When collecting information or doing research, I have found this collection of 'Ps' to be a useful way to organize the information, sequence intelligence gathering activities and ensure domain coverage.
People
The most valuable connections are to people. Here I think of domain experts, authors, writers, opinion makers, consultants, brokers, analysts, scholars, maverns, connectors, gatekeepers. These people 'in the know', have extensive social capital, large personal networks, domain cache and reputations. They are often the first to be informed of new developments, they know the context and the history, they can serve as quick filters and they know the questions to ask. Build your people network first.
Places
Where to go, where like-minded folks gather. This could be professional associations, clubs, web pages, listservs, web conferences or blog rings. If you know some thought leaders and can 'hang' in the most advantageous places you are already 60% of the way there. What is now needed is to acquire some domain terminology - know their language and key concepts.
Problems
Understanding and empathy for the key issues and concerns helps you ask interesting questions, gains attention and shows you have done your homework. If you need to gather participation, facilitate conversations, appreciate social groupings or arrange things, a neat list of the current and emergent issues will provide a clear and engaging structure.
Promises
Get a grasp of the benefits, the particular advantages, the rationale and the expected spin-offs. Clarification here helps to appreciate the drivers, what is in it for the players and enables you to position and place your attention to gain cooperation and improve collaboration.
Principles
Drilling down to the core assumptions, the 'rules' and guiding logic helps to see where disparate parts fit. Getting participants to explicate the domain principles quickly raises the level of discourse, surfaces area where there is uncertainty, strong disagreement, divergent beliefs and practices. Talking principles is an easy way around quagmires associated with standards, pet frameworks and personal models.
Patterns
Collecting proven solutions to common recurrent problems is a powerful way to gather and sift community expertise and experience. Helping the participants describe the forces at play, sift and test for optimal solutions that work, having a bounded specified context within which the pattern operates, helps structure domain knowledge. Expanding patterns into a connected pattern language, lifts discourse to new levels, enables the location of gaps and allows the community to talk effectively at high levels of abstraction.
Products
An appreciation of the market, the products and services available gives an immediate feel for the domain needs. It is always useful to classify the tools, services and organizations active within the domain.
We often come to think our collections are 'knowledge', but they remain gatherings of information until engaged by a community, interpreted by individuals, verified and tested in use.
I remember a recent book by Micheal Jackson, "Problem Frames." It was interesting because it turned from the usual focus of programming methodologies away from solutions to problems.
The pattern movement has focused on solutions. All of the software engineering discussion since Dryska has been on solutions.
But, the problem point-of-view is different from the solution point of view. One problem, many answers is the usual practice once you get outside the science classroom.
I just mentioned this, because in the strictest sense problems and solutions are not the same thing. Solutions can be seen as a product. Patterns link the two perspectives in that a pattern solves a specific problem.
At the same time the problem frame and solution frame are points of view. This means that they are ontologies with different sortables. So the question has to be asked, how does a pattern connect the two points of view? Or are patterns just an extention of the solution frame that only marginally connect to the problem.
"Dialgoue: The art of thinking together" talks about the processes involved in aligning and connecting different, irreconcilable points of view.
The various techniques in the book seem to operate on the temporal reorganization of the decision trees, so that the trees share as much commonality as possible. The solution to a war starts with "we are human," "we love our children," .... And, not "This is my piece of dirt!"
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So there is some demonstrated ways to connect disparate ontologies, because they share conceptualizations. Problems and solutions are linked, but only weakly so.
It also seems that problems are social and solutions are technical. In a sense, it is analog-to-digital, or real-to-abstract. This indicates that solutions are the weaker of perspectives. Markets for solutions provide collections of these weaker solutions. People retain the problem spaces not reached by the solutions. The solutions do not entirely fill the econology of the problem. This is consistent with the notion that paradigms contain holes, from which the next paradigm will emerge.
What I see is the same kind of system that we have for law. When laws are written they are too ambiguous and too fragile. The courts use case law to expand and clarify the coverage of the problems that gave rise to the law.
So there should be in Lawrance Lessig's notion that code is law, the complementary notion that court is developement. Which from where I sit isn't served by market forces, because the market niches are too small. So how would one claimant present the case that some functionality was needed, and who would the judge, the coder, see to it that this one claimants needs be met?
Posted by: David Locke | November 08, 2003 at 06:54 AM
Just now, I found myself thinking about how the "knowledge must be free" crowd always struck me as not being the way to create wealth.
I know the the wealthy attend a lot of manditory parties, because that is how they earn a living. They know where to invest and who is doing those things that won't turn into cash for twenty years. They stay ahead of retail. You might say that their wealth is socially constructed. And, it is their social links that matter more than the scoring information called dollars.
So for the information they traffic in, spreading the knowledge is contrary to wealth.
But, what of patents? They work with the opposite hope and that is the widespread knowledge will create wealth. So how can these two views be understood as a single phenomenon?
Network effects. It is not the value of the node that matters, but rather the value of the network that matters.
For patents, widespread knowledge leads to more patents, and thus more value. For the wealthy, widespread knowledge leads to having more people in on the deal and thus reduced risk.
But, the wealthy don't share. Well, neither do disciplines. They share within themselves, and only at the boundaries are their interdisciplinary effects. Wealth works the same way. My boarding school educated buddy hooked me into a network of wealthy people, so it happens.
Networks end up being bound by their onlogical constraints. The concept of the universal access to the Internet, for example, illustrates that the Internet is a bound network and not as ubiquitous as it promises to be one day.
So we keep score with that informational construct we call dollars, but in all of the links is knowledge. So frameworks like Denham's tell us where knowledge can be explicated.
Posted by: David Locke | November 08, 2003 at 06:26 AM