A month or so ago, Clinamenic and I jammed on what became the Sensemaking Scenius' first-ever thematic newsletter. The topic - Community Sensemaking - was inspired the Scenius itself and an arena I find myself working on in some-way-shape-or-form just about every day lately. So you can imagine my surprise when I sat to write an essay on the topic, and I just couldn't seem to cohere any intelligent structure!
Time and time again, as I would focus my attention on the topic, words would be begin to flow out of me. Typically, this is a good sign! During each sitting, however, the sheer amount of content I produced was seemingly endless. And while I was centered on the theme, I couldn't for the life of me linearize my thinking.
Finally, I laid rest to the linear essay format (my stubbornness found great resistance to this for some reason - I wanted to write an essay dammit!) and instead opened up a fresh FigJam to endeavor a new form. And suddenly, a-ha! A mindmap took shape, and while the emergence is a bit of an insane mess of intersecting pathways, I'll tell you what: I'm onto something!
Finding the Structure of a Pattern Language
Ever since the Scenius unearthed the broad pillars of a sensemaking pattern language in January, I've been stewing on the concept of pattern languages and how they operate. Instead of researching pattern languages, I guess I'm experimenting first-hand with how to craft a social, or communal, sensemaking pattern language.
You might say I'm overly optimized on self-sovereignty and practice-based approaches to my own detriment, and you might be right. But here I am, making things up as I go, and first-principling theories, structures and approaches of which I'm sure many of you will point out post-facto.
What I'm finding is, like everything else worth doing in the world, pattern language design and development is iterative. What started as core pillars of sensemaking appears to be evolving into a more distinctive, granular ontology.
Specifically, the social sensemaking pattern language I'm unearthing seems to have a few core components in addition to the main pillars:
Roles - functional and active archetypes that people play; in linguistic grammar: the subject
Objects - propositional information or knowledge in myriad forms: concepts, theories
Spaces & places - arenas of action, where people in roles act, employ object and ask questions; i.e. context
Questions & areas of exploration - provocative lenses through which to explore the pattern language
Action or processes - an active movement, something a person in a role can do; in linguistic grammar: the verb
Unlike linguistic languages, pattern languages seem to functional much differently. Or at least this is my experience with the community sensemaking language so far. The language is non-linear, and graph-based, where component parts are interconnected through functional pathways. These pathways are woven from contextual cues - drop anywhere on the map, at any single node, and you can tell many stories about the functionality of that node through its connections.
Where to From here?
To be honest, I'm not sure where I'd like to take this project next. I'm hopeful to arrive at a logical next step by sharing the map with the Scenius community and facilitating discussion about its contours, and generally the role and utility of pattern languages.
My instinct is that there's better software to use to more dynamical explore the pattern language. Better yet, perhaps I can use a tool being developed within the Scenius.
My vision is to develop a pattern language that can be used by community builders in day-to-day community operations. One specific aspect of future work I'd like to explore is the design of distributed community practices based on the intelligence contained in the pattern language. I'm keen on the language having this kind of concrete utility.
This will entail a fair amount of iteration towards the pattern language as a product. In its current form its reach is not very wide, in large part because it's fairly idiosyncratic. While typical for early stage development; I look forward to something more broadly understood.
Notes
The central focus of the social sensemaking pattern language is a "distributed community". For the sake of my exploration, I was focused on the patterns employed by digital communities who have a distributed locality. There's a few reason for this focus: for one, this is where my day-to-day life is situated, and two, this is where I drew the content and inspiration for the map.
The map emerged through a dynamic process of reviewing existing Scenius' explorations, research, and documented conversations. I translated content from the Scenius and abstracted it into the core component forms, finding pathways among nodes along the way.
--
Thank you to Dave Gorum for editorial support, and to the Scenius community for the ongoing exploration & collaboration that continues to bear fruit.
