A few days ago I was giving a lecture to an audience of young creative people. Part of it was devoted to showing them how to use Kublai as a platform for developing their ideas into full-fledged projects. Since I thought the experience of joining Kublai would be more fun if students got early response from the community, I started to Skype people I saw online asking them to drop by and say hello to the newcomers. A few did; and, as the (about 15 students) started to interact with Kublai, the activity got noticed by a few more kublaians, who decided to drop by as well. < (lang_en>

As the number of people using Kublai simultaneously got in the 15-20 range, I got the almost physical feeling of the experience changing dramatically. Any action taken locally (in the classroom) would show up in the recent activity feed, and users across the country would pick up on it. Response was almost instantaneous: as soon as you finished writing something, somebody else had commented on it. It was quite exhilarating, for me and for the students.

I could not help being reminded of phase transitions (in physics that’s the transformation undergone by matter when it changes its state, say from solid to liquid to gas or viceversa). Kublai felt like a glacier: it had been moving in its solid state, pulled down by gravity and shaping the landscape with moraines, but now it was melting, and moving much faster as a result. This raises a fascinating question: is this the same process happening at a higher speed or does the higher speed imply a different process? In the example of the melting glacier the transition from ice to water gives rise a stream, which is most emphatically not the same thing as a faster moraine. My intuition would be that’s the case for Kublai too: specifically, I’m conjecturing that “liquid” Kublai tends to concentrate a higher share of the posts on the most active projects than the “solid” Kublai… but that’s very far from a founded conclusion.

In complexity science, matter at the phase transition threshold exhibits interesting properties and is said to be at the edge of chaos. So Ruggero and I got quite excited, and discussed ways to study this phenomenon through graph maths. Meanwhile, I enlisted some of the most active members of the community in running an experiment of using Kublai as a semi-synchronous environment: it comes down to doing a “project coaching jam” on a set date and time, trying to get 20-30 people to start posting at the same time, and we’ll see how that goes. Will the phase transition take place? Will other people get the same feeling that I did before? I’ll post any progress – if any – on the blog as we go.