Sunday, September 24, 2006

Unification of computation, communication, and community

I was just thinking a little bit this weekend about the nature of communications and realized that what we really need to explore and exploit is the unification of computation, communication, and community. Each is worth exploration and exploitation on its own, but it is the various intersections of the three dimensions that hold the most promise.

A few points:

  1. Computation without communication is far less interesting.
  2. The potential for communications is far too limited without enhancing it with computation.
  3. Community can be dramatically turbocharged with advanced communications and advanced computing.
  4. Community gives a heart and soul to the raw technologies of computation and communication.
  5. To date, we have done a very poor job of integrating these three technological angles. Integration has always been an afterthought rather than a foundational concept.
  6. We need to rethink computation and assure that communication is handled at the same level as computation. Ditto for communication and computation.
  7. Maybe the hardest task is figuring out how to redefine computation so that community is a core foundation concept. The was part of my motivation with my thoughts on a Consumer-Centric Knowledge Web and how to look at software agent technology.

The key concept here is how to simultaneously think about compuation, communication, and community, rather than each on its own or the distinct pairings. I am not there yet, but it does seem like an interesting place to go. What might we even call the combination? I am tempted to continue to call it computing, or maybe Computing 2.0 or Computing 3.0 if you want to consider the Internet and Web as Computing 2.0.

-- Jack Krupansky