Knowledge sharing

10 February 2008 at 5:41 pm (Un-Usual Post)

Today in Robert Hodgin’s blog – Flight404 – I read “Source code rumination“, starting a discussion about how and what to share.

In Martin Wisniowski’s – Digital Tool – I’ve read “Doing Research in the 21st Century“, his last post in his Research and theory part of his blog, presenting a point of view about changes in the way we do research in the 21st century.

And then I thought. Both post are linked (obvious), and I started to think about sharing, and how to do that in an intelligent way…

First of all, I’ll define what is to share : to give a portion of something to another or to others. That means you don’t need to give everything. It means you can give parts of it.

Research is the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.

(definitions from Oxford American Dictionary)

Sharing will allow people to do research, and by doing research one builds new facts and conclusion, that can be used in somebody’s else research and so on. But doing research doesn’t means that you try to find a complete solution or a perfect match. It means you’re trying to understand and build new knowledge.

So a smart way to share would be thinking on what someone could need in a research, and this is the hard part (the easiest would be to give everything in details or nothing at all). Sharing means more the simply giving, it means explaining and indicating the highlights of a problem.

For an art work it can be how and why it was made. For a program it can be some main points of it. The way someone shares his knowledge, and the way somebody else sees and process information are both personal.

There are no perfect sharing and perfect research. They are as many research as possibilities, that means an infinity. That doesn’t mean that something can be wrong or correct. I see it more like qubits where the result from a logic operation is both true and false. Quantum computers make this kind of operations, and I believe that our logic is going to change when (and if) quintic computers become common. Systems like Wikipedia are a slight approach of quantum logic, using a propositional logic system where people can add their propositions to give a definition and share their knowledge.

Erwin Schrödinger made an experiment with a cat in order to exemplify the concept of superposition in quantum mechanics. Here you’ll find an explanation about this experiment known as “Schrödinger’s cat”. Basicly when you put a cat in a box with a device that can kill it and you close the box, the cat is both potentially dead and alive at the same time. And when you open the box you’ll see only one possible result of the problem.