Personal Brainstorming Session

About two nights ago I got a wild hair and walked to the office late at night and began going at it on the white-board. During this process I clarified several things.

1.) Defined an assumption about ICT's need to reflect community praxis, rather than ICT redefining praxis in haphazard ways.

2.) Articulated the components that make up the theory and practice of the work I'm focusing on.

3.) Wrote out a preliminary model for the architecture of the system I'm working on to support this work.

The images below reflect the evening's work.








This summer, is going to be devoted to building the base application, along with coordinating with potential case-study participants. Busy times...

Envisioning the Ideal Case

So I have been given a little exercise to try out over the next few days; I need to construct an 'ideal' hypothetical case for applying patterns and systems thinking. It needs to emphasize community level problem solving and environmental sustainability.

Issues of interest are: land rights, community energy solutions (wind, bio, hydro, solar, methane farming) community forestry, marketing and protection of non-timber forest resources (such as dyes, resins, fungi and other ethnobotanicals used as medicines, nutrition and so forth). Perhaps, all in one.

Along with these issues, I'm looking for cases that exemplify community attempts at autonomous decision making, planning, implementation within the context of globalizing world and external pressures from government, business, oppositional civil society, etc.

The case also needs some transnational linkages (i.e. NGOs, MNCs, etc.), yet this can be several degrees removed. Various levels of information literacy and communicative capacity are also needed.

Once this idealized situation (or situations) is developed, a few of us are going to begin the tedious task of looking for potential candidates for empirical study.

Extending, Clarifying and Redirecting the Previous Post

After reading over my long, yet free thought exercise on expanding my research questions, I have had some time to think and reflect.

What do I think about this?
While I generated a lot of interesting ideas, but I think I really lost sight of the original research questions that drove me to investigate patterns.

Actually, much of my emphasis on patterns is based upon specific questions. Although these questions are not specifically centered upon particular environmental or sustainability issues, rather these questions are centered upon the use and application of patterns in relation to the work they are intended to support.

While patterns have become a central piece to a number of approaches to ecological design, the ways in which patterns are used seems ambiguous, similarly, how do outsiders who want to integrate pattern thinking into their work utilize past knowledge, or append their own insights into existing languages.

While environmental managers and eco-consultants make greater use of communication technologies to support their work, many of the systems that these people use seem inadequate. For instance, knowledge management systems that are geared towards the development of an evolving knowledge bank resemble nothing more than document repositories listing cases of past work (Take a look at CBNRM.net or FRAME). Now this isn’t necessarily the case among major business entities, but for the most part content even here retrieving knowledge seems difficult.

When reviewing these cases it seems difficult for outsiders to glean the central principles that make these projects successful. It would also seem difficult for even a long-time user to know where to look when attempting to integrate patterns that may have not been used by the designer, or when ongoing projects require a designer or community collaborates to identify alternative solutions to emergent forces.

For pattern users, the way they have sought to solve this problem has been to produce a number of pattern repositories that serve as a collection of acquired knowledge, either from other pattern repositories, research or personal design experience. Yet, even these systems feel lacking. For instance, take a look at the Liberating Voices project or Hillside.net, with hundreds of patterns it seems difficult to know where to start.

Furthermore, once patterns are identified and applied, how do we monitor their usage? If forces dictate that a pattern be adapted, then how do we capture that knowledge? Perhaps, these adaptations imply the need for other patterns to be added to a design language, yet how do we capture this process? This would seem important to any future work, as these are elements of a language that must be acknowledged.

Based upon this emphasis it would seem that my research questions might ought to reflect shortcomings in the usage of patterns, the systems we use to preserve, adapt and share patterns; as well as how communities and eco-managers collect and record patterns in order to generate their own pattern languages.

In a very generic way the list below represents a set of useful question to help orient this work, with patterns and pattern languages representing just one part of a series of possible solutions.

1. How do we support the development and retention of environmental literacy among communities?


2. How do we retain community knowledge that spans across multiple domains to include the environment, politics, culture, communications and economy?


3. How do we communicate this community knowledge to resource managers and development practitioners in coherent ways?


4. How do we adapt this knowledge over time, based upon feedback?


5. How do we connect this knowledge in ways that make it useful for complex, holistic decision-making?

Now, as one could see these questions are very broad, yet by contextualizing the questions in relation to current efforts to employ KM and other ICT based tools in the work of ecological design and natural resource management, these questions do seem to take on a more specific character.

If we are taking a KM approach then new question emerge as additional considerations must be taken into account:

1. How do patterns help in structuring KM solutions?


2. How do we support the viewing and searching of knowledge that exists across multiple dimensions?


3. Which approaches to pattern co-construction serve to build the greatest level of community centered environmental literacy?


4. With an emphasis on patterns and KM, what role might community ontologies play in usability?


5. What might be the best way to visually represent patterns as interconnected pieces of knowledge? Mind-maps? Concept Maps? Casual-loop diagrams (perhaps with explicit semantic relationships)?

These questions can go on and on. Yet, they all seem relevant to the work. However, along with the questions what are the assumptions underlying the orientation of these questions? Though a discerning reader might get this I need to make at least five of these clearly explicit for my own reference

1. Why KM systems? To support the growth and development of civic and networked intelligence for collaborative problem solving.


2. The task of supporting sustainability is a global issue requiring not only global action, but networks of individuals and community actors collaborating and working together.


3. The internet provides an effective medium to supplement face-to-face interactions for planning, monitoring and knowledge transfer.


4. Patterns coupled with the use of community ontologies within KM systems represents a possible approach to knowledge creation, knowledge transfer and knowledge retention.


5. Patterns represent an effective design paradigm for community based ecological design and resource management.

Of course these are just some of the assumptions, but these correspond to the larger more general assumptions driving the research in the direction of KM, patterns and community collaboration for ecological design and natural resource management. Out of this understanding it is possible to assess these assumptions and ask the questions listed above within a more specific context as connected to a specific problem area among resource mangers and community actors.

For this I will refer back to one of the primary questions put forth in the previous post:

How do (can) we sustain and support communities dependent upon non-timber forest products in the wake of degraded forests caused by commercial logging, invasive plant diseases, loss of biodiversity, alternating weather patterns and the intensified harvesting of non-timber products due to growing demand for such resources?

While the question addresses an environmental issue the implications touch upon both human and environmental systems. It spans a number of problem domains, such as economic livelihoods, potential political forces, cultural connections to land, the communication, planning and maintenance of natural resource based economies under threat from a multitude of human and environmental forces.

Patterns and an Intelligent Web

In contemplating the usage of patterns for sustainable development and planning as tools to be accessed collaboratively through the web, I began to contemplate the usage of patterns with their structure of title, problem, context and so on as a way to enable intelligent computing.

There has been so much talk about the semantic web as a step in this direction and from the very little I understand I see RDF, or resource description framework as being an idea that could enable this vision. However, patterns themselves possess an inherent structure that could lend them to being extremely useful to furthering this vision.

For instance, the notion of defining a generic problem within a specific pattern provides an interesting set of options. These problem descriptions possess key words that could be searched. Also, the problems could be broken up to possess their own URI along with a subject and predicate that could also make use of the RDF technology.

Why is this important? Well, in thinking of using patterns to support through the web planning and design, it is conceivable to think that many different patterns that span across domains of knowledge could be queried to support a more holistic design solution.

The Liberating Voices! project has so many great "nuggets of knowledge" yet there are elements that are missing with regards to the lower-level patterns. Most of what is in the current project are fairly high-level. This is not to say that they are so high-level that their usefulness is abstracted away from the casual observer, but my point is there is a lot of information left out. The other issue with the project is that the lower-level patterns that address more specific elements for designing communicative solutions to entrenched problems don’t pertain to ever

Now on the other hand, there are many other projects taking place that could be useful to help fill in the gaps. So, the question is how can we harness the possibilities offered through these different projects. Perhaps we can begin thinking of these projects as being meta-patterns themselves representing the highest level in our design. But again, how do we make these connections through the web where these various projects are not all structured the same way, nor connected together?

Currently, Liberating Voices! has this way of getting at these patterns through an xml dump. In this way we can query the patterns in the database based upon a set of parameters and retrieve patterns relevant to the parameters we provide. Now, this provides an important level of flexibility for those interested in using the Liberating Voices! patterns, but what if someone part of planning committee has need of a pattern that isn’t there?

It is possible that the planning group is clever enough to construct a solution, but it is possible that another solution has been provided by another pattern language project. Also, the pattern may provide a solution, but similar to the Liberating Voices! project, this pattern may also highlight some potential pitfalls and situations that could make the solution problematic. As a result, the planning group could miss out on this warning as well as the opportunity to identify other patterns that might be critical to mitigating these potential shortcomings.

I think it would be incredible to have these various groups get together to discuss greater levels of collaboration. I understand there are possibly conflicting interests, but if people could begin supporting open structures it is possible that the adoption of patterns as heuristic tools for design, planning and so forth could not just increase in popularity, but be more effective in fulfilling the basic premise of holism.

This way we could be in effect querying all of these different pattern repositories in order to construct our more context specific pattern languages. This is also important because if these repositories are distributed and that way the knowledge represented in these differing repositories can be managed by those already heavily involved with these specific domains.

This brings us to the idea of pattern adaptation based upon further real-world experience. So, how might actual users be able to help refine and illuminate the possibilities and pitfalls of various patterns? How might users take their experiences and help strengthen current patterns? Likewise, how might these cases help inform future pattern implementations?

But these are questions for the next post.

Daily Pattern

In continuing to present patterns relevant to my interests and overall research goals I came across this pattern today when I was thinking about community memory and peoples capacity to reflect and adapt based upon assessing past decisions and their actual outcomes.

Following in line with "Development as Process,' that asserts the necessity for reflection and adaptation, the pattern "Memory and Responsibility" seemed appropriate for consideration. It also represents a useful introduction into my proposed research here at WSU.

Being in the ES/RP program here much of my interests are on sustainable development that considers a number of factors from the political to the environmental, and the social to the economic, all of which represent dynamic, shifting systems. And it seems that this is perhaps one factor that produces shortcomings in meeting goals.

As someone who sees the potential of patterns as a conceptual model for assisting people to be more affective in describing and design community based solutions, it is my intent to help evolve practices of using patterns in ways that can empower communities to work with this complexity.

However, in considering the vast wealth of information available on these patterns and the shear number of them available for consideration, it is difficult to see how such a huge system could be useable in a truly meaningful way. For instance, where would someone begin, and if time is an issue (like it is for many of us) how could this learning process be minimized to only those patterns relevant to a particular problem? Likewise community stakeholders and development practitioners are often dispersed across geographic boundaries that make regular face-to-face meetings difficult if not impossible. With these concerns in mind it is hoped that we can develop a Community Knowledge System that uses patterns as heuristic models for visually mapping out pattern languages as related to peoples specific needs.

Along with this ability to map out these patterns in ways that support a conceptualization of how various solutions interact and reinforce one another is the goal to support the community memory that Doug mentions and the adaptive capacity that David Mosse talks about in his book. Both of these elements are necessary considerations as people come to perceive the importance of addressing the changes in context that emerge as goals, perceptions and outcomes shift or don't meet expectations.

It seems to me that such a Community Knowledge System could be useful as a tool for reflection that could enable groups to look back upon their pattern maps to help evaluate and perhaps even extend or shift these patterns to form alternative pattern languages as information and realities changes.

Now, this is undoubtedly a complex project but an exciting one for sure and well worth investigating.

To make this happen, I think it would also be interesting to use the current patterns in Liberating Voices! (and perhaps other pattern systems) as a way to design the system in order to help orient the project to address issues of accessibility, open source coding standards so others can build upon the system, and so forth. These are extremely important to me as I have a very hard time with current planning technologies that are centered upon expert usage. Now that is not to say that experts don’t have a part to play in this process, but I think more work could be done if communities had the resources needed to approach some of the problems in intelligent and intuitive ways (which is contrary to many technologies)

Anyway, enough ranting! Along with this system as a piece of software and something I think Doug wanted me to talk about is the use of the xml data. In this way the system could query the pattern database based upon a set of community defined criteria and could in theory provide a related pattern dump. After this, planners could then have a smaller set of patterns from which to draw from and evaluate but perhaps easier to comprehend in their design endeavor.

So there is the idea and a fairly abstract sense. However, over the next few months I hope to have a very refined set of requirements developed and I will be sure to post here. And I would like very much for pattern participants to help me identify useful patterns that could direct something on the design process.
Take look at the patterns on our current DB at “Liberating Voices” and if something strikes you, post a response with the URL.

Anyway, I haven’t been feeling so well the last few days so I’m calling it an evening, but when I start feeling better and have a chance to review this post I might be making some clarifications.

I’m sure this will be revised another 10 times before the project plan is finalized and I will try to post all iterations on here for review and comment. So yes, please tell me your thoughts!

Visual Languages

Extending this idea of developing a common language brings me to this notion of visual languages that seems to be such a hot-topic among HCI scholars and practitioners these days. As I was refining my main mission in regards to the PhD I recognized that what I'm after is the development of truly viable visual language for planning and design.

Though the totality of the project is more than that, as it is really meant to be a holistic methodological approach to adaptive development. However, the component of planning with the usage of archetypal patterns is directly related to these ongoing studies that are addressing Visual Languages for learning, planning and organizational development among businesses.

There even seems to be some discussion taking place that is parallel to these observations. While these people are not using patterns, they are nonetheless concerned with simplifying what is already an overly complex task.

However, some are talking about patterns. Just for reference this guy is thinking in similar vein: Qualitative Geomatics for Sustainable Development.

However, it is unclear whether these ideas really got the traction needed to push this project forward.

Which brings me to huge critique. First, the large overhead of these software systems like GIS, and similar geo-spatial design software. It is absolutely ridiculous. It is relegated to the professional and essentially cuts out the interested civic minded person from taking an active role in thinking about and conceptualizing alternatives to their lived spaces.

I understand software developers have to eat, I'm one of them, but the open-source model seems most appropriate when we are talking about the public good. The sustainability for developers is in servicing this software and facilitating in effective use not in the code itself.