Noodling about.
David Gelernter, the mind behind Linda, has an article at CIO Insight. In the Expert Insight column, an interview with him: Rethinking the GUI for the Big Picture.
Gelernter has been pursuing this vision of a new interface for some time, and has his own company to pursue these ideas. (seen it mentioned Comm of the ACM and Nooface)
He treats lightly with the idea of communities of practice, a term I am only slightly familiar with in its corporate context. I think it may have arisen from postmodernist theory; I think Stanley Fish speaks on the idea of communities of practice, and how an idea of truth arises from these communities by way of a shared understanding. (Remember, postmodernists care little for the idea of an objective truth.)
The idea of streams of information, creating a narrative, has other proponents, such as Ted Nelson and his famous holy grail, the Xanadu project. I believe with ZigZag, Ted Nelson wants to be able to create several streams across the same data, connecting them in different streams to present them in different ways, such as a chronological stream for project history, a criticality stream for project priorities, and, say, several substreams for individuals’ responsibilities in a project.
Scopeware seems to me to be Gelernter’s attempt to unify the lifestreams approach with several other interface ideas he’s presented before.
[by way of MacCentral]
7:44:23 PM 
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