I gave a talk about Sphere College on Monday at AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park, New Jersey. The talk seemed to go rather well, and I had some excellent followup conversations afterward, some of which are ongoing via email. One reason we connect with others in this was is because the questions we get help us continue to develop our own ability to convey our ideas to others. During these conversations it became more clear to me precisely what, to my mind, Sphere College really is. In a nutshell…
The system I envision here is of a self-organizing system in which it is not possible for any of the entities—faculty/staff/students, current and future—has sufficient knowledge of the complete system to fully design it beforehand. Human experience is simply too heterogeneous. This implies that the implementation must be discovered on the fly. Communication among the entities begins with rather low fidelity (in the sense of accuracy of reproduction of a signal to its source), complicating the problem. However, the fidelity increases manyfold as the system matures. At all times a sufficient infrastructure must be present to ensure progress toward the common goal, embodied in our mission statement (which was written by the students under my guidance). The function of some of the entities—a minimal number—is to maintain the integrity of the infrastructure. I posit that this system is optimal.
Granted, there are many people to whom the above is not going to make a lot of sense, but think about it while we work on other ways to convey the concept of Sphere College. In the Steering Committee we have been discussing a nice metaphor. More on that at another time.