Defining the best questions

Yes, over-emphasis on design questions, and need to shift towards means of discovering what in fact is working 🙂 I think this is akin to what I was saying to Oli here, about ‘pluriverse’ - there will be a multiplicity of approaches and groupings that any of us needs to pay attention to and distribute our contributions across.

How do we share information? Way too many channels! We can be seduced by corporate social media or be open-source zealots, we can broadcast or narrowcast, we can explicitly post/blog/toot/etc or tacitly leave signs that can be observed by those who care to look our way. I’d be very glad if someone offered an analysis of this at OC2020, and had some patterns (and platforms/apps) to highlight. Myself, I’m inclined to focus on small pods of active collaboration, in which each member pays attention to locations where others post stuff or leave signals. As long as we all know where those locations are, that’s OK? But given that we each will be in numerous pods/movements, we could do with personal aggregation tools, to provide us with just one or two ‘feeds’? Also, we could do with some pattern models that might help us choose at the outset what kinds of digital locations were going to work OK (not ‘best’) for our particular collaboration? Is anybody up for leading on those?

How do we share learning? My own big hunch here is - pattern language. Given that ‘what works’ is evolutionary, pattern language is an obvious form to adopt, bcos in its origins it’s about great capabilities and great forms that have evolved over many generations and locations. Maybe OC2020 should have something on pattern languaging, and tools for pattern languaging? Perhaps every pod should subscribe to one or two or more (digital) pattern language commons . . . curating, stewarding, using? So - an ecology of tools needed there, to facilitate the weave of c/s/u activity in digital media commons? Do these already exist or do some need to be created?

Indicators and scale? I honestly don’t know what to make of this. That pairing echoes 90s post-Fordist corporate competitive-strategy thinking too much for me to be comfortable. ‘Scale’ is problematic, and we need to be much more careful about when we mean scale (‘mass’ scale, a Fordist, modernist, imperialist aspiration?) and when we mean scope/diversity/evolutionary niches/ecology/interoperability? Indicators tend to imply quantification, with many pitfalls including monetarisation and single vision. But perhaps pattern is another way? Maybe there could be pattern recognition tools that could diagnose emergent viable forms? Can anybody make practical sense of that - for me, it’s all a bit sci-fi, and I’m reluctant to buy into algorithmic analytics, unless they offer very robust means of control by the communities whose practice is analysed. Once again, tooling up the commons. Anybody feel like leading at OC2020 on socially controllable pattern recognition tools applied to amorphous, emergent, radical social-economic activity?

Seems like pattern is my response to everything! I guess thats because this is all about discovering and resonating, in the midst of complexity?

The three questions here are examples of things that should be addressed in the the mestasystemic layers to which I referred yesterday. These will necessarily co-evolve with the "operations" they support and with the environments in which they operate, which will in turn be modified in some way by any remedial actions.

I take pattern languages to be heuristic variety attenuators, but I worry that they sometimes attenuate the variety too far. Even where helping to describe and summarize established practice, they discard information that might explain how they came to be settled upon.

It's a tightrope! Building the right pattern language - not too coarse not too fine, not too big not too small, not willfully separate from other langauges, not too formal not too sloppy - is a matter of lifetime skill. Like everything that matters!

Does anyone have example of how pattern language can help in a real-life scenario? I struggle to see how it can work in practice - but may well be missing something critical here...?

Here are two practice oriented, practice-rooted, learning-rich pattern languages
http://tree.tries.fed.wiki - group process and faclitation
http://npl.wiki - regional and urban development

I imagine that the facilitation language is used - live, and in planning - all the time by its originator. I imagine that the originators of the urban development language continually use it too, in assessing situations, in planning interventions and in developing designs. I think the problem with pattern languages is diffusing them to extended communities. Which has to be done in practical collaborating, not by just publishing. Walking the hard yards.

Here is a small beginning of a resource base for pattern language
http://pattern.resources.federated.wiki/view/welcome-visitors/view/pattern-language-resources/view/instances-of-pattern-language

Hi Mike. I agree with most of what you say. But indicators do matter, so that we can assess whether something is working. And by scale - I don't mean necessarily that we scale up one big project, just how do we amplify the outcomes? How do we change more of the economy using what we've learnt?

how do we amplify the outcomes? How do we change more of the economy using what we've learnt?
Yep :) I would call these scope issues - how do we develop another activity, in another location or community, which resonates aesthetically, and can interoperate operationally?

Indicators are essential, and direct indicators preferable to proxies. These are essential transducers in remedial and sustaining feedback loops.

Working at scale requires effective variety management.

I think that what I would like as an outcome of Open:2020 is to find a smallish set of projects or people that are reasonably closely aligned with what I am working on, that keep in active touch with each other for mutual support and ongoing learning. This group would be small enough so that I could actually pay some attention to all of them, and they to me/us, but each would be connected to others, and so on, so that there would be an active network of support reaching very widely.