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Island Wisdom, Coded in Java. "Trampoline" -fundamental principles on how people communicate

Charles Armstrong had one day job in his life — working as an account manager for an internet marketing firm in London. He didn’t like it. Communication was dysfunctional, morale was terrible. Like anyone who’s served time in cubical hell, Armstrong was certain people could do better.

So in 1999 he set out to conduct an ethnographic study of how people naturally communicate and organize when shorn of externalities like e-mail and PowerPoint. His quest took him to the tiny island of St. Agnes, the smallest of the Isles of Scilly, 28 miles off the coast of Britain. He lived there for a year, studying how the 80-or-so island villagers interacted and functioned.

Not surprisingly, life on the island contrasted powerfully with the corporate culture of London business. "Looking at how people schedule tasks and priorities, in most conventional organizations people make a to-do list, then they will do the highest-priority things first," he says. "On St. Agnes, somebody wakes up, has breakfast, walks out the door and looks up at the sky…. If it looks like the right kind of wind and tide to catch a kind of fish they like, they might just do that first."

By Quinn Norton

Full Story: http://wired.com/news/technology/0,70474-0.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2

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