One of my old college roommates, Bud Vieira, did some work on the
system with Flores and discovered that when users self-labelled their
messages, almost everything got labelled as a comment, whatever
category language-action theory might have assigned.
It's interesting that authors don't want to think as carefully about
the labelling for a message as the message itself.
Actually, if I understand his results correctly, it was more that the
users of the system did not want to be overtly "demanding",
"requesting", "accepting","declining"; they wanted to avoid being
pinned down so that they could cloak demands, requests, etc. as
comments. This was more normal social behavior in that context, in
his reading of the results.
Now that I see it in more detail, your proposal is actually different
from the Winograd & Flores work; since you focus on the phase of the
discussion rather than character of the individual message, you may
not have the same problem with the political behavior of the
participants. I believe, however, you will still have the same
problems with the system as a barrier to participation.
regards,
Ted Hardie
What I had in mind for a prototype was:
- a user interface via which messages are submitted, which reminds the
user what phase the discussion is currently in prior to the message
being submitted, and which insists that the user specify the phase
of the message being submitted. ("comment" is not a phase)
it would accept messages that are out-of-phase but the presentation
of messages to readers would be separated by phase. presumably
the current phase of the discussion would get the most attention.
- a means by which a moderator/chair could reclassify already posted
messages or threads as out-of-phase. for visibility, the message
would be tagged as "reclassified".
All of this would be experimental, of course, so we shouldn't
expect any of this to work on the first try. But we're going
to need to allow WGs to do some experimentation if we want to
find better ways to do our work over the net.
Keith