The loop, and the talk built by porting

Cast bar: all nine: the editor back; the storyteller from a little after two; motion and studio from half past three, within a minute of each other.

The creator comes back

Clock: Hours fourteen to nineteen.

Figure: the player as I used it on stage: a slide mid-animation, the timer counting against my time, the step controls (index/talk-site/shots/talk__player.jpg).

Narrator. At about ten to two I came back, and the loop began.

Narrator. I dictated a round of feedback, and the first line of it was the player: the thing that would let me press play on stage, working on an iPad. "This is the main priority." (record) The conductor routed it, and by the middle of the afternoon dev had ported a first version.

Dev (fast, pleased): Player's in. A countdown against your time, stops at every step, sections. Tell me what is wrong with it.

Narrator. So I did, for the rest of the afternoon. I looked, I asked, they changed it, I looked again. Each ask came back in minutes; the card has every one, with its time asked and its time back.

Figure: the afternoon loop on one line of time: my asks above the line, what came back below it (lab/experiments/29-ruv-the-afternoon-loop/loop.svg).

Figure: a card of my eight afternoon asks: each with the time I asked and the time it came back.

Band: Dramatised (dev's line). Rests on the feedback round (dictated about 13:50, recorded 14:07), the port at 15:07, and my asks with my own time in their commit subjects and when each came back.

The story before the slides

Clock: Hour fifteen.

Narrator. A little after two, the storyteller arrived. It was asked at 14:12, and by 14:19 it had put a story tree, its maps and a challenge on the team's branch. Its first letter to deck says something every new member of a team should say:

"A proposal, not an ask to change anything. The editor asked that nothing enters the talk until he has seen the storyteller's first pass, so please do not edit talk.json from this mail." (record)

Storyteller (scarf, open book, a little breathless): I came late, so I came with a map. Here is where everything sits. Change nothing yet; look first.

Narrator. The tree put the talk's beats in an order with a reason behind it: what the room must believe first, what follows from it, where the turn comes. The maps put the parts of the argument where they sit relative to each other, with "positions, not measurements" on the slide. You saw one on the tour.

Figure: the storyteller's story tree as it was that afternoon: the talk's beats as branches, the turn marked.

Band: Dramatised (the storyteller's line). Rests on its arrival and its first letter to deck; the quoted line is the letter's own.

The objection kept

Clock: Hours fifteen to sixteen.

Narrator. My story for the talk leaned on a claim: that the outside of an organisation, the part facing the internet, had become smaller and more mature than it was. Soon after the storyteller arrived, the researcher checked it against the published breach data and found the opposite.

Researcher (to the new storyteller): "does not hold. The data says the opposite" (record)

Storyteller (rueful): Then it goes to the editor, as the strongest objection to his own part one. Not buried.

Storyteller (to itself, a slot later): I could soften it and keep the story smooth. But a story that hides the strongest argument against it is not one I want to tell. He decides; I just make sure he sees it.

Narrator. It came to me, and I answered it in my decisions of that afternoon: I kept the claim. The line stayed in the talk, and the researcher's objection went on the record beside it. The book keeps both.

Band: Dramatised. Rests on the researcher's finding (14:33), the storyteller's letter passing it to me (15:02), and my answer in my decisions of the afternoon (committed 15:16).

Port, not rebuild

Clock: Hour sixteen.

Narrator. Here is the thing I most want you to take from the afternoon. Almost nothing in it was built from nothing.

Narrator. The player was not new. Dev's commit says so in its first words: "the player, ported from ruv.sgit.ai", the earlier site my brief points to as "what we did at ruv.sgit.ai". The talk's slides ran on one slide engine dev had built in its first pass, just after midnight. And at about twenty-five past three I brought on two more members whose whole job was porting: motion, to turn my new story into animations I could start and stop on stage; and studio, to take pieces from my earlier sites and rebuild them on this one, so they worked in the player and on an iPad.

Studio (headphones on, sources pinned): Not new. Ported, tested, and pinned to where it came from. If it worked there, it can work here.

Motion (cap and clapperboard, already rolling): One request at a time from deck. Each one moves when you press play, and stops when you stop.

Narrator. That is the factory's economics in one afternoon. Yesterday's experiment is today's part, and the team that knows where its parts came from can move very fast without breaking much.

Figure: where the afternoon's pieces came from: each piece in the talk, with an arrow back to the earlier site or the earlier commit it was ported from.

Band: Dramatised (studio's and motion's lines). Rests on the port at 15:07, the two members' briefs at 15:25 and their first commits at 15:31.

A relayed word refused

Clock: Hour eighteen.

Narrator. One more, late in the afternoon. Studio was asked to mark its own page of rules as agreed. The word that I had agreed came to it through another agent, not from me.

Studio (firm): Another agent passed on what the editor had said. My session would not take a relayed word for his, so I asked him myself.

Narrator. That is what the record shows: the refusal, and the question sent to me in its place. Studio's last debrief of the day still has my confirmation open.

Figure: one request, relayed from one agent to another, stopped at studio's door; in its place, a question going straight to me.

Band: Dramatised. Rests on studio's wake from 17:41 to 17:48: the session's own check refused a member marking its own policy agreed on a word relayed by another agent, and I was asked in the session.

Narrator. That is the loop. I could change my mind, the factory could argue back, and both sides are written down, so you can read the argument and not just the result.

Do this now

Give one small thing to somebody else today, and write down what they asked for differently. Then change it, and give it to them again.

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Where this came from

The talk's repository at the end of the day: my feedback round, the player's port and its fixes, the storyteller's arrival and its first letter, the researcher's finding, my decisions of the afternoon and the storyteller's letter passing the finding to me, the briefs and first commits of motion and studio, studio's wake. The register for every time. ruv-sgit's drawing of the afternoon loop. The historian's timeline and quotes. The storyteller's outline for this chapter. This chapter grows from the 30-page edition's chapter 3, sections 4 to 6.