Vernacular Community Survey

When I began this journey to support neighborhoods, I imagined the need for Neo4j and Tom Sawyer Perspectives. Both are amazing proprietary platforms.

Until I met Ward Cunningham and his merry band of FedWiki creators I could not imagine succeeding without the graphic and data display capabilities of Tom Sawyer Perspectives. That route was too difficult, mostly because of the need to learn how to work with communities and to have a way for any particular community grow into mapping itself.

I believe that Ward and friends working with Carl McDaniels and myself can create something very useful as the unimagined addition of FedWiki could amplify neighborhood scale cooperation and restore power to neighborhoods--through self organizing.

A pattern language (Neighborhood Patterns) for neighborhood living will play an important role too. These can be gently revealed within the neighborhood's map.

This survey is meant to be adapted to each community where it is used such that the meaning of the questions matches the Viable System Model (VSM) functions and relationship BUT uses only language that is normal in the particular community. This requires testing and adjusting.

The intent is for the survey to be ongoing and updated as more people are involved, as situations change in and around the community, and as people's experience and understanding change.

The Neighborhood VSM Survey, particularly the open ended EVIDENCE and SUGGESTIONS can reveal the relevant parts, relationships, and attributes of parts and relationships. From this information a map or graph of the community can be constructed solely from the words of the community members. With such a self-revealed map in hand useful conversations can be convened to further clarify parts, relationships, attributes--especially shared ideals, shared and contentious values, goals, actions, and results.

The evolving graph can be made understandable, navigable, and editable with appropriate open source software tools. We are looking at Federated Wiki and GraphViz to accomplish this.

To reiterate, the community survey, administered by a trusted community member for the sake of the whole community provides the starting material for a community constructed map. That map provides rich material for conversations, coordination, cooperation, co-design, and greater co-identification as a neighborhood.

Getting the User Friendly Tools in the hands of the community is paramount.

Google Forms GForm for the first few surveys. It is hoped that we can adapt the community's FedWiki site to continuously update the survey in real time as people choose to take it or to update their prior answers.

CSV files of the collected survey results are loaded into Neo4j (not open source) and relevant parts of the community graph are displayed in a Federated Wiki that is managed by the community (open source with local control).

I am Learning GraphViz which will allow users to explore the map in manageable and understandable steps. The FedWiki community will develop GraphVis views until the community is able to do this without help (also open source).

GIS Map Displays are created from the data in Neo4j and displayed in the Community's FedWiki.

We should be bale to create FedWiki Living Surveys.