In response to schmuck's post about the openness of SC, I thought I'd bring up another issue the community is facing—the problem of scale.

Not the amount on members, no, but the size of the library, the amount of contributions from members without a simpler way to organize and find the information therein. Space Collective, if it were a hive mind (and some might argue it is), would be a scatterbrained one—shifting attention from one topic to another quickly, sometimes repeating information and sometimes burying novel ideas (i.e. forgetting).

it's a stoner, basically.

The synapse system is great to find new articles, but to create synapses requires you to go out and search for related articles, which can overwhelm the average user. There are multiple languages evolving on this network, people are creating terms that overlap with each other's and these new ideas are getting trickier to search for beyond the original creator's former posts (looking at you wildcat). I'm not proposing a dictionary (though that might be nice). I'm proposing a new way for space collective users to interact with it as if you really were travelling within a super brain's network, since we already seem to have reached a scale of information that goes far beyond what a single human is capable of reading in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. sleeping).

My proposal is this: the synapse system be semi-automated. It's time for an update. There is software out there now that can analyze documents and generate word clouds that give some relatively accurate renderings of what words are important within the text. Using these, the Space Collective synapse system will automatically generate one for each post before publishing and use those clouds to map on to others that share the most similarity, and present them to the Space Collective user as possible synapses. The draft will be saved and the user can peruse the possible synapses she/he wishes to create by checking all that apply and hitting publish.

I think this would do wonders for searching for info within the spacecollective infoverse or whatever. From there you can map the networks and let users navigate it through that style of interface by selecting hub node articles and then further researching the branches, similar to the way a brain is constructed, which i'm sure was along the lines of the original intention of organizing the site, but lacked a healthy level of synapses between posts. I believe this would be much more effective at providing information to those that seek it and actually getting an overall view of what spacecollective is doing spontaneously. AND with that knowledge, users can choose to focus on relatively neglected topics or avoid redundant information, instead of this sampling from the top of the ever-piling Mt. Space Collective. other features could map out what has been read and what hasn't, showing users how much of the network they've actually explored and what destinations they frequent most.


ease of creation —> more synapses —> easier access —> more informed users —> more insightful contributions (not that they aren't already ;)