Icarus Project
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The central idea behind the project is the idea of concepts as illustrated in the following example. We have in our minds the concepts of things. Pick anything, a car, patriotism, laws, a specific law, man, woman, male, female, etc. These concepts may be related to things of many different natures. Corporal and non-corporal, physical, energetic, psychic, etc.
We always talk as if "seeing the big picture" is the hard part while from a certain perspective it's the whole that's the natural easy bit. Looking at a thing from a certain POV is the hard part.
This is because we think in a very intuitive fashion. We combine large, complex systems into mental concepts that we manipulate with great ease, and--on the whole--we're very often right in our conclusions. What we really need is a way to break down complex concepts into different perspectives without losing our ability to keep the whole in mind.
The things which we have most immediate and basic access to are the physical things. I can point to a car and we can all agree it's a car. Even though most people are not mechanics, if you presented them with a car they'd never seen before, and even only giving them one view the thing, they could tell you a lot about how the inside is laid out and what the car would like from any other angle.
We are naturally used to doing this with things in the physical world. The fact that we get exposure to all these points of views--meaning both different physical dimensions, as well as tidbits about mechanics and physics that make it go, and even including culture that drives styling--greatly enhances our concept of cars.
Now imagine talking about cars without access to actual cars. You can discuss what a car should be, how it might run, etc. but you can never actually make a car in the physical world. You could carry on this exercise for generations and not have as much understanding of what a car is as a modern human in an industrialized nation will passively absorb in one lifetime.
This is somewhat the situation we have with concepts like "justice" and "economics". These concepts are just as real as the concept of car, they simply lack direct physical manifestation. In other words, car is a concept centered and grounded in a physical thing. Economics is concept addressing a dimension of the human experience.
Icarus Overview
Specific Tools
The value of the tools as discussed below are--I hope--be self evident. Thus, I run the risk of diluting the impact of the practical benefits by veering into the meta-layer discussion I'm about to sidetrack into for a couple paragraphs. In light of this understanding, I offer the following caveats: first, I would not include this discussion in literature aimed at consumers. I'd probably avoid it for investors too. Second, I do think this understanding is important for developers and contributors (meaning both in a broad sense). It may inspire ideas. It's also important for many practical reasons to keep the application stylistically cohesive. Concepts can and should evolve over time, but it's important to be tuned in to them.
With that out of the way, here's the idea behind the application tools. There are two basic things a user might do. One is describe a system as it relates to a particular domain (POV). For instance, there's the legal dimension. How was the company formed? What kind of participation structure do the by-laws define? There's also an economic/accounting dimension. What's the cash flow? Debt to equity, etc. In gathering that data, there are three things to consider:
- What does the application need to know to best capture the concept? This defines the model.
- How can we best express that model in a way which makes it easy to use from a developer standpoint?
- How can we best express that model in a way that makes it easy for a user to interact with?
The second basic piece to the application tools are transforms. How do we combine the domain (strict POV) models into a new perspective? In other words, how can we take this data and the applications internal concept and present it in ways that help the user understand more, work more efficiently, and achieve more.
Map/Plan
Maplan?
Mind map application combined with dependency based scheduling.
Plan to Task
Steps to full satisfy dependency and/or realize goal. From map, add "implement" to the front of the big concepts. I.e., if we had "Business Formation" as a main branch on our mind map, we could say "implement business formation" to create a goal in the plan, and then flesh that out with tasks.
