Hacking Verbal Communication Systems
summary
Claim: a simple set of hand signals borrowed from Quakers/Occupy fixes concrete problems — race conditions, latency in remote video and suppressed voices — by making bids to speak visible, prioritizing clarification, and surfacing consensus. Implementation uses four flow-control signals and four consensus gestures, optional progressive stack ordering, and can be paired with Zoom and chatroom bots to pop hands into a queue. Several teams implement it repeatedly, it reduces interruptions, helps marginalized speakers, and fails only when hands aren’t visible or audio is the only channel.
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chapters (23)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:32Housekeeping
- 2:45Improving Conversations
- 4:37Body Language
- 8:00Algorithms
- 8:56Confession
- 9:17Occupy Hand Signals
- 13:10Race Conditions
- 15:04Symbol Hack
- 15:54Jerks
- 17:25Interrupting
- 18:15Consensus Modeling
- 19:05Subtitles
- 19:46Neurodiverse people
- 20:40Home Stretch
- 20:58Explicit Facilitator
- 21:47Progressive Stack
- 22:46Limitations
- 23:27Other Systems
- 24:05Adaptive Systems
- 25:14Self Obsoleting
- 26:22Questions
- 26:49Using more common signals
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