Idea Form Discussion

Does IdeaForm have merit? Which of the two presentation styles (PortlandForm and CanonicalForm) is preferable?

I think IdeaForm has lots of merit. It seems similar to a concept that I have been playing with, that pattern creation is a two-step process. See SuccessesAndPatterns. -- StanSilver

I'm glad you think IdeaForm has merit. I think the intent of IdeaForm is different from the intent of SuccessesAndPatterns. You're suggesting a way to discover or mine, and write up, patterns - from the commonness of written records of successful things you've done in a past time period. I'm proposing a set of words to name some kinds of ideas that are similar to, or related to, patterns - but that do not meet the strict definition of "pattern". And I'm suggesting that documenting these kinds of ideas in a form very similar to PatternForm is valuable, because it encodes experiential insight and creates conceptual handles and common vocabulary, and facilitates weaving these kinds of ideas into "languages" similar to PatternLanguages. -- RandyStafford

Aha - I am starting to see the difference, and like IdeaForm even more.

It reminds me of the coding technique described in the UltraStructure paper, which uses several heterogeneous "ruleforms". Each ruleform is a database table, customized to hold a certain type of rule. Each ruleform holds several rules, all of the same type.

The paper suggests that if you choose your several ruleforms correctly, you can code up your rules quite concisely, because you are specifying rules in a shape tailored to the rule, instead of forcing all rules into the same shape.

Exactly. The problem is that forcing things into the same shape can stretch the shape beyond recognition. --RS

Are you finding different "categories" of ideas, each taking a different "form"?

Yes, exactly. But the different forms of idea, for the most part, can (and should) be documented in a form very similar to pattern form, because it captures experiential insight, creates conceptual handles, creates common vocabulary, etc. - but at the same time we don't want to abuse the meaning of "pattern" hence the different categories of idea. --RS

See also DiscussionPatternCousins (which mentions discussions, faqs, and cookbooks) and KoansMetaphorsAndParables. -- StanSilver

Similar themes are there - but my hope is that documentation of ideas of the limited subset of kinds covered by IdeaForm will result in better accessibility and codification of those ideas than is achieved via documentation using the literary forms mentioned on those pages. --RS

I kind of like PortlandForm. If I tagged an idea as a ProtoPattern right at the top like this:

 ProtoPattern
 blah, blah, blah,
 Therefore: blah, blah, blah

would that still be IdeaForm? -- PhilGoodwin

Yes - that would be an example of documenting an idea that is a ProtoPattern using PatternForm, and labeling its form as ProtoPattern (so as to avoid abusing the meaning of pattern). I wish I had a more precise word than "idea" to abstract the subset of kinds of idea I enumerate on IdeaForm, but there aren't enough words in the English language :-) --RandyStafford

I really like the form, and actually like that you use the word "idea." (I suppose you could use "meme," but not everyone understands that, and memes don't have to have any value at all; they're just good at propagating from mind to mind.) Idea is very inclusive, in the spirit of brainstorming (no judging up front). Could we end up with attempts to put mediocre thoughts and mental "junk" into some type of form, and give them more "weight" or the appearance of validity than they "deserve"? Yeah, probably. But it is worth it to improve the chances of pulling out a subtle but useful idea, which could in turn "evolve" into a pattern or one of the other alternatives as appropriate. I don't want a form, or any of the names or terms used with it, to be the filter that differentiates "good" ideas/patterns/etc. from "bad" ones. I trust people (to some degree) to evaluate the "goodness" of an idea independently of the form in which it is presented. -- AndyMoore

IdeaForm is suited to reformatting a page on which a consensus was reached, summarizing some of the movements along the way. Which is handy for those situations, but a minority of the wiki pages. The old wiki style is good for thrashing around the idea space, and when (if) consensus is reached, we can let someone convert that to IdeaForm.''

All of what Alistair just said is true, and sounds like one way to convert pages to DocumentMode. But I didn't intend for the application of IdeaForm to be limited to pages on this wiki. I'm interested in people's reaction to it as a way of documenting non-pattern ideas in a style similar to that used to document patterns, regardless of the medium used to share the documentation, in the hope that doing so will increase communication bandwidth and knowledge sharing within the software development community. --RandyStafford