Speech Acts

Education, open-source culture, and structured collaboration in language. PyCon 2016 keynote by Lorena Barba highlights Winograd & Flores using github pull-requests as an example. video slides

We don’t communicate to share information, we communicate to change the world … we coordinate in conversation, offering promises, building trust, developing relationships … All of these actions are linguistic, they happen in conversations … the actual doing of the work is outside of the graph.

"A commitment to coordinate action to address the issue for the sake of the project's shared mission." - Flores

"We design our organizations around the networks of commitments being made." - Flores

Github is a tool-of-the trade in the open-source world that supports the workflow, and promotes a culture of collaboration.

The culture of open source: an example of coordination for action through computational platforms that support humans to be more effective.

Garden vs. Stream. Neither this wiki or the typical news feed captures any sense of commitment between individuals. Speech acts of Winograd & Flores appear more like a protocol than a document, temporal or not.

See Garden's Stream where we consider enhancements to wiki that also fail to lead to action.

Beyond the AI Winter by Paco Nathan said nice things about Barba's presentation. medium