Last Updated 2/18/01
Description - This Book Study Group.
Background - How it got started.Chapter Summaries (to be added as we go)
Introduction and Chapter One - The Irish Idea of a Hero
Description
For the very first time, the JSL list will be engaging in studying a book.. Five to ten people have said they are interested and ordered the book. Here are the particulars:
What - The book is "Complexity - The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos" by Waldrop, 1992. It contains 9 chapters, 359 pages.
When - Discussion on the JSL list will start on Sunday, February 18, 2001, with a kickoff announcement, which will be about the first chapter in the book.
How - We will cover one chapter a week. Each week will start with a message about the chapter we are starting, with some hopefully penetrating observations and a question or two. This is the signal to start chattering away about that chapter. We expect one thread per chapter, which will occasionaly spawn new threads. If small chapters are discovered they may be combined into one week.
Wrapup - At the end there will be a final message to signal the chapters are done, and that we can discuss the book and what we've learned as a whole, etc. This can get pretty deep....
Who - Jack Harich has volunteered to be the moderator for this book. If this Book Study Group experience goes well, folks are welcome to suggest the next book and volunteer to be moderator. It helps if the moderator has special interest or skill in the book's area.
Why - Perhaps this is best expressed by Greg's reply to the "Are you in?" question:
I am interested in it, because it will engage me at a level of abstraction that can have an influence in many things I do. One way to be creative is to break out of the rut and do things differently. I look forward to the thread...
If it appears useful, messages or extracts from the book threads will be posted to this webpage. Hey, this is gonna be fun, and we might even learn something!!! :-)
Background
To bring eveybody equally up to date on the background on this, here are some of the JSL messages involved. First is this message on January 18, 2001, on the Snippets thread:
joshy wrote:
> I find I spend most of my time managing complexity.Jack replied:
This is the heart of the matter. I came to the same conclusion. Ever since then I've been wondering how to resolve this intricate problem. My two main directions have been in the process and high reuse areas. One, Visual Circuit Board, is looking promising but requires _much_ work to reach critical mass.Recently I ran across a new paradigm that may help here. I'll try to describe it in a manner helpful to managing the complexitiy of software systems.
The field is called "Complexitiy" or "Complex Adaptive Systems". The idea is real world systems are composed of autonomous agents whose actions and interactions cause the emergent behavior of the system. What's amazing, and somewhat of a breakthrough, is the most interesting and useful behavior occurs when a CAS (Complex Adaptive System) is on the threshold between chaos and stability. The threshold is a delicate equilibrium, where the agents are working hard to stay on the threshold, and not fall off either side. Also of interest is a simple set of rules is all it takes for some agent systems to produce very complex behavior. Also, computer simulation is crucial to the research in this field.
An example is a flock of birds flying as a group, like Starlings. Fish do the same thing when swimming as schools. Consider that the ruleset of each agent only has to handle keeping a certain distance range from it's immediate neighbors, pointing about the same as them, and keeping about the same speed as them. This is a mere 3 rules. Computer simulations show this is all it takes to get a flock of "boids" to exhibit what at a glance looks just like a real flock's behavior. For those interested, an excellent intro is the book, "Complexity - The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos" by Waldrop, 1992.
This came later from Jack:
Greg and others, if you'd like to start a Book Study Group on this one book, let me know. We could do a chapter a week or such, have some fine discussion, and I/we could simultaneously extract knowledge and put it on some web pages. The book has 9 chapters. I originally read it in one week while on my recent California vacation.
I have seen such groups work well, on the CASE Compuserve forum years ago. I would be glad to help play the role of moderator, using the same style I saw there.
As I said in a previous email, my best guess at some of the major trends in software is:
1. The move to Component Based Development.
2. Then a move to Declarative Knowledge centric system and tools.
3. Then, using both components and DK, a move to Complex Adaptive Systems, as the book covers.The Book Study Group can of course be virtual, and include folks from all around the country and the world.
Greg replied he was interested, since a friend had raved about it and given him a copy of the book but he hadn't read it yet. Then came the let's-do-it announcememnt, on January 19, 2001, from Jack:
Well Greg and others, let's seize the day. :-)
How many people would be interested in participating in a 10 week email study group experience, like we have just described? It would start 4 weeks from now, so you have time to read the book.
The book is "Complexity - The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos" by Waldrop, 1992. Please see the Snippets thread for further discussion.
I'd like to thank Joshy for causing all this. It was his shrewd sentence, "I find I spend most of my time managing complexity.", that led to this Book Study Group idea.
This may be the first of many books we study. I'll volunteer to be the moderator for this book. I promise to do a good job, and to improve my speling. ;-)
If you're in, please post a reply to this thread, and express any observations, suggestions or concerns. I'm especially interested in why individuals are attracted to this book.
And finally this, which describes operational details:
Greg Kreis asked:
> A chapter a week seems like a good pace for reading, BUT could the discussions
> be done in a week before the next chapter starts? ;-)Jack replied:
There you go again, thinking proactively. :-)What I saw on the CASE book study groups was this:
1. An announcement was made about an upcoming book. This was a blurb about the book, the author, and the contextural trends. It also had a schedule. This was one week per one or more chapters, plus a wrapup week at the end. Nice format. The main purpose was to get you to decide if you wanted to participate, and if yes, to buy the book and start studying. If you decided yes, you posted a message saying, "I'm in". If too few were in, it was dropped. This rarely happened.
2. At the beginning of each week the moderator made an annoucement. This had provocative observations on the material and discussion questions or hints. This was the signal to start emails about that week's material. I'd estimate there were about 15 regulars in each study group, and about 30 posts per week, usually from a core group of about 5.
The assumption was made to read ahead. There was never a problem about folks not having read the material, because announcement style 1 preceeded the first announcement style 2 by about 4 weeks. Most participants seems to stay about 3 chapters ahead, and the rest had already read the whole thing.
A new cycle started, as I recall, every 2 months. But each book took only 6 weeks. This allowed a gap between books. It was lightly used for comparing different books, post-post-mortum chatter and such. This allowed covering 6 books per year. In our case, I'd recommend longer than 6 weeks, such as one chapter per week, plus a wrapup week at the end.