Hi Alan

I have to admit I was struggling conceptually with designing that activity for the TLRP categories-development yesterday, but I think I'm finally starting to understand what it means and how it can be addressed usefull in software.

What's initially confusing about it, of course, is that the teask is *about* categories, and will also *use* categories

so there are categories as categories, and also as discussion points

I got tied in knots trying to hack a quick way to enable them to blog about the categories freely, as well as growing discussion threads within each category-as-discussion-topic

But now I'm starting to see how we might approch this more generally as an enhancement to knotes itself.

Background: remember in the old REM / Resource Locator / IMS metadata work days, that I always used to go on about the key issue in building useful repositories is the social negotiation of shared categorical / taxonomic terms and structures? There are several sources of tension which make this a very interesting problem

tension 1 : freedom-to-tag versus ease-of-search :

• it has to be easy and natural for editors, catalogers and plain old users to describe their content
• but it also can clutter the space of existing categories if that i totally unconstrained - lots of semi-synonymous or seldon-used categories emerge
• and at base, we tag so that others can find, so it is a social, communicative (or marketing :o) act to add categories to content
• and thus the requirements of those searching for content or resources has to constrain the categorical conventions

tension 2: expressive of special interest groups versus interoperability and global searchability

this is basically what killed the Learning Oblects Metadata

• each country, state, subject-area etc has its own peculiar way in which it thinks categorically about resources - eg different systems of educational level or specific content area
• but LOM tried to be global, and thus every local content-tagger was flummoxed by meaningless distinctions and terms

In the latter days of the resource-locator project, I put a lot of work into trying to embed discussion and negotiation and agreement within the taxonomic systems. But at that time we lacked a good enough discussion system to make this work... it went nowhere

AHA! But now we have an open-architecture discussion system to play with! It should be possible to make some advances, especially if we can identify and address some simple cases with simple steps forward.

What I'm thinking we should do soonish is add the ability to discuss and agree categories *as categories* within knotes

In other words, each category automatically gets to act as if it was a potential trackback recipient in itself, and we provide an interface to make new blog entries or discussion items which 'link' to the category itself.

(All this needs is a special URL which will open the interface for annotating and discussing that category... easy to do)

If that were the case, we would not need to make special discussion items to 'represent' the categories when we want to discuss them

And the process would be available in all blogs, for all categories.

This puts off the thorny question of how to agree the categories, though we could also put up a voting interface?

And more interstingly, what to do when an issue spans more than one category - as will often be the case - perhaps cross-trackbacking and spawning new 'category-agreement-issue' types of discussion topic/poll would do.... there is loads of room to experiment.

ill sign off now so I can take your call :o)

cheers

Mike