N040200
nfoWare
nfoNote
Situating
Confirmable Experience
Initial Notes
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N040200
nfoWare
nfoNote |
0.10 2023-11-26 13:41 -0800 |
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I keep talking about situating this, situating that, situating everything. I suppose I should situate situating. Meanwhile, I wanted to say some things about the situation of confirmable experience. That is, what are the situations of and for confirmable experience?
Now that I have begun this note, I am tongue-tied.
I can provide, for starters is the development of the concept of confirmable experience in my thinking. I can also discuss some other aspects of confirmable experience:What do I say a confirmable experience is?
What are examples of confirmable experiences?
What are confirmable experiences part of?
How do we measure confirmable experience?
-- Dennis E. Hamilton
Seattle, Washington
February 19, 2004
Content
By confirmable experience I mean arranging or recording an activity in a way where it can be confirmed: what is done and what happens. There is an aspect of repeatability. And of providing an account from which one can replicate the experience. I may not be using experience in a precise way, but I do mean to imply that someone else can "get it."
This means to me that we are talking about confirmable behaviors. In computing and the use of information systems, it has there be confirmable behavior that you can replicate yourself and describe in a way that another can replicate it. This applies to trouble-shooting and it applies to learning the ins-and-outs of some computer-mediated activity.
I want this principle to be so strongly in place that when something happens that is not confirmable, there is clearly something amiss. Like when your checkbook doesn't balance, only maybe better.
I also extend the idea of confirmable experience to the metaphors and models that people invent about the systems they are using and participating in. I want there to be strong support for their creating a theory or story that is confirmable and that when it isn't, they can see what is needed to have a story that is more compatible with the defined behavior of the system.
It is in this regard, the part about conceptual models and our relationship to the computer-mediated process that I thought of as "experience." I am reminded that this may be an inappropriate choice, because we cannot cause an experience -- the experiences that people have are theirs, and they might best be thought of as internal and inexplicable for an on-looker. Still, artifacts are regarded evocatively, and we want to be responsible for that in ways that are available and effective. This is an area to be dug into a bit more, although I don't feel very expert about the cognitive-science side of this.
I have moved quickly through some ideas and not nailed them down very well. It is the purpose of this note to provide more concrete expression of confirmable experience.
Here's what I mean by confirmable behavior:
Everything that occurs is amenable to confirmation: direct demonstration, including operation of any software or computer-mediated exercise.
The construction, composition, and operation of experiments and software implementations can be fully verified and confirmed.
There is always a way to trouble-shoot an experience and determine failure points and root causes.
The reader/user/student is not subjected to inscrutable behavior and always has available the necessary resources for uncovering an account of what transpired
There is guidance and suggestion for creation of interpretations of the confirmable behavior that empower the users of the system in making successful use of it.
To separate it from incoherence, there are examples with regard to toolcraft for communication between computer systems and computer networking. Just being able to observe and confirm network access, conduct of protocols, and exhibition of protocol data units would be a big help. I will pick my examples from there.
I will also pick one from incoherence, involving e-mail and how one describes to someone what one is seeing that is not being seen by someone in a remote place.
I will probably move these into separate notes or sets of notes, but they should work for us here.
The relationship to coherence.
The relationship to commercial arrangements, trust, and trustworthy systems.
The relationship to scholarship and accountability.
Demonstration as a powerful element in the integrity of an arrangement
I was taking the expression a part a little bit. That is, an experience is what it is, and someone has it. To say that it be confirmable is an odd use of language. There experience is what it is, and pretty much the only access we have to what it was is through what we are told about it by someone who claims having it. So what does it mean to say we want to create or cause confirmable experiences?
It is mostly in the communication of breakdowns or discrepancies and their resolution. It is in the demonstration/repetition of observed behavior. It might even include an account of an experience.
The phrase "confirmable experience" is one that I have become comfortable with. That does not mean it is a very good choice. Only that I am comfortable with it. I must dig deeper here.
Many examples have to do with the effort involved in communicating something and how one learns from the other party that the communication was unsuccessful for them, and what the breakdown was so that the originator can at least be aware of that and also, perhaps, establish a remedy that accomplishes the intended communication.
Use the breakdown around Bill sending me his document on measures as an example. It and its resolution is a clear example of wanting to accomplish a communication and it shows how we worked it out.
The work that Bill and I are doing around coming up with a simple example, based on digital signatures and signing of code is important in another respect. Here we are out to establish a confirmable-experience approach to the topic And have it work for us and others at the same time. This one is about coherence as well as confirmable experience and demonstration.
Bill Anderson has provided me with some material using a Tom Gilb requirements table. This is toward identification of measures for confirmable experience. This will be a separate collaborative note, and the activity is going to spawn some other questions about providing Wiki-ness for nfoWare collaborations and discussions.
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