social needs

You are viewing

aleviathan's journal
Log in Create a LiveJournal Account Learn more

Explore LJ: Life Entertainment Music Culture News & Politics Technology

social needs
3 most recent entries

Date:	2005-12-09 00:05
Subject:	collaborative enterprises and consensus
Security:	Public

I been thinking on this all evening but just now have time to sit down. It's late and I need to hit the sack, but I wanted to get something down. I'm not sure what's most germane to the discussion, so decided to exploratorily post here and try to get down my thoughts.

The consensus project is I think a very important piece in any collaborative effort. However, I might be thinking at too large a scale. I'm not entirely sure that a general framework will scale from smaller, more technical projects to the larger, more open-ended projects that involve much more stakeholder interest and require a balance of values between the stakeholders, participants, and technical people.

If we presume that even the smallest project will be larger scale, involve more than a handful of participants, have difficult technical challenges, have some level of stakeholder interest, involve to some degree differing values underlying some of the components, and have indeterminate life spans; then I think that a consensus process/framework should be generalizable.

In any project with significant stakeholder investment and/or significant complexity in component structure my first thought is that trust is paramount to the overall success of the project. The concept of trust is more generally understood in the context of stakeholder involvement, but I think it is applicable in the technical domain in terms of how the technical components support the values underlying the goal|task|function of the components, especially at the interface level.

I imagine that at a lower level within a technical component - and i'm thinking of actual software/hardware components; the idea of trust is perhaps more directly translated as integration, interoperability, and reliability in terms of values that must be incorporated into the design phase of each component, the interaction|communication between components, and, in my thinking most importantly, at the interface level of the components. By interface I'm referring to User Interfaces, not lower level programatic module or class interfaces.

Back at a higher level some of the features or characteristics of trust are, in no particular order:

By way of illustration, let me recount my experience with Rio Arriba county's effort to site a landfill in response to pressure from the NM Environment Dept requirement to close the existing landfill in Youngsville. Note the the NMED was only responding to regulatory pressure in the form of Federal requirements from the EPA. In the interest of time at the moment, I'm going to be quite brief. But I hope to illustrate the interaction of values with requirements within the process of a collaborative project. To simplify, there were three general alternative actions: 1) site, and build a regional landfill in Rio Arriba county; 2) use an existing landfill outside the county and truck the counties waste to it; and 3) no action; keep using the Youngsville landfill.

Because of the timeframe of the State and Federal regulatory requirements number 3 was essentially not an option. This resulted in essentially combining the first two alternatives so that alternative #1 was, in effect, three proposed 'sites' - namely, the existing landfills in Nambe Pueblo, Taos county, and Santa Fe county. There were many 'values' that were included in developing the criteria used in siting the landfill. I think that the principle ones that in large part determined the outcome, were the values of trust, control, and the cultural value of the land.

Trust was very highly valued by community stakeholders, and was largely ignored by the institutional stakeholders.

Control was very highly valued by institutional stakeholders and largely ignored by the community stakeholders. and

finally, land value, vis-a-vis the fact that the most favorable sites in the county were, either entirely, or part of, old community land grants managed by the BLM, was, as it turned out, very highly valued by community stakeholders and was undervalued by the institutional stakeholders.

Ok, after furiously typing this out and rereading I've second thoughts on just how important this is to the discussion of consensus in collaborative enterprises...

To me, the failure of the project, in terms of the millions of dollars that were spent over about 10 years to virtually no effect (the money might as well of been buried in the landfill), was the fact that the huge disparity between the weights given to just these three values (criteria) were either largely unknown or ignored for the nearly the entire period of the effort.

My thought is that with a software based tool that could be used easily by all the stakeholders, this disparity would of become obvious fairly early on, and, could of either been consensually addressed, or resulted the resolution of the problem much earlier and at a tremendous cost savings to the taxpayer.

OK, so what now? :) Well, I'm thinking that this overlong story sets the context and use of a software product that would facilitate the development of consensus via a dialog that primarily orchestrates the marriage between the relative weights of underlying core values and the more formal requirements for large complex collaborative enterprises...

And the chance that anyone is going to read this long of a post to get here approaches zero. But I typed it so I might as well post it, especially as no one is looking at this yet. That, and I will have gotten it out of my system.

Advertisement