Climate change - and my information seems anarchical - not hierarchical March 25, 2011
It would be great if I could simply orgainse the information I'm dealing with under neat headings and subheading, in logical hierarchies, but life isn't that simple. In my experience information is more anarchical than that. I won't try to explain what I mean - either the observation will make sense to you or it won't, depending on the kind of information you are accustomed to handling and the kind of information flows you are trying to manage.
The thing about information flows is that, well, they flow. And when things are flowing it's hard to get a handle on them. It's not like each information chunk comes neatly organised and labelled, knowing its place and what role it is going to play. Information comes in as drops and deluges - an odd comment here, a pdf there, a meeting, a video, a tweet, a blog, an idea, an insight, a pattern, a conversation, an introduction.... Dadamac-style information flows happen because they need to happen. Our information relates to the people we know, and their interests - plus their communication with each other - so our information flows are as much about relationships between people as they are about the actual information. Our information is hard to pigeon hole. On reflection that makes sense - after all the people in Dadamac's network are pretty hard to pigeon hole as well.
Today I'm thinking that I need to pull together the information that is flowing around climate change. I want to do that to help the work in Coalition of the Willing (CotW) and its ProM project. It would be good if the CotW people could easily see anything that Dadamac has done that relates to climate change - however it's not a simple matter of typing in a search query. It's more complicated than that.
- Where do I start?
- Where do I stop?
- How do I structure and present the information that I find?
- How would CotW like the information presented?
- How much work would it take to present the information I have in the way that CotW prefers?
- Who is going to do that work?
Well I guess I need to have some kind of a hunt through what we've got - but I certainly won't find it neatly filed anywhere under "climate change". I could look in our various archives. I could see what I've mentioned here in dadamac's posterous, find out what what Nikki blogged after all our UK-Nigeria team meetings, go through the archives of our "First Thursday" meetings, check my "email trails" with people who have interests overlapping climate change. I could even check sites I've bookmarked. Probably I'll just start with what comes to mind, and then see if I can find that without too much hassle.
2 - Where do I stop?
Climate change is a huge topic. On the grass-roots side of Dadamac climate change is coming up in the context of agiculture and unexpected weather (problems with when the rains are coming, failed crops, even messages about herd animals dying and serious problems of drought and people not having enough to eat.) On related practical action we are looking at simple irrigation.
Irrigation is simply about climate change and weather - but there are so many more things that are related in one way and another: carbon footprints, alternative energy, appropriate technology, solar power, cooking stoves, food production and processing, permaculture, learning about these things, theory and practice, sharing knowledge, the list could go on. In some ways you could say that almost everything that Dadamac does -Integrating Education and Development in Africa and Online - has some connection with climate change.
3 - How do I structure and present the information that I find?
As a first step I could create one of my dadamac spreadsheets and collect up relevant links there. It's my favourite way of creating a quick collection of links - primarily for my own use, but also easy to share with others, either shared with a few named people, or available to anyone who has the link - for example - Dadamac spreadsheets and docs - compiled 2011
Another thing I could do would be to write up climate change as an initiative on dadamac.net, and point to the spreadsheet from there. (Current list of dadamac initiatives - The initiatives are mostly more "dada" than "mac" regarding the content - and more "mac" than "dada" regarding the structures and systems that made the initiatives visible. The initiatives section of dadamac - like so much else - is a dynamic 'work in progress". We are still discovering how best to select and present information about initiatives)
4 - How would CotW like the information presented?
CotW has a preference for wikis as a starting point for everything. CotW also has some spreadsheets and is using other tools such as Diigo, various etherpads, email lists, ongoing skype chats and some "cards" to fill in at http://prom.openstewardship.net/ about vision, ideas, experiences and frustrations. There is a lot going on.
5 - How much work would it take to present the information I have in the way that CotW prefers?
That depends which of the possibilities above are being used. Some are very different in structure to the structure of the information I could find. Some are much closer. The closer they are the less work that is needed.
6 - Who is going to do that work?
I'm not sure yet but I'm very encouraged that Charley Quinton and I have started to look at this together. He is building the first bridges between Dadamac information and CotW information structures. He has visited dadamac.net and taken some of our information to represent in wiki form, and together we have started to create a spreadsheet of links, around our separate ares of work to date, where there seems to be overlapping interest. He has registed at Dadamac.net, so I can give him some privelages there, and then we can work on updating the climate change initiative together - once I have set it up. I imagine the updates will tell of new wikipages Charley is creating that dadamac people might usefully know about.
So - setting up the climate change initiative, that's another task jostling for position near the top of my to do list.