Ensembles of networked minds connected by heavyweight, physically proximate connections scale linearly. Managing rising complexity over these tight connections require unate, conceptual thought leaders. Globally connected communities of expert individuals allow exponential scaling of architectural complexity.
Social networks, vast collections of light-weight connections, have emerged in many fields of art. The same emergent quality of normative behaviors (if you like honey badgers then I like you) appear spontaneously in the Google-plex, the Facebook-plex and the reddit-plex. This same emergent phenomena of virtual lead architect in hardware and software points to a new role for technical documentation. Those who followed now lead.
I made the distinction of mutual knowledge and common knowledge yesterday that I will expand. Think stovepipes. If a member of a group has knowledge of a particular kind and a member of another group has similar knowledge but neither knows that the other knows, this is mutual knowledge. Within the stovepipe, heavyweight connections guarantee that mutual knowledge transforms to common knowledge. Between stovepipes, epistemological distance, a measure of dissimilarities between two distinct subject matter bodies of knowledge (BOKs), is a repulsive force.The attractive force is open source documentation whose contributors share a vast number of light-weight connections. This is the genesis of a distributed, adaptive complex system -- a layered mind.
The new paradigm is a collection of standard document types with a consistent and persistent enforcement of house style coordinated by disciplined content management. Therefore, it is obvious to one skilled in the art -- the documentation team is the new sheriff in town.
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