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From: Jasper
Date: Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Time: 10:44:01 AM
Paddy, … Thanks for getting back on the CWLQ idea. …………Pleas do not concern yourself with presenting a “perfect” document for your proposal. The first step in doing something like this is always a little rough because you can’t know what the final product is going to look like. You don’t even know what it should look like until you have farted around with it enough to understand the structural requirements. How long it takes depends on the obstacles you have to overcome. …………The most formidable obstacle is ALWAYS a lack of feedback. Most people WILL NOT tell you what they see and what they think. Therefore, you can’t tell where you are with the people you want to reach, so you end up spending most of your time groping around in the dark. You can’t tell whether there is a problem you can fix (if you knew what it was) or whether there is something inherent in what you are trying to do that some people are never going to consider or understand regardless of what you do. ………… Is anyone interested? Why or why not? Do they get it? If not, why? Is it because of something you wrote, something you didn’t write or something you did not intend to write the way you did? Is it because of what you indicated or didn’t indicate in the necessary order to get people’s attention and hold their interest long enough and well enough for them to give you an informed thumbs up or thumbs down? Did they trip over a word or phrase that made them decide that you were a fool or make them fear that they would look foolish if they asked for clarification (that’s usually the BIG one). ………….Meanwhile you want to put down everything you can think of in any order just to make sure YOU understand what you’re doing and why it matters. You did that. I thought you did an outstanding job. Mike didn’t. …………..Thank God for Mike. Without his feedback I would have thought that the significance of your proposal was obvious. Now both of us know that it wasn’t and we know why it wasn’t. This is going to shave many hours off of your development time. …………There is NOTHING wrong with your proposal as you posted it. I just wanted the paragraph breaks because it was a long post and the paragraph breaks would make it easier for readers to pick out key groupings of ideas faster and easier. You can do the refining later. This is what I do on High Points. The first entries are sometimes extremely rough. That’s the nature of the development process. It is inherently messy. You will, of course, try to avoid factual errors at every stage but at this stage it is a mistake to worry about them. Most of them will jump out at you later or someone will point them out. The interesting thing here is getting “corrections” that aren’t correct (in my experience it’s about half and half). This forces you to do research that you might not have thought was necessary and allows you to cite reference that you could not have cited before. ………..I don’t know how far you can go with this but you have already gone farther than anyone else on earth in merely proposing it. –Jasper