the dojo psi

Tasks as an Art Form

15 March 2009 – 4:19 pm | by PJ

Out of the new-idea of setting everything up in a personal ‘task library’ came some other fabulous ideas from the beta testers.

If you’ve ever used Firefox browser add-ons, or open source software that has plug-ins, add-ons, mods, hacks, or other names for “special stuff that other people build and make available for you to use too”, you’ll understand this concept.

The original idea was actually, “Can I share my library?” which was a great idea, but I wasn’t fond of it in full for several reasons, like:

1. It would complicate things in my coding, making some private and not others, and I’m not willing to share my whole library.
2. It would mean the total quantity of available tasks would end up being so huge that it would be useless, like doing a search and getting 10 milion results, and people wouldn’t know where to start, plus they’d end up with a lot of duplicates shared across libraries. It would just take so long to find good stuff, wading through so much, with lots of peoples’ entire library shared.
3. It would instantly lose track of where/who anything came from.
4. It would end up with tons of available tasks that were kind of crappy tasks, just casual stuff people do on the fly, and I’d kind of like shared things to be deliberately done and focused on quality, so the feedback is diverse, is included locally, etc.

But I loved the base idea of that which was really, “Can I share certain of my tasks with other taskers?”

What if a person really put some major effort into making an exceptional task? Or let’s say, a small group of tasks with something in common?

It occurred to me — a sort of epiphany really — that TASKS are just as much an art form as sessions, if not moreso. Good tasks usually take longer to setup than it takes to do a session. From quality feedback, to trying to find non-copyrighted feedback (such as creative commons / copyleft, something you can credit but are allowed to use publicly), to a variety of feedback (custom paraphrased key info from an encyclopedia or website, a quality photo(s), etc.), putting together a good task can be a bit of work. They deserve recognition and appreciation totally on their own, totally apart from the viewing.

Could a tasker do something to ‘package’ those tasks up, so other taskers could use them too? So people looking for something to task might have some ready-made options by other taskers? Whether they assign these to themselves, friends, offsite groups/people, a local team, etc. doesn’t matter, it’s up to them.

I think that’s a fabulous idea. Better yet, I think it should be set up a little like firefox add-ons, where you have the option not only to download something (or in this case, you click a button to have those tasks [and any associated media files] copied to your own library), but also to leave a comment about it or rate it.

That way people making and sharing tasks can get some feedback from others, and that way if there are eventually tons of options for sharing, one can at least ’sort by rating’ and get the packages that other taskers have thought the most of over time.

This would also keep track of who did what; it might allow some taskers to ‘further build on’ a collection or approach one tasker had already begun; it would allow a tasker to ‘update’ a set later; it would prevent those borrowing from getting duplicates; it would emphasize the ‘quality’ of tasks that are shared; it would reduce the massive overabundance of shared tasks that entire shared libraries would bring; for folks who like exploring different kinds of creativity, it might give them a new area to create in and share with others; and it would provide a better focus on tasks as an art form in the project that most ought to be recognizing that.

So it’s a “win” on more than half a dozen fronts.

The nice part about the redesign of the TASKER module in tBot is that this makes a separate subproject like this pretty easy. It’s not a big deal to just let someone click a few tasks from a list or category, give it a name and make a comment and press a button, and have all that copied to new holding table and holding folder. (That way if the original provider deletes a file/task from their library, it will not affect the shared collection.) And it’s pretty easy to just have someone click a button and have it all copied right into their own library. Simple and fast and versatile; ideal.

I think quality tasking is underrated in the RV field. I think a lot of people put emphasis on things which may not matter quite so much (like wording–which probably does matter, but probably not as hugely as assumed in the case of free-response (vs. binary dowsing) RV), and don’t put enough emphasis on things which are ideal–such as having some quality, succinct, informative text along with a quality photo or video (and even better yet, all this able to be posted publicly without the viewer getting sued for copyright violation, which takes custom paraphrasing and special searching for media that fits that criteria).

I also think people tend to err on one side or the other in tasking, either providing too little information, or providing too much. It’s laziness really. A website about Easter Island is too much information, especially a few websites. A hand-crafted, very succinct yet informative and FOCUSED text summary, along with a couple good photos of the same thing from different perspectives (which should be whatever the text is talking about), that makes a good task feedback. And it should be able to be posted publicly without copyright infringement. Getting all those elements together takes time and effort.

When the tasking is ‘framed and focused’ based on the feedback, then the quality of that feedback becomes even more important.

So I best like that it provides a whole area for a special focus on tasks as an art form. That it also provides a bunch of other neat feature is just a handy side-effect.

I don’t know what I’d do without the beta testers because most of these great ideas and totally new ways of looking at all this are thanks to them. I’m the originally programmer so my model is both old and ’set’ and they don’t have those limitations so they are really expanding the horizons — and drastically improving the final product we’ll end up with.

They’ll get it free as a result of their help. I might charge for at least some of the features when it finally opens (2010).

PJ