accept it because of fear. Or we could move based on knowledge and walk before we run. I would say though I love technology it tends to make us ride before we walk. The result is we neither learn how to walk or run.

# Posted By John Farrar | 6/30/08 10:45 AM

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