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Potential quests

Continuing the discussion from Designing Quests:

Turing the remarks from @Jerry into a template:

Project Name:
Envisioned goal:
Other potential outcomes:
Time available:
Accountability structure among participants:
Any associated Mini-Quests:

Next Steps:

Project Name: Complete the Giant Wholeness Egg
Envisioned goal: Make a map of the patterns that describe other groups in OGM’s orbit.
Other potential outcomes: This could turn into a nice paper for one of the PLoP conferences. The last time we wrote a paper for PLoP, we retained the copyright and then waived it to make a nice contribution to the Peeragogy Handbook. Participants will have a chance to learn about “wholeness” (e.g., in connection with readings like the recent book Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole). Practically, getting the wholeness egg completed could help identify “transversal connections” between groups that can render OGM useful to the wider world.
Time available: PLoP submission deadline last year was July 12, expect a similar deadline this year.
Accountability structure among participants: I think scheduling a monthly call about this would probably be enough to make reasonable progress, assuming we have a shared place to do some writing, and people are willing to work with some independence. Someone should be willing to travel to PLoP 2021 (October), if it is in person and pay the registration fee.
Any associated Mini-Quests: Presently we have a Miro Board; participants should be willing to take ownership of at least one of the constituent “eggs” and report progress in a timely manner. (We might decide that some other representation would be better, that’s fine.) If this project is of interest we should start drafting a paper to clarify objectives.

Next steps: I started a thread to discuss further details here: Giant Wholeness Egg — Please follow up there to express interest (or, if you find this proposal baffling, bafflement).

I want to politely indicate that there has been this and this, and me trying via Peeragogy pattern templates to do a form generator for a semantic data repository, which I gave up after Peeragogy PARs continued in their scattered, non-semantic manner as well as Peeragogy dashboard proposal and earlier implementation not being worked on as well as OGM duplicating Peeragogy’s pattern work by starting their pattern jamming from scratch, and then another duplicate getting started again around @Arena’s Catalist (video, project submission form) + CICoLab (including @lovolution) and @BentleyDavis (also consider GameB’s project lists) and maybe other people by now as well or not any more. Would ask about or otherwise suggest joining/contributing-to whatever they’re working on. Or maybe for forum categorization, there’s this for practical OGM projects/activities, or like, wondering if/how forum moderation or beat reporters would collect such posts from Discourse into a repo/brain/directory for later/other use + update + review.

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Thanks for the links and discussion. I see two likely themes here:

(1) The Potential Quests theme — Yes, this is similar to the Invitation: Design + build a collection and feed of project invitations/requests thread — do you think the template I tried above be useful to such an effort? Is a template needed? The Catalist “project submission form” seems much more heavy, and I could imagine people getting scared off by the amount of detail requested there. But, people might not even be willing to fill in a few lines of a template either! I’d say a paucity of total effort is likely to be a much bigger problem here than dilution of that effort across different venues (but I could be wrong). It’s not quite clear if the principals you mentioned want help with their project-curation-and-generation projects, though they might! I’d welcome some further detail on the status and direction of these projects from @Arena @lovolution and @BentleyDavis — ?

(2) The Wholeness egg proposal, directly above, which serves as an example of the “potential quests” template — I don’t think that’s the main focus of your remark but it occurs to me that maybe the template that we used to make the OGM egg could be better for quests (also) than the “quest” template I proposed, viz.,

1. Core Purpose
2. Defining Characteristics
3. Values
4. Scope of Work
5. Participants
6. Strategic Objectives
7. Key Operating Principles and Practices
8. Sustainability Model

Granted in the OGM context it took quite some time to even come up with preliminary answers to these question — and some projects might not view them as the right set of questions for them. Maybe quests need different sets of questions than projects at this level. But then, it would be interesting to think about how the two sets of questions relate!
Lastly, I do want to stress that with the Wholeness Egg quest, I am talking about concrete up-and-running projects (not proposals) — and I imagine that there might be a dozen or so of these that could benefit from mutual contact, and that define the operating context of OGM. Even so, completing the task would require a level of buy-in from these groups, and as yet we don’t seem to have it: maybe it will come into focus later!

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Hi Joe, thanks a lot, makes all sense. Trying to be very brief: you probably know better than anyone that I’m much in favor of these templates and minimum viable ontologies/semantics, and also have some opinions of my own how these things could/should work, but keeping them for now. Your template is of course a candidate the existing public data could be converted into, which in part may be a lossy conversion and not really identical in terms of semantic meaning, but who cares, give or take, for viability and especially the use of such data, exact precision doesn’t matter too much, can be relaxed somewhat IMHO. So yes, looking at Nancy’s fields/template so far, if anybody is on Murmurations already, or if yours might be a convenient format to prepare the repository/collection/list a bit to then shovel/distribute these entries to whomever would want/accept them, entirely possible if there’s no objection or other issue we might be missing.

Indeed, the Wholeness Egg project description, I looked for now more at it as example data, just because the pattern template/format is a new one getting introduced, rudely hijacking the intended topic of the thread. Coincidentally, the Wholeness Egg might as well serve as an visualization and/or data entry tool/instrument, for grouping other data than just groups, for example projects by topic, or something like that. Don’t know if somebody would work on the technical side for such an attempt, in any case: guess you’re asking primarily who would content-wise contribute, adding other groups. I have my own small list, sure, and I wonder if somebody would want to mine/review OGM’s Neighbor Communities in Jerry’s Brain (or if that would only lead to duplication), and of course let’s not forget this thread potentially struggling with commitment of somebody transferring the entries. Again and similarly, if these links get onto the Wholeness Egg, how to get it out again, equally as well as if posted on Discourse, how to get it out again? Same for Catalist, and everything else.

For an outside observation of OGM, could be relevant to consider that it also has its graph rescue operation going on, and it’s a much larger + diverse group of people for discussing and arranging their views towards some understanding (not necessarily agreement), and there’s also a serious shortage of technical capacity that’s available and not occupied with the graph project. Also makes it difficult for curation and facilitators to reasonably, effectively contribute, if there’s no technical/tooling support.

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OGM’s Neighbor Communities

Yes, this would certainly be good input! If @Jerry would like to coauthor such a paper his place is certainly secured in advance! “Data curation” is already enough to earn an authorship CReDiT — though only useful (in that regard) if a paper comes into being, 'natch.

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The projects I was working on that seem similar have all stalled. I am considering working on some underling technology that came out of those attempts but it may end up being a different focus. The Complete the Giant Wholeness Egg project overlaps in the problem space but not in the solution. The one I am working on now is a matching system which will allow for better searching on a list. Crowd Matching/ Rating/ Review System Builder

I’ll keep an eye on this project as is does tickle my fancy.

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Briefly on the Wholeness Egg itself, it’s some visual, manual grouping again, which is not my cup of tea. Could be the Peeragogy dashboard + data entry input forms instead. And yes, rating/matching engine underneath maybe? But in any event, Wholeness Egg is an excellent exercise and starting point to collect and get some entries down, to then potentially proceed from there or not. Just there are a bunch of maps and lists already, insofar duplication goes.

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I haven’t seen anything yet that deals adequately with relationships between the various projects/groups… and the Wholeness Egg should definitely be seen as a form of sketching. The OGM Workshop Group 1 output uses that kind of sketch to make a more structured “pattern language” — but the broader exercise across different groups would (1) double-check the salience of that; (2) expand it in scope. So, I very much hope that we could produce something that’s suitable for peeragogy dashboard + data entry as well, in the process! In particular, it would be good to expand the patterns with “next steps”.

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Apologies, I’m conflating them in my mind easily and all the time, for the simple reason that the visual instrument of having a bunch of boxes or circles for grouping can be used for both, filling these with neighbor community entries or project entries just as well, no reason to statically fix it to a particular, specific one, except of course it’s all done manually as flat, dumb data exclusively for humans to arrange and consume.

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The Wholeness Egg may prove very inadequate for expanding the relationships between groups — so indeed, it’s more about the manual process and conversations that happen alongside.

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Hey Joe,

@peterkaminski would agree with you that the “project submission form” in it’s current form is too heavy, and after taking another look at it I feel the same way.

For the reason of different opinions on where to draw that line/balance, we are working on some different approaches which balance “simplicity of submission” vs “ease of find-ability and matchmaking” - the more detailed a project the easier it is for someone with limited knowledge to say “oh, i saw this project you’d be interested in” or for a computer to make a match because there are topics/values in common or “matches” with data fields between two projects or someone seeking to work on a project and a project submitted.

The form was a result of me compiling a comprehensive “super-set” list of the major questions that I saw in different project directories, with the intention of finding others that want to help. Next step IMO is to test out the form, get feedback (yours is valuable as well) make different versions (some with more/less info, easy to just hide fields 8-11) see what fields are most often skipped or not filled-out well. Lets set up a time to chat if this aligns with your interests?

@BentleyDavis are any of the 10 or so projects in the togethertec list “up to date”? If not, fine, If so could i include any of these that are yours in the list we are building or would you prefer I link to the togethertec project list?

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Sorry for such a naive question, but would you please point me to the input collected so far? Is there a strategy around licensing/use/reuse of the data?

@Arena feel free to use the data. I can’t vouch for how up to date it is except for my projects.

Also, in thinking through this I would prefer to have the data pulled from my site like Murmurations. The main description and logos etc, should probably be pulled from the sites social media data where possible. That would reduce the work in keeping part of it up to date. You could also archive it if the site is not responsive.

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Okay thanks Bentley, for now I added the sites that were up to date… maybe we can chat more about setting it up to pull the info via murmurations at some point. Think it’s easy to pull this into Airtable for now?

Best,
Vincent

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In order to support the story aspect of this I might suggest adding a parallel frame: How the world was before and what sparked the journey (why this matters), what the great challenge was/is (what it is), what attracted the powerful collaboration (who’s involved and the pieces they bring), and what is the world we envision after (outcomes).

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I tried an example, I wonder what you think? Potential quests, reducks

Sorry for being MIA and noting I will probably STAY MIA, but I owe a response as @StephanKreutzer was kind enough to email me about this last month. My experience in non-technical communities is that a set of minimum specifications (min specs) in a template, with lots of permission to add more and question the process (grin) works well. I typically like to do a two step PURPOSE/MIN SPECS exercise to kick it off. By purpose, I don’t mean some high, mom-and-applepie-vision, but something pretty concrete such as:

The purpose of identifying the minimum specs of projects/questions/eggs inside of OGM exists to (describe benefits) for (describe who benefits ) so that they can (describe outcome or impact as concretely as possible.) We know we are making progress on our purpose when (describe some kid of indicator).

Then the min specs are built off of the purpose. Practically, it takes a few iterations between purpose and min specs as we discover what really matters. See http://www.liberatingstructures.com/3-nine-whys/ for digging into purpose, with the purpose statement as the outcome, and Min Specs http://www.liberatingstructures.com/14-min-specs/

OK, I’m disappearing again. :slight_smile:

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Great feedback. This reminds me of what I learned about Causal Layered Analysis as well, which boils down to answering this:

‘What is our vision for change and how is progress measurable?’

I can try to sharpen up my description of the Peeragogy project using these questions.

These seem like useful rubrics under which to review, e.g., grant proposals as well. Here in the UK at least there’s some detailed guidance on how to write about “Academic Beneficiaries” in particular; alongside broader review criteria.

That said one of the questions from a ‘paragogical’ standpoint is how to come up with good proposals in the first place, since “review” is only really applicable once you have something in hand. Finding good questions is itself a kind of “quest”, isn’t it?

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