The Nooron Whitepaper

1. What is Nooron?
2. The Argument for Nooron
   1. Interesting Problems
   2. Flawed Democratic Institutions
   3. Metaproblems Need Metasolutions
   4. Solution Cultivation
   5. Nurturing Noosphere
   6. How Nooron Relates
   7. Problems Nooron Addresses
3. How Does Nooron Work?
   1. Basic Facility
   2. An Example
   3. Viewing the Model
   4. Display Functions
   5. Filter Functions
   6. Immediate Design Goals
   7. What do we see? How do we use it?
4. The Technology of Nooron
5. The Scope of Nooron
6. References

What is Nooron?

Nooron is Web software that enables people to collaboratively organize and analyze ideas. It is an open, computer-aided think-tank. It provides a framework within which participants present ideas, connect them to other ideas, devise criteria for idea evaluation, evaluate ideas and view the ideas in the system in various ways. Rather like internet newsgroups, there are different forums which use the engine to deal with different topics.

Nooron is a new technology that lets people in an organization capture, store, explore, visualize, filter and improve even complex ideas. Nooron is 'knowledge based' meaning that it uses Knowledge Representation technology to store the richly complex and interrelated information in people's heads. Nooron supports the capture (or importation) of conventional facts and figures and then augments it with a framework of criteria according to which people perform evaluations. The resulting storehouse of assertions and opinions about them can then be navigated, filtered and visualized in new ways. The effect is that the 'good stuff' rises to 'the top' and is either deemed good enough or inspires even better 'stuff'.

Nooron is intended to be a suite of free software clients and servers which together form a system for magnifying collective human intelligence. It is intended to help a small team work smarter or a large population to collaboratively manage, visualize, filter, discover, navigate and improve their combined knowledge. It is designed to integrate users and their collective knowledge into an evolving system capable of improving ideas and even the software used to manage those ideas.

The Argument for Nooron

Interesting Problems

There are a number of thoroughly modern problems:

1. structural unemployment
2. global warming
3. nuclear proliferation
4. nanotechnology
5. antibiotic resistant bacteria
6. AIDS
7. world population explosion

These challenges share certain characteristics. They are all:

1. potentially catastrophic global issues
2. scientific or technological in either origin or solution
3. sociological or psychological in either origin or solution
4. complicated by competing political, ideological, financial and religious interests
5. doubly difficult in that solutions are often as problematic as the problems themselves

Flawed Democratic Institutions

One might hope that the democracies would be able to handle such situations. However, democratic institutions have their own serious flaws:

1. economic and ideological interests distort the rationality of decisionmaking
2. the information that voters (and more powerful decisionmakers) have access to is always incomplete and usually colored by the interests which generated it
3. even when a decision isn't bought or misguided, the background story -- the reasoning, the issues -- is largely inaccessible to the population at large
4. governments are encouraged to make decisions based on short-term considerations
5. game-theoretic weaknesses in electoral systems (party discipline, synchronized terms, lack of recall, non-proportional representation, etc.)

Metaproblems need Metasolutions

Let us call this ensemble of problems and barriers to their solution the "World Problematique"^[COR] and let us recognize that if solutions exist it is likely that:

1. they will be complex
2. they will require global coordination
3. they will require very solid analysis
4. people of all sorts will need to have some understanding of both the problems and the solutions
5. they will change people's lives

Solution Cultivation

Clearly, no individual has the solution to any of these problems. More important is to cultivate the solutions. The following principles are derived from cybernetics, evolutionary theory, artificial life research, ecology and modern programming practice.

1. Global Mind (Noosphere) is the perceptual and conceptual scale at which the World Problematique is child's play.
2. Emergent phenomena break through into new orders of complexity and sophistication.
3. Emergent phenomena regulate subsidiary phenomena.
4. Memes can be seen as thoughts moving though Noosphere.
5. Software is a very powerful meme vector because it does stuff (such as let you see things in a new way) and doesn't degrade when copied.
6. Free software (when the source code is available) is subject to evolution because it can mutate (have new features added or bugs fixed) and is subject to selection (one version over another or one package over another).
7. Self-organizing phenomena don't have organizers as failure points.
8. It is possible for designs to have openness to evolution built in.

Nurturing Noosphere

The mission of the Nooron Project is to encourage the development of Noosphere or its practical equivalent by:

• developing open source software which adds new "lobes" to the Global Brain
• developing open source software for collaborative work which incorporates openness to evolution and elaboration into its operation and design
• developing open source software which is memetically robust
• developing open source software which directly addresses barriers to solutions addressing the World Problematique
• designing the seeds for emergent phenomena that address the World Problematique
• conducting research into the design of emergent phenomena
• promoting the pursuit of such goals by others
• promoting the concept of Global Mind

How Nooron Relates

A freely distributed, knowledge-based, online, distributed, conferencing system augmented with criteria and evaluations provided by a large population of users could be the basis for a self-organizing system capable of fostering the evolution of ideas. We at Emergence by Design are interested in living in a world where ideas get better, and better ideas are more influential than worse ones.

Nooron is designed from the ground up to be a tool that any number of people can use to perform intellectual work together. Nooron is a container into which people can externalize their knowledge, opinions, perspectives and even feelings. Nooron is a set of tools to filter, organize and portray this information in very flexible and configurable ways. Nooron is a new way for people to think -- together.

Nooron is designed to handle large populations of collaborating users. There are three major classes of difficulty associated with large public information spaces:

Availability

Nooron addresses the availability challenge by having information compartmentalized into separate knowledge bases, by having knowledge bases automatically mirrorable across knowledge servers and by having the authoritative role transferable between Knowledge Repositories.

Navigability

Nooron addresses the navigability challenge by organizing information associatively so that one can follow all manner of associative connections including at least the following and their inverses: from general to specific, from class to instance, from creation to creator, from evaluation to evaluator and many other connections.

Signal-to-noise Ratio

Nooron addresses the signal-to-noise challenge by providing filtering capabilities based on criteria and evaluations and by permitting the specification of whose evaluations to heed.

Problems Nooron Addresses

• Large numbers of people participating in detailed technical debate or complex design traditionally require highly formal social arrangements to avoid chaos. (e.g. legislatures, courts, standards bodies, the peer review system, commissions)
• The significant social, political, financial and time investments required to initiate and sustain these decision and design processes limit the number, quality and timeliness of such efforts. (e.g. bills per legislative session, witnesses and arguments before a court, proposals for inclusion in a standard, user interface design details in piece of software, articles in a scientific journal)
• Typically, it is a rapidly developing self-organizing process driven by tight feedback loops which provoke the formal social process. The formal processes are often unable to match the pace of the problems they address. (e.g. biotechnology, reproductive technologies, species loss, molecular engineering, deforestation)
• Ultimately, frailties in the formal social systems result in suboptimal decisions or designs. (e.g. the Vietnam war, Rio Summit, large software projects in general, emissions standards)

How Does Nooron Work?

Nooron was originally conceived of as a tool for working with State-Transition models--scenarios. When viewed this way, the "ideas" in the model are "states of the world" and the "links" are "transitions" between the states. To extend the scenario analogy, these are just "situations" and "events". Since the notion of ideas and links between ideas is so fundamental, it shouldn't be suprising that there are a large number of conceptual frameworks which could be modelled using this system. (Vertices and edges, graphs, digraphs, trees, flowcharts, life cycles, food chains, entity relationship diagrams, choose your own adventure, etc.)

Basic Facility

Lets get detailed. Within each "Forum" the basic facility works by letting participants add:

1. states
2. transitions between states
3. criteria for evaluating states and transitions
4. numerical evaluations of states and transitions with respect to said criteria
5. annotations to all of the above (including other annotations)

An Example

Lets flesh this out with a wee example from a very simple "scenario" Forum called "Origins of World War One"

• states
  1. Archduke Ferdinand in motorcade: August 1914
  2. World War I in full swing
• transitions
  1. Anarchist gunman shoots Ferdie with pistol [connects state-1 to state-2]
• criteria
  • historical accuracy (in percent)
  • level of detail (from 0 to 1)
  • time (dates with error range)
• evaluations
  1. Susan thinks state-1 is 30% historically accurate
  2. Tim thinks transition-1 is 100% historically accurate
  3. Betty thinks transition-1 happened April, 1914 (+/- 2 months)
  4. Clive thinks transition-1 happened April 17th, 1914 (+/- 2 days)
• annotations
  • John says about transition-1 "maybe this was the trigger, but there must have been more to the story"
  • Brewster says about state-1 "wasn't Ferdie in a carriage?"
  • Betty says about state-2 "this is pretty vague"
  • Elvira says about evaluation-4 "How can Clive be so certain yet so wrong?"

Viewing the Model

Of course, participants can view their collective handiwork in a variety of formats:

• 1-dimension: hypertext (HTML)
• 2-dimensions: pictures (GIF or EPS)
• 3-dimensions: models (VRML)
• 4-dimensions: movies (MPEG)

Display Functions

There's more. Nooron is architected to evolve. Programmers on the Net can add new ways to display criteria:

• color
• diameter
• texture
• sidedness
• x-, y-, or z-location
• transparency
• ...what ever else they come up with

Filter Functions

Programmers can also add filter functions so participants can say things like "Show only..."

• things I've added
• things Alice, Bob or I have added
• things that at least 20 people have evaluated for plausability
• things that only I think are plausible
• things that no one has evaluated for environmental impact
• things that are considered less than 20% plausible by at least 10 people
• ...or anything else they dream up

Immediate Design Goals

Version 0.1 -- full 1 dimensional functionality

Using only HTML as a UI the system shall support:

1. addition by users of
   • states
   • transitions
   • criteria
   • evaluations
   • annotations
2. addition by programmers of
   • display functions
   • filter functions

Version 0.2 -- 2 dimensional display

Version 0.3 -- 3 dimensional display

What do we see? How do we use it?

Live charts, graphs, networks, flowcharts, diagrams and automatically formatted text flow naturally out of the knowledge. The content of these views is easily tailored by each of us via filters and mappings to depict particular perspectives on the knowledge. These depictions are saveable, shareable and subject to evolution -- just as the ideas are -- by being enjoyed, recommended and improved by others. We're even able to evolve world views: collections of filters and lenses that can be used to view different knowledge bases; to bring a familiar perspective to bear on new data or fresh perspectives on the familiar. We'll find like minds. We'll find foreign ones. We will discover consensus. We will accelerate the evolution of ideas.

It will feel like playing with an intelligent graphical toy.

The Technology of Nooron

Here are the main technological features of Nooron. The Nooron research and development effort consists of developing a free implementation of each of the following technologies (several of which are quite unique in the world), but the overarching technological challenge is precisely to combine the following features into an efficient and effective system.

Knowledge Representation

By using this extremely powerful technique from the artificial intelligence community Nooron will eventually be able to store just about any kind of concept, claim, statement or datum conceivable. Knowledge Representation means Nooron starts off as a general-purpose container for ideas and consequently a platform for nearly any kind of application.

Criteria and Evaluations

The essential Nooron feature is that entities (ideas, facts, claims) in the system are able to be evaluated by users according to any criterion which is applicable to entities of that type. This is a profound capability, because the resulting collection of evaluations can be used both to filter what is seen or to guide how things are seen. So finding the 'good stuff', the new stuff, or any other kind of stuff becomes easy. Notice how people filtering ideas based on evaluations constitutes a variety of 'artificial selection' (because it is applied by intelligent human agents) which is analogous to the natural selection pressure applied to species competing for a niche. Criteria and Evaluations establish Nooron not only as a tool for exploring the space of ideas, but also as a system for comparing their fitness.

Versioning

By making it possible for versions or 'mutations' of ideas to be created by its users and then compared against the other versions of that idea, Nooron makes it possible for the expression of individual ideas to undergo a process of refinement nicely analogous to that which genes undergo. The presence of a variety of differing expressions (versions) of each idea makes it feasible to view a forum in the fashion most appropriate at the moment. Users could just specify that each idea be represented by whatever version is, for example; clearest, shortest, most accurate, funniest, or most understandable to Russians. Versioning works in concert with Criteria and Evaluations and the 'artificial selection' pressure that critical human minds can apply to improve the quality of the ideas in Nooron. Versioning makes Nooron into a system for the evolution of ideas.

Depictions

When evaluations and other information about frames are mapped onto the various characteristics (x-position, y-position, line thickness, border color, font face, etc.) of a diagram (such as a scatter plot or a flowchart or most other kinds of info-graphic) it is possible to coherently present a huge amount of information to the user. Since depictions themselves can be easily created, saved, shared, evaluated and consequently evolved, they become powerful tools for letting people explore, recommend and consider diverse perspectives on shared knowledge.

Distributed Knowledge Architecture

Nooron as described above is useful for small numbers of users working on private projects. It would clearly be desireable for the power of Nooron to be applicable 'in the large'. To deal with large numbers (either of users, forums or ideas in each project) it is necessary for Nooron to flexibly access more knowledge than is practical to store on an individual machine. Its Distributed Knowledge Architecture (a scheme rather like a knowledge-based DNS with mirroring and failover) makes Nooron into a scalable system fit for managing the very largest projects.

Extensible Architecture

To make it possible for Nooron to present specialized information to specialists in familiar ways it is necessary for Nooron to be extensible. It is important that it be easy to add new graphing modes, logic or data entry widgets and have them be automatically download-able when they are needed. Again, as with most Nooron components, these extensions can have criteria and evaluations applied to them and are consequently subject to evolutionary pressure. A standards-based extensible architecture makes Nooron into a general purpose platform for application delivery.

Open Source Licensing

To make it practical and feasible for programmers to volunteer to add features to Nooron, even such elementary things as new diagram styles, it is necessary for the programmers to be able to have confidence that their work, though (probably) unpaid will at least be appreciated and not 'stolen' from them by being made some license holders property. It is for these reasons (and many other excellent ones) that making Nooron a piece of freeware with an aggressively free license such as the GPL is prudent. Making Nooron freeware gives programmers good reasons to contribute, including: knowledge that their work has lasting relevance, give them a way to do 'good work', provide a venue for achieving peer recognition, etc.

The Scope of Nooron

Will Nooron provoke the creation of new ideas?

Yes. Early prototypes were effective brainstorming tools, as more features become available it is clear that Nooron will become even more effective in this regard.

Will Nooron accelerate the refinement of ideas?

Yes. It would be very surprising if people (who already refine ideas using negligable software support) were not able to do so even faster with the explicit support for evolution which Nooron offers.

Will Nooron make it easier for people to understand the big picture better?

It's a marvel that anyone at all grasps the richness of our extraordinarily complex world. For the first time, people will be able to see the 'big picture' to say nothing about focusing on its details, seeing how it's changing, contributing to its accuracy and so much more.

Will Nooron make it easier for consensus to be discovered?

To the extent that people don't understand the same things, consensus is virtually impossible. Perhaps there are fields of study where there is already enough factual information and the only barrier to a practical consensus is the difficulty people have acquiring an overview of the field. People with unusual ideas will have every opportunity to clearly support their claims. Existing techniques for structured argumentation can be put into practice within Nooron.

Will Nooron permit people to coordinate their behaviour any better?

Many people are hesitant about taking action when they still have what they consider to be reasonable questions about the specifics of a situation. If Nooron facilitates consensus, it might be able to facilitate coordinated action as well. Since Nooron is knowledge-based, virtually any kind of information may be modeled in it, including already well understood domains such as project management. Such project planning therefore inherits all the capabilities of Nooron such as being multiuser, providing flexible visualization or textual reporting as required and being grounded in an evolutionary system.

Will Nooron make it easier for like-minded doers to find one another and collaborate?

Yes. There will be many different classification systems which will make it easy to find a particular Nooron forum: Library of Congress, Dewey Decimal, USENET and whole new taxonomies of knowledge and human activity. There are likely to be critical cliques: self-defined groups of fellow travelers whose evaluations may be conveniently heeded by some clique name. Nooron forums will of course be (optionally) subject to moderation, and other, more flexible, control of access privileges.

Will Nooron make it easier for people to behave more intelligently?

Possibly, if behaving more intelligently includes being: better informed, more thoughtful, better coordinated with others, more practised at making careful distinctions, more aware of alternative perspectives and more able to contribute to the evolution of knowledge.

References

1. http://www.clubofrome.org/about/world_problematique.php