I gotta admit that I don’t fully understand what you’re envisioning here and that much of my ignorance is technical = when you mention the term “community ICT” in your original post and then later in you correspondence with angusparker, you guys mention the terms “API” and “data models” = I had to look up via google these terms just to gain a foothold in this conversation.

Thanks much for mentioning Gideon’s paper “Movement as Network” = that seemed to bring me up to speed with respect to self-organizing metaphors in general and with conscious and compassionate (after all, if we’re gonna actually enrich our public good then we may as well bring our best games) community-response to eco-crises in particular.

BTW, I love your use of “attractors” here! I’m not sure how best to tap into it as a resource and yet I’m convinced that basic human-attraction = that which we the people actually love = is necessary (and perhaps even sufficient) to help us clean-up and get-out-of our current eco-messes and, at least as importantly, also help us redirect our evolutionary courses so that we prevent such mess-making tendencies from getting so out-of-control in the first place.

So, I’m all in favor of our common human capacity to be attracted, to appreciate, to love, to evolve (or whatever we want to call such a commons) becoming much more of an explicit design component and perhaps even an organizing principle for the efforts/results you’re envisioning here.

If I’m catching your drift, you’re aiming to push our collective-envelope in terms of how the designs and uses of our info-tech infrastructure can continue to evolve to best support individual human beings teaming-up to help manage our emergent eco-crises, globally and locally. Am I at least in the ballpark here? Or am I projecting more of my own biases?

If I’m not too far off-base with respect to this here conversation and if the notion of “evolution” can serve as a guiding influence on the designs of our emergent info-tech infrastructures is at all supportive of your aim, your image, your vision then let’s consider entertaining our common notions of evolution as a sort of meta-attractor. What’s really, truly, actually, sustainably, thrivably super-attractive for each and every human life-form? I don’t claim to know the answer and yet I’m pretty sure evolution’s in the mix!

Evolutionary, open-source, self-selecting, self-organizing etc., human activity systems are quite attractive to me and I trust they already are to many if not most of my fellow-species members who share in the whole commons = life on Earth.

I trust my two-cents is coherent enough and relevant enough to this conversation.

Ciao for now,

paul

The first step we need to take, as a practical measure is to document our data models, announce them as public data standards and invite critique of the data model, and invite use or adoption of the model by others. If we can move in the direction of a useful data model that spans any one organization or effort, we have the basis for tremendously relevant data flows.

Too often we’re caught with only the beginning of a good idea. Having an Open API sounds like a great thing, but t isn’t enough and often doesn’t bear the fruit we intended.

If we design our API with concrete partnerships in mind, and make them public and open, with a commitment to the long-term stability or maintenance of that standard that that implies, we’ll foster a better ecology of information flows, and a better culture of information sharing between groups and causes committed to the social benefit sector.

In the WISER Earth context, I’d be clear that the organization index constitutes an open and public data model, with a page documenting the choices that led to the specific fields in that data model, and what those fields are.

I have not been able to follow your progress close enough in recent months, and I would love ot learn what elements of your API have been established and opened.

I’m leading the redevelopment of the Catalytic Communities website (http://www.catcomm.org), and we’d love to rely upon WISER Earth for organizational data. We see no reason why someone contributing a Solution to our site should have to enter all the data on their organization when it’s already in the WE system.

So, we want to be able to check if such and such organization is in WE, and when it is, we’d rely upon that data, and when it isn’t in WE, there would be a mechanism whereby the organizational data would be added to the WE dataset.

I’m speaking at a very general level, but now that we’ve got our basic tools in place, we’re ready to actively move on these fronts, and we invite your partnership in this endeavor. Certainly the WE name has a good deal of respect and recognition, and if WE provides this sort of leadership, we’ll achieve a great deal together.

Regards,

Michael