I’ve been thinking about the relative speeds at which different pieces of information move .. and the relative depth of these chunks of information, and some other psychadelic stuff like that.

For example, consider a continuum which has the “fast” information on one end. The fastest being a chat room, then Usenet, then Slashdot and news organizations (the first level of editorial logic and classification). On the slower end, you have “knowlege bases”, the Linux Documentation Project, and other bigger (slower-changing) documents. Standards documents and RFCs are probably at the slowest end. They are infrastructure documents.

I think there’s an interesting analogy here with houses, ala How Buildings Learn. The fastest moving parts of a house are the people and their stuff. The slow moving parts are the biggest parts: the foundation, the roof, etc. If you look at the industries, the furniture and “stuff” industries are the fastest moving, and the building industry is relatively slow moving, with raw material standards like wooden 2x4s and PVC tubing.

And of course, in both worlds, there’s room for experimentation on the infrastructure levels. A Frank Ghery building is an infrastructure experiment. His projects require the use of new materials and new construction techniques, etc. But it’s expensive. Interestingly, the entire Open Source movement has grown from the bottom up, out of the infrastructure, starting with the kernel, the core of a computer’s software operations. Even now, Open Source projects haven’t been able to come up with decent user interfaces and “facades” for their work. It’s largely underground, and I think that’s why it’s taking over the industry.

As Stewart Brand discusses in How Buildings Learn, many organizations spend ludicrous sums of money on the facades of their buildings, more so than any structural costs. Maybe there are similar costs associated with facades (user interfaces) in software, and that’s why OSS hasn’t addressed these yet. Or maybe the design “dictatorship” (like what Apple does) isn’t strong enough among the OSS community, so design is too fractured and the audience is too vague for anything to be labeled “user-centered”.

Hmm.