education

More than 150 years ago, public libraries started to provide people with information and knowledge that would otherwise have been out of reach. Through a publicly-funded lender, ordinary people such as Samuel Johnson’s “common reader” could discover more and better books. At a library open to all, any ambitious working-class youth could seek self-improvement; Andrew Carnegie, future benefactor of public libraries around the world, educated himself as a young immigrant only through the kindness of the owner of a private library.

Broad public support for the sober and egalitarian institution of the public library allows citizens to encounter difficult, provocative and unpopular ideas. Public libraries embody both the characteristics of their communities and the principles of intellectual freedom. More of one may lead to less of the other. The challenge of liberating libraries is to benefit from the justified pride that communities take in their public libraries while encouraging greater efforts toward intellectual freedom.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares the right of intellectual freedom: “to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” This freedom of opinion and expression for all citizens underlies a society’s capacity to recognize and realize new possibilities. Civic participation requires access to information and life-long education. Prosperity in a free society depends upon the creativity which comes from diverse and challenging ideas. Democracy's survival over time calls for adaptability and critical thought in the face of change.

Through professional associations such as the American Libraries Association (ALA) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), librarians advocate the principles of intellectual freedom. The pressures that they experience tell us about the obstacles to these principles. Among these obstacles are money, location, coercion, private interests, lack of privacy, and pressure toward conformity.

Public libraries provide services regardless of the ability to pay; they serve everyone equally, including those for whom money would otherwise present an obstacle. Though the public library may enjoy broad public approval, funding for this free and open source of information is seldom easily come by.

Public libraries provide services regardless of location. Whether in inner cities or remote rural outposts, they reach people who might otherwise not encounter the information and ideas that libraries offer.

Public libraries provide services regardless of coercion and censorship. They exist to bring people and ideas together, not to separate them. Public libraries operate at arm’s length from their sponsors, whether government, taxpayers, volunteer fundraisers (such as Friends groups) or private donors. Despite this, they often struggle with the restriction of information by governments, by self-censorship among librarians, and by those who seek to impose their standards or tastes on others.

Public libraries provide services independently of private interests. While respecting intellectual property, public libraries give priority to their patrons over commercial concerns, advocates of particular views, and any other interests which may distort the free flow of information and ideas.

Public libraries protect the privacy of their patrons. They encourage people to access information and ideas by maintaining the confidentiality of what they look for, look at, and communicate.

Public libraries resist pressures toward conformity which arise even where the diversity of information and ideas is growing. They take pride in providing ideas and information which are “unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority” (American Library Association, 2004).

As an “information commons” (Kranich, 2004, p. 281), the public library provides a forum for information and ideas, it offers new ways to access information, and it recognizes freedom of opinion and expression as the basis of democratic society. Though its strategies and services go beyond the printed word and beyond the walls of the library building, the public library also offers those who love “that magical hinged object, the book” (Holroyd, 1999, p. 143) a refuge from the possibly less subversive distractions of technology and contemporary media.

Public libraries develop access to information in many ways. Individual libraries provide computer access and guidance to patrons, including those who have no other means of using the Internet. Regional aggregation of library catalogs and databases offers patrons a collection much richer than any one library could maintain. Libraries are active in making government information more available, and they work to influence legislation to prevent intellectual property rights from adding new obstacles to access.

Public libraries have long worked to develop skills, most often needed by their underserved constituents, in language, literacy, and technology. As more information of increasingly variable quality becomes available, it becomes more and more necessary to evaluate its integrity and independence. With their staff and their patrons, public libraries are beginning to cultivate information literacy: the skills necessary to find, use, and critically evaluate information from many sources.

Side by side with public libraries' broad mission for an informed and active citizenry is a focus on the local community and civic dialog. The typical public library offers a public gathering space, available to all regardless of opinion or creed. It may provide a network connection to the local school so that youngsters can use library computers to perform their homework assignments. It may maintain an archive of local history and records, and care for cultural artifacts (such as paintings, for example) of local significance. This local focus can lead to collaborations with other local stakeholders; for example, in the case of a major local environmental issue such as industrial river pollution, the library may work with a government agency to host community meetings and include copies of the agency’s reports in a collection of documents related to the issue.

Public libraries have a special mission to serve their underserved or “information poor” (Kranich, 2004, p. 287) constituents. Groups such as urban minorities and rural communities have special difficulty in surmounting the obstacles to accessing and using information and ideas. In some parts of the world, such as the rural north of Peru served by the Rural Library Network (Medcalf, 1999), library services develop literacy through books and storytelling. In situations such as this, public libraries transport books on foot or by pack animal—camels in Kenya, donkeys in Zimbabwe.

The public library is an established institution which offers a model for building new institutions and services. It enjoys broad public respect and support, and promotes principles central to democracy and development: (a) intellectual freedom, (b) access to information and to ideas both fashionable and unfashionable, and (c) serving the needs of the underrepresented. If the Navajo call the library a “house of papers,” it can be much more; through new technologies, new partnerships, and new services it offers what Josh Cohen, director of the Mid-Hudson Library System (www.midhudson.org), calls “one of the cornerstones of democracy and one of the building blocks of a strong community.”

Durable assets in sustainable development can be summarized within four sections: natural capital (natural resource assets), reproducible capital (durable structures or equipment produced by human beings), human capital (the productive potential of human beings), and social capital (norms and institutions that influence the interactions among humans). The idea of durable assets is that they are capable of generating flows of goods and services (Rust, 1985).

Here is a simple list of some concrete examples of Durable Assets in which peoples can acquire to support their overall economic security:

• Automobiles
• Land for cultivation
• Computers
• Sewing Machines
• Tools
• Livestock

This list is by no means meant to be exhaustive but rather meant to illuminate the types of durable assets that can be acquired to provide peoples and families greater means of supporting their livelihoods, both in times of relative prosperity, as well as in those times that prove to be not so prosperous.

Overall, this pattern emphasizes both a focus (and approach) and concrete goal of engendering livelihood development for peoples left without the means to ensure their own survival. The foundation of a durable assets approach follows from the understandings that fully relying upon one's own labor can be problematic in regions in which the economy is vulnerable to dramatic transitions. By giving peoples the power of ownership over their own lives in the good times as well as the bad yet another layer of protection can be added to avoid situations of furthered "hardcore poverty".

For example, throughout South Asia there is a movement of development driven by the creation of women's Self-Help Groups. In these groups people collectively save in order to acquire loans or assets to acquire the tools to initiate income generating activities. Many start-up shops as seamstresses, or begin poultry farming, some go on to open small stores and others as in the case of the Graemeen Bank's cell phone program, provide cell service to local people. In each of these examples, a common thread is the tools used. The seamstress must posses a sewing machine to pursue her business, just as the poultry farmer needs the livestock and the land. The cell phone ladies in Bangladesh would not be if it weren't for their ownership of the cell phones they use to run their businesses; just as the fisher would go hungry without his tools, so too would farmer without his land, and taxi driver without her taxi.

This isn't meant to negate the role of creativity of individual or group creativity to generate income, but it the pattern highlights a useful view on how to facilitate the inherent creativity of people for pursuing livelihoods for themselves and their families.

However, as long as there exists any durable asset, it is capable of possessing monetary attributes and, therefore, of giving rise to the characteristic problems of a monetary economy (Keynes, 1936). Therefore this pattern could be perceived to reinforce oppressive or unfair economic systems. Yet, despite this issue the reality remains that over a billion people live in extreme poverty without the means to feed or protect their families in times of greater economic hardship; to ignore this fact based upon arguments against the current economic system is perhaps to make a bad situation worse, and only perpetuate socio-economic inequalities.

Young people are encountering peace education in a variety of modes: Volunteer lawyers in Washington and other states teach mediation in the public schools. Community groups working with teenagers in trouble teach “straight talk,” a system for engaging directly with potential critics. Families too, have a choice between authoritarian parental powers and developing their members' negotiation skills, although if children are to learn to negotiate, parents must really be willing to change in response to their child’s arguments.

Since peace and justice are intertwined, peace education requires also that the younger generations learn also about achieving justice. Addressing topics relating to economic, ethnic, class, religious and other injustices remains controversial in US public education, but many schools and colleges have begun to open discussion of these issues.

Japan makes a significant investment in peace education for the young, through a large network of museums and peace sites. Most school programs are focused in on peace as it relates to World War II and indeed some of the facilities Japan describes as peace museums, others might label war museums or memorials. Nonetheless, through the cities and citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan has been a world leader in reminding people of the urgent perils of nuclear weaponry.

Peace education and peace research are linked and in 1981, under the leadership of Sen. Matsunaga of Hawaii, the US government set up an Institute of Peace. Since the ending of the Cold War, when it became legitimate once again think more about peace, US universities have founded significant programs, including undergraduate studies at Hampshire College, and graduate programs at George Mason University and Antioch. Europe, too, has seen considerable investment in university level education in peace studies and Europeans seem more willing than Americans to take an assertive stance in favor of peace. One outstanding program in Britain is at Bradford University, another at Lancaster. Among international institutions, Vienna is host to the UNESCO supported European University Center for Peace Studies and the United Nations Peace University is centered in Costa Rica with affiliated institutions in Geneva and Toronto among other places.

Large scale, institutionalized settings for peace education are complemented by dozens of of smaller venues in temples and shrines, churches and mosques, in peace camps for youngsters from war zones, in anger management courses and other therapist communities, in contemplative practices and even in martial arts training. The right environment for peace education can be found to match almost any age, mood, and orientation.

Still, the agressive, competitive and vengeful energies in most societies are given precedence over the peaceful in the media, in business and commerce, in sports, in law and even in education.

This pattern links to Teaching to Transgress, Education and Values, Citizenship School,

Breast Cancer Action Nova Scotia's (BCANS http://www.bca.ns.ca) interactive site is the world's largest and oldest breast cancer discussion site, indeed one of the oldest medical mutual-help sites in existence, dating from 1996 when it was started by a volunteer. The site began a period of fast growth in 1998 and in 2002 was reported to have about 400 closely involved "regulars", a wider circle of people who drop in now and then, and an unknown number of lurkers, some of them long-term. Not only women but a few men with breast cancer post to this group, as well as husbands, sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, and friends. Although the majority of users are American, with about one-fourth Canadian, the site also hosts visitors from all the other continents, notably a large and active contingent from Australia and New Zealand, numerous Europeans, and participants from Turkey, South Africa, India, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.

Participants in the website can give and receive:
• reassurance and caring;
• informal advice to cope with the myriad sub-acute problems that arise;
• encouragement to stick with medical treatment regimens;
• professional medical information, such as details of new clinical trials;
• support for questioning conventional medical wisdom;
• material goods such as cards, gifts, and funds.

The site also includes tributes to those who have died; a collection of links to specific breast cancer topics; and a glossary of more than 400 breast cancer-related terms.

Since its launch with a single discussion forum, an interactive calendar for local (Halifax, Nova Scotia) activities, and a mission statement, BCANS has grown into a community that has written books, given conference presentations, appeared on TV and radio, launched a fundraising arm, and formed numerous in-person friendships.

To account for the success of BCANS, Patricia Radin turned to social capital theory, which analyzes the elements of beneficial social networks. According to the literature, trust is at the heart of a "virtuous circle" of activity wherein people voluntarily help each other, receive benefits in return, and again reach out to provide assistance. Although social capital theory was developed by looking at networks of people working face-to-face in bounded situations, it appears applicable to any context where mutual assistance is being rendered, such as an online medical mutual-help group.

Some specific features of site design and operations help to move visitors progressively toward a state of greater trust and reciprocity.

• An alert webmistress fiercely protects the community from hurtful messages, spam, and exploitation, thus promoting a high level of trust and goodwill.
• As well as the main forum discussing breast cancer issues, there are now additional sub-forums: e.g. one to accommodate groups planning get-togethers and one to allow for the swapping of recipes, jokes, and so on.
• A "prayer chain" section is available for users to post spiritual messages.
• Chat rooms are open 24 hours a day, but particular times are specified when a ‘host’ will be available to welcome newcomers to the chat room.
• There are two ways for participants to post permanent self-introductions (including photos): by filing a profile, which is then automatically linked with each message; and by posting an autobiography in a password-protected section accessible only to others who have filed a "biog." Many personal friendships have been formed and some community members visit the discussions as often as three times a day.

These features allow new visitors to size up the costs/benefits of participation in a risk-free environment; it allows longer-term users to stage their level of self-disclosure; choose from many ways to contribute and receive from the group; and to take part in shared experiences, both virtual and face-to-face; and it gives the more established community members chances to develop personal relationships and initiate projects of mutual benefit.

This pattern is in memory of Patricia Radin who is the original author.

Everyday conversation, though often purposeful, is informal; it doesn't rely on an agenda, defined roles, or precisely delineated rules of interacton. To overcome the unpredictabilty of this type of human interaction, systematic rules have been created to facilitate purposeful group meetings whose objective is to produce collective decisions. One of the earliest set of "parliamentary procedures" was formulated in 1876 by Henry Robert in a treatise entitled "Roberts Rules of Order". "Roberts Rules", as they have come to be known, have been widely adopted as a means to fairly and equitably conduct the business of group meetings and provide a method to ensure that all parties within the group have the opportunity to participate in the decision making process. At the same time Roberts Rules ensure that no minority interest can exert undue influence on the process.

The advent of the Internet has provided an opportunity to combine the democratic principles (such as Roberts Rules of Order), with modern interactive communication technologies, to provide new web-based meeting facilitation systems. Ideally, online deliberations systems would allow people to come together as peers in an "on-line" environment and conduct "official" business meetings without being present in the same physical location. The plethora of online discussion systems, especially when contrasted to the scarcity of deliberative systems suggests the difficulty of this enterprise.

While working in and with a team of students at The Evergreen State College the authors of this pattern were involved in the development of eLiberate a working prototype developed using Linux, MySql, Apache, and PHP. The application provides facilities to create groups and to create and schedule meetings. Then, using written (typed) rather than spoken input, the system facilitates meeting by coordinating user interactions (such as making motions), conducting and tallying votes, and providing an archive facility for official minutes.

Online deliberation substitutes one set of advantages and disadvantages for the set that face-to-face deliberation offers. In general the broad criteria of either approach include access to the process, efficacy of the process (including individual involvement and process as a whole, and the context (including legal requirements, etc.). Of course these criteria overlap to some degree and influence each other.

Although face-to-face deliberation is basically "low-tech," physically getting to meetings may involve costly, "high-tech" travel. Then, once physically present at a face-to-face meeting, effective participation depends on the skills (including, for example, how to use Roberts Rules of Order), intentions and knowledge of the individuals. It also depends (of course!) on the skills, intentions and knowledge of the other participants in the meeting — including the chair.

By making access to a computer (connected to the Internet) a prerequisite to participation online deliberation adds an access hurdle comprised of cost, geography, and computer fluency. Depending on the characteristics of the potential attendees this barrier may be more than offset by the advantages that online deliberations could provide. If, for example, the meeting attendees are drawn from western Europe and the United States, it is likely the case that costs associated with computer communication will be less than transportation costs. As a matter of fact, online deliberation makes the prospect of more-or-less synchronous discussions / deliberations among people around the world possible, although here the tyranny of time zones and humankind's intrinsic circadian rhythms (which encourage us to sleep at night and stay awake in the daylight hours) become a mitigating factor: making decisions while many of the attendees are sleeping is one formula for dysfunctional meetings. The very fact that worldwide meetings become possible however provides an enormously fertile ground for civil society opportunities. (See, for example, the World Citizen Parliament pattern.)

Knowledge of the topics under discussion, knowledge of the process (Roberts Rules of Order, for example) and command of the language(s) being used in the discussion can also be obstacles to effective and equitable face-to-face as well online deliberation. Online environments, however, have the potential of alleviating, at least to some degree, some of the disadvantages that seem to be intrinsic to face-to-face settings. In the eLiberate example mentioned above attendees can select a "language pack" so that the appropriate Roberts Rules process word or phrase (such as "I second the motion") will be presented in the attendee's own language. Note that this is not machine ("on-the-fly") translation. Moreover it has no bearing whatsoever on the content of the meeting — what the participants actually contributed — it determines only which of several equivalent language sets of the Roberts Rules "meta-language" is displayed to each user. The possibility for automatic "machine translation" to be put to work on all attendee input so that attendee only saw input to the meeting in their own language. Of course machine translation is imperfect at best — and may always remain so. Try, for example, transforming some verbiage into another language and back again via a machine translation system on the web. The result generally bears no resemblance to the original. On the other hand, translation by humans is not perfect either; relying as it does on the skills of the human translator. For those reasons it may be well-advised for reasons of transparency and integrity of the process to make both (or all) original and machine-translated language versions available for inspection with the other meeting contributions in the database. (Today as I write this a transcript of an interview with me appeared in a Sao Paulo newspaper: my utterance "couldn't" was transcribed as "could" — an easy mistake that totally inverts the meaning!) So, while free and reliable electronic translation is desirable, high-quality human translation could be inserted into the process as appropriate. This could only be as "simultaneous" and as accurate as the skills and availability of the human translator interposed within the process would allow. The needs discussed above for multiple versions and for long-term storage are appropriate in the case of human translation as well.

The online environment offers other potential advantages. One obvious benefit is that only the actions that are allowable within the deliberation process at that time are displayed to the individual participants. This, in theory, can help reduce problems that are commonplace with meeting attendees who are not thoroughly familiar with the Roberts Rules conventions). Online systems can also provide online "help systems." Within eLiberate, for example, users can view descriptions of how and when specific actions are used. Also, as previously mentioned, a meeting transcript can be automatically created and votes can automatically be tabulated as well.

Community organizations dealing with local traumatic events, families with a personal story of injustice, even an entity as large as the United States with its dark history of slavery can consider creating a Truth, Reconciliation and Amnesty Commission. A Commission holding hearings will allow the actual history to be revealed by taking testimony from a wide variety of perspectives, and will also become a forum in which adversaries can approach each other without insisting on punishment or revenge. Perhaps surprisingly, a narrative, anecdotal yet full recounting of painful truth contributes substantially to restoring the harmony and vitality of the community for the future.

South Africa’s the most famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but there have been dozens of others.Many have played an important role in repairing community rifts without furthering the suffering for most people. In South Africa, an indigenously inspired and funded project, heard thousands of testimonies and disposed of over 3000 requests for amnesty. Guatemala's TRC was more centralized and UN sponsored. A key outcome of the latter's work came in an apology from the United States for its abusive interventions Guatemalan affairs.

TRCs offer a substitute for traditional disaster adjudication systems, which usually take one of the following three forms: insurance payments/liability law suits, government investigations/hearings, criminal trials and punishments. While each of these has its place, all three are concerned above all with blame for the past. Furthermore, legal and official procedures traditionally depend on arcane jargon and they tend to be expensive, long drawn out and highly centralized. Since they are dominated by experts, traditional dispute forums tend to marginalize the ordinary people who actually experience traumatic events. UN War Crimes Tribunals for Rwanda and Bosnia, which refuse to consider amnesty, have been bedeviled by the failings of court-based systems.

TRC style hearings are quite different. They are relatively informal so they are commensurately cheaper and can take place anywhere in an affected area. If they follow the South African model, hearings are not adversarial, they do not assign guilt or innocence and they are carried out in the local, natural language. In 2004 in Greensboro NC, hearings about 1979 slaughter of four civil rights activists offered an opportunity for people to continue on with a process that had actually been cut off in the courts.

TRC Commissioners need to attend openheartedly to the voices of suffering, to ask probing questions about responsibility and action so as to determine if the truth has indeed been told. Their success depends on the integrity of these commissioners. It also depends on careful recording and distribution of the testimonies. Participation, both for witnesses and those accused of doing harm has traditionally been voluntary, in the sense that no-one faces additional legal sanctions from their society for failing to appear, though community hostility can be hard on those who reject the Commission's request to appear.

The strongest argument against TRC proceedings is precisely the strongest argument in favor of them: that such hearings are not the forum for punishing a perpetrator. Victim opponents of TRCs fear being deprived of justice. Perpetrators worry that the hearings are merely fishing expeditions to search out the guilty who will then be punished. Theorists are concerned that perpetrators who are not prosecuted under such a system will find they can act with impunity In South Africa some victims remained critical to the end, but many discovered that the new knowledge they gleaned at the hearings about what happened and why proved much stronger in easing their hearts than the had expected. And nothing about these hearings need prevent judicial action. Indeed in recent years there have been examples of re-opening judicial proceedings with a similar intent, for example the 2005 recreation and new "trial" of Chief Leshi leading his exoneration in Washington State, a hundred years after his execution.

Establishing a successful commission depends on preparing the groundwork on many issues. The factors identified by the Truth Commission Project (see below) include
• By whom/under whose name the commission is established
• When the commission is established and how far back it reaches
• Prevailing focus on healing or justice
• Public support for a truth commission
• Geographic horizon for Investigation
• Legal Powers of Investigation
• Rejecting anonymous and confidential testimonies
• Visibility of Hearings
• Degree of Formality of Hearings
• Whether or not to offer Amnesty
• Completion, Publication and Distribution/ Accessibilityof report

While most actual TRC hearings have been conducted in former war zones, it is easy to discern other issues which could benefit from this process:

1) The United States government and the American people could people re-examine the costs of the slave trade and the centuries of slave labor and yet minimize the likelihood that the acknowledgement of history becomes the basis furious revenge.
2) Or the people and the different levels of government could investigate the events of the New Orleans 2005 catastrophe without focusing narrowly on blame and thereby prompting an onslaught of liability law suits.
3) Or the residents and former residents of Hanford-Washington, Chernobyl-Ukraine, and Ukraine, and Bikini Island and other nuclear sites could craft public history out of the secrecy which surrounded the nuclear programs of the 20th century. At the same time they would create a forum for dialogue with the builders of the weapons and power plants who have left behind a radioactive legacy that will last for millennia.

This pattern links to Memory and Responsibility, Witnessing, Transparency, Community Inquiry, International Law

Forces:

Many processes are too complex to be understood in detail by one person.
Performance on a task is generally a logarithmic function of time on task.
A person's time is limited.
Complex systems are typically designed and built by decomposition.
Systems to automate, semi-automate, or coordinate are generally designed by people who are not the people who actually do the tasks.
Designs can never anticipate all contingencies.
Human beings can negotiate to solve novel coordination problems via conversation.
People find conversation in the service of finding and solving problems rewarding.
People are subject to forming "in-groups" and "out-groups."
If "in-groups" and "out-groups" are formed, rather than negotiating a solution to a problem that is globally optimal, each group will try to "win" by forcing the solution that is optimal for their subfunction.

Examples:

Historically, many organizations have recognized the need for such informal conversational ties and have provided both special places (Officer's Club; Traditional Pub; Company Cafeterias) and events (Company Picnics; Religious Retreats; Holiday Parties; Clubs) to facilitate such interchanges. As organizations attempt integration across ever wider scales however, providing appropriate venues becomes increasingly challenging.
In some cases, two related functions report to a single manager and the manager may serve as a communication bridge. Clearly, however, in complex organizations, formal management methods alone will be insufficient for coordination across all the boundaries.
When links in a processing chain do not converse, inefficiency results. For example, telecommunications company Customer Service Reps gave out credit card numbers to business customers. However, they had to get these numbers from the accounting department. The customer service reps were only allowed to make outbound calls between 12 and 1. The accounting department generally had lunch between 12 and 1. As a result, it was often many days before customers were able to begin using their business accounts. The accounting department and the customer service reps also disliked each other, had no informal contact, and when other coordination problems arose, generally blamed each other.

The same general difficulty arises in attempting to deal with any complex problem; e.g., attempting to voluntarily and democratically facilitate social change. For instance, in the pattern, "Community of Communities" it is possible for various communities to develop plans that inadvertently interfer with each other. That is why it is useful, on a regular basis, to have conversations that cross community boundaries.

At IBM Research, I used to play a lot of tennis with other IBMers including an inter-company league. Here, I met someone in the corporate tax department named Frank.
I also used a system which returned the abstracts of scientific and technical articles that contained key-words of interest. Such systems return many false positives. One in particular had nothing whatever to do with my interests; it was about a new federal program that allowed highly profitable companies to trade tax credits with companies that were losing money. Instead of throwing this in the trash, because I had had conversations with Frank, I forwarded him the abstract. He looked into this program and saved a lot of money for IBM. This case illustrates that ideally even people with no obvious process connection should be able to converse informally.
In planning the first Universal Usability Conference (ACM SIGCHI), it was necessary to delegate various functions to various parties. We attempted to plan ahead of time by standard tools such as budgets and project timelines. A weekly conference call proved crucial in allowing us to identify and solve unanticipated problems effectively and efficiently.
In WorldJam (an on-line 3 day company-wide electronic meeting for all IBMers), moderators and facilitators used Babble (an electronic blended synchronous/asynchonous chat) and Sametime (a synchronous chat system) as backchannels to collectively solve problems and coordinate information among jam topics.
In Hanna Pavillion, a children's psychiatric hospital, each change of shift is marked by a short joint staff meeting in which critical issues are discussed so that a continuity of knowledge persists across shift boundaries (common in most medical settings). In addition, at least some people work double or rotating shifts and get to know people from various shifts. There are ample opportunties for informal conversation during the day as well as special outings. Then, staff members can coordinate treatment for a specific child across the boundaries of profession and shift.

Additional Reviewers/Editors: Catalina Danis, Alison Lee, David Ing, Ian Simmonds
Image of Babble courtesty of: "Visual by www.PDImages.com"

Although we have had some strong success with these tools, their deployment--particularly in the field of education--has not been easy. In the educational context, we first have to work with community members to find a cultural practice that can be simulated. In the case of Native American practices some of the best examples in terms of ethnomathematics turn out to be sacred practices that cannot be simulated (eg Navajo sand painting, Shoshone whirling disks). Second, we have to make sure the cultural practice is recognized by the youth -- several African examples were questioned because by teachers who said African American children would see them more as dusty museum artifacts than as something they had cultural ownership of. Third we have to satisfy the requirements of standard curricula -- many interesting examples of ethnomathematics (Eulerian paths in pacific Islander sand drawings, fractals in African architecture, etc.) are difficult to use because they are outside of the standard curriculum. Fourth the software support must be easy for teachers to use -- many math teachers (particularly those serving large minority populations) do not have ready access to good quality computers for their students, and do not have good technolgical training. The students must be provided with cultural background information and tutorials, and the teachers must be provided with lesson plans and examples of use.

Community Indicators [link to Community and Civic Indicators pattern] can provide an important tool for monitoring current trends in a community. However, we will usually be interested in the values of these indicators in the future, not just the present - and which actions will result in more desirable outcomes as measured by the community indicators. Simulation and modeling can provide a powerful tool for informing such discussions, particularly if the results from the simulation can be presented using the same indicators as selected in a participatory Community and Civic Indicators project. For example, the summary graphic for this pattern shows the population densities in the Puget Sound region in Washington State in 2025 given the current land use and transportation plans, as projected by the UrbanSim simulation system. The results of the work should be made available using the web or printed reports. Using the web has the advantage that definitions of indicators, documentation, and related information can be conveniently linked together. Supporting public access to running the simulation, as well as the results, might be provided in several different ways, depending on the complexity and size of the simulation and input data. Particularly for complex simulations, with substantial data requirements, accessing a simulation hosted on a server via a web interface is a good technique. Smaller simulations might be downloaded and run on individual's computers. This is in general not an easy pattern to use. In addition to developing the set of indicators (including careful definitions and documentation), a simulation of the phenomenon of interest must exist or be developed, including the necessary data and calibration to apply it in the given community. For the example used here (land use and transportation), this typically requires that the local or regional government agency in charge of land use and transportation planning either undertake the simulation work itself, or be willing to work closely with another organization that does so. The game SimCity demonstrates that many people -- including grade school children -- can be highly engaged by what might have been thought to be a dry topic, namely urban planning. While games such as SimCity can provide valuable inspiration and interaction ideas, there are key differences between such games and the simulations suggested in this pattern. First, this pattern is concerned with producing simulations of actual phenomena, for example, simulating a specific, real, urban area, with the intent of producing useful forecasts of its long-term development to inform public deliberation and debate. Second, the interaction techniques available to its users should expose only the actions and "policy levers" available to real citizens and governments (for the urban simulation example, such as building light rail systems or changing zoning). Users of these simulations can't simply declare that an area will be redeveloped (or bring in Godzilla); rather, all they can do is change relevant policies in a scenario in hopes of influencing people in the simulated environment to redevelop the area and residents to move there. Potential challenges to the result include challenges to the accuracy and reliability of the simulation.

To act effectively to improve a situation, we need to understand that situation. Using a map can act both: as a way of monitoring the current situation in an area and showing how this is changing; and as a way of presenting the issues to other people to raise their awareness and encourage them to support the work. The image above is based on the Green Apple Map of New York City http://www.greenapplemap.org

Examples of using maps in this way include: Green Maps (www.greenmap.org) of cities which can show information about local open space, green transport options, pollution problems, renewable resources, sustainable or fair-trade businesses, or cultural facilities; the State of the World Atlas (Kidron et al., 2003) which includes a large set of global maps covering topics such as political systems, transnationals, climate change, biodiversity, human rights, war and peace, malnutrition and life-expectancy; locally produced maps such as the Sheffield Food Map (Fletcher et al. 2005), which shows locations of community cafes, healthy and socially responsible eating places, opportunities to grow food, buy seeds or get advice on growing, and places to get advice on healthy nutrition, cooking and health.

It is important that the map is easy for readers to understand. Distinctive icons, graphs and other visual features should be designed to represent the key topics. The Green Maps project (www.greenmap.org) provide a set of icons that can be used for maps concerned with environmental issues. Displaying such icons on a map can make inequalities between different areas easy to see. The image below shows the tip of Manhattan on one of the Green Apple Maps.

It may be helpful to make the map available on the Internet, but in giving the information away freely, you need to consider how the funding to keep the map up to date will be sustainable.

It is important that the map is seen as a reliable source of information. The project needs to define a clear set of criteria for what is / is not to be included on the map. These criteria should be publicly available.

The map also needs to be kept up to date, so the project will need to identify a person or group of people who will be responsible for assessing items against the criteria and revising the map on a regular basis. On-line versions can be made database driven.

To ensure that the map is seen as unbiased, the mapping project must be careful to remain independent of political or commercial interests that might be interpreted by a reader as influencing the content. This can make it difficult to use advertising as a source of funding for the project. Alternative sources of funds may be selling the printed version of the map, providing the map to schools or education centres in return for a fee, funding from local government or planning authorities.