it has come to this.

8/90: Points

Okay.  Another short one, but hopefully these will start stretching out a bit in length.   I also acknowledge that I have some catching up to do since I let a few microbes force me into taking a few days off.

Related to the brief post about uncertainty, I’ve long been interested in very lightweight approaches to measurement.   In any organization, collocated or distributed, it is very difficult to know the conditions under which individuals are productive and innovative.   I suspect that in a lot of cases, the hallways and breakrooms are more of a nexus of intellectual production than are the conference rooms and offices.  In order to get a better understanding of when organizations are being productive, a lightweight application (probably for phones) could be written that would allow “cool things” to get tagged in time and space.   A simple signal that “something cool has happened here” would place few burdens on users, but would be valuable in creating a spatial and temporal mapping of worthwhile happenings.   Looking at the accumulation of points over time would provide insight into the social mechanisms that help an organization thrive, providing a way to target a deeper analysis.