worx.wiki Academy

1- The World Is Not Small for Everyone: Inequality in Searching for and access to Knowledge

From a recent article in Management Science¹ it appears that whereas:

• The "small-world" argument in social network theory emphasizes that people are, on average, only a few connections away from the information they seek.

there seems to be empirical support for the argument that:

• such a network structure does not benefit everyone: some (employees) may have longer search paths in locating knowledge in an organization—their world may be large.

It is important for achieving development outcomes that the drivers for societal inequality in the access to knowledge - are neutralised (ref: two mechanisms - periphery status and homophily² - jointly operate to aggravate the inefficiency of search for knowledge).

By introducing systematically defined hashtags (as in the #Tag pivot below) one facilitates heterophilous search behaviours³ that cross social boundaries.

Alongside the hashtags, wikis are defined with a reference page for each tag, and a pivotal page for each series of tags.

When browsing these wikis you will notice the utility of pivotal pages such as for:

• sustainable development goals and targets: #SDG and #SDT tags
• functions of government: #cofog tags
• economic activities: #isic tags
• all countries: #cofog, #isic and #sdg, #sdt tags combined with ISO country codes to create tags for each country
• all provinces and municipalities in the Philippines: #PHlgu tags

Together, the tags, the wikis and additional systematized content commons have this purpose: contribute to make the world of knowledge smaller for all members of society.

Further suggestions in support of the creation of local inclusive knowledge economies are in the Convention on Knowledge Commons.

2- Solid wiki foundations that enable sustainable and equitable value constellations

The systematized content commons consists of these wiki-based components:

• a global agreement: the Convention on Knowledge Commons;
• a methodology: the Collective Regulative Bundle (CRB) methodology
• five dictionaries:
  • on interactions (interact)
  • on atomic entities (ens)
  • on actants (roles that entities fulfill in interactions)
  • on constraints
  • on indicators
• two atlasses:
  • an actor atlas, with actor maps for relevant territories; each actor map has its own administrator
  • an initiative atlas, with different kinds of nodes supporting multi-stakeholder initiatives (projects and programmes); each node has its own administrator. Baseline and blueprint nodes can be shared among various initiative nodes.

3- A practice vision for global to local development

Communications in development will be based on a high-quality web-of-open-access-wikis, rather than on content packaged and frozen in brochures, reports, books and other "silo" presentation formats that were created in the printing press age.

The proposed systematized content commons enable the substitution of the "content-silo based communications in programme and project communications" by "web-of-wikis based communications." (a conjecture, the validity of which is being demonstrated).

Development, Sustainability and Growth Reporting

Content commons based reporting on development, sustainability and growth can be conducted at personal, corporate, sectoral, national and international level. This can be done with cross-cutting reporting standards explored in A multi level monitoring and evaluation standard in health care systems: exploring the option (at Scribd).

ICT-reliant Operations in a Global Market Place

Shared classifications are part of content commons. They are an essential enabler of efficient logistics processes. See the work of CEN Workshop on 'Multilingual eCataloguing and eClassification in eBusiness' (WS/eCAT) - ePPS & CC3P projects for more details.

Assessment and Interventions

In clinical settings, for pico and micro level actors and their interactions, the systematized content commons can be used for functional and resource-endowment status assessment, goal setting & action or intervention planning and monitoring, as well as outcome measurement.

Socio-economic Policy

In landscape settings, for meso and macro level actors and their interactions, the systematized content commons can be used for lean monitoring and evaluation, collective goal setting, policy planning, as well as outcome measurement.

Research & Innovation

Indexing of research projects and results by means of content commons (and the included classifications) will facilitate comparability and cumulativity of the research and innovation projects and their results.

4- The Basic Change Cycle

With systematized content commons provided, a change cycle would involve frequent references to the systematized content commons in planning and implementing joint initiatives that follow the Collective Regulative Bundle methodology.

Each initiative will in principle be supported by a baseline, a blueprint and a number of initiative nodes, one per delineated action as explained in yield/Initiative Management. The initiative node should only contain those details of the initiative that cannot be included in any of the dictionaries, nor in the Actor Atlas or the social capital wikis, baseline nodes, blueprint nodes or open web-pages of pre-existing initiatives (once-only principle). Guidelines for the initiative node implementation are in assets for glocal partnering.

CRB-compliant joint initiatives will feed, by creating wikis following the initiative node guidelines, the cumulative growth of the dictionaries and atlas while deploying their contents:

• Atomic entities such as principals, institution objects, entitlements and claims are described in the Entity Dictionary and interact according to patterns that are described in the Interaction Dictionary, yet are compliant to constraints described in Constraint Dictionary .
• Actor Network Theory allows both animate and inanimate actants to participate in interactions. In the Actant Dictionary, the possible roles in interactions of Principals, these are described in the Actor Atlas, are refined, and added to it are other important classes of inanimate actants, especially information actants, or info-actants such as documents, events and services.
• The description of patterns is largely neutral regarding valuations that establish proportions in the interactions, for instance, what is the price of a bread, or what income threshold separates the poor from the non-poor? To support further quantitative and qualitative refinement of the interactions and claims of principals, we must use metrics and measurements. These are introduced in the Indicator Dictionary. The indicators support a range of activities, including the definition of attributes of Institution Objects and Principals, and the specification of quantities in interactions.

Each of the wikis with systematized content commons will be under construction for several more months, volunteer contributions are made alongside tutorial authoring ongoing at http://www.atria.us. Each test relies upon shared systematized content commons. The utility and coverage of these content commons will grow exponentially with the number of contributors.