Co-modelling change

Vehicle for an effort to co-model change, CommonOutcomes supposes a conceptual model of change and a collaboration framework. Before diving into the specifics of the modelling choices throughout the remainder of this wiki, we offer some background reflections outlining what we mean by "co-modelling change".

What is versus what could be

Wikipedia has taught us a great deal through its articles but also as an experiment in commons-based peer production¹. Despite the challenges it faces, it will likely remain a key place to co-organise and make accessible information about what is for the foreseeable future. Yet, by design, its articles describe nothing original, since they only refer to notable things or concepts that are referenced elsewhere.

Now, let's imagine a commons-based peer production platform modelling not "what is" currently the state of the world, but rather on "what it could be" or "what it should be". So, how should CommonOutcomes be to enable this?

Between knowledge co-production and collective envisioning

We now know that citizens are able to freely² work together to co-produce invaluable encyclopedic or scientific knowledge. We also have witnessed the emergence of tools and experiments directly supporting or enabling new forms of deliberation and participation in decision-making processes, often at organisational or municipal level. Harder it is to find tools enabling citizens to engage collectively in free reflection on what they would like their future to be.

With CommonOutcomes, we propose to bridge these worlds, effectively providing a platform for structured knowledge production about change in order to align our understandings of possible futures and better inform decisions. We like to see this effort as collective modelling and envisioning of change.

Relevance of change

Change can either be seen as something external to us, or as something we actively shape and influence. In the former case, the modellers are passive while in the latter, they are pro-active, recognising that they have some agency over that change. For a given co-modelling community, we will thus speak of passive versus active change.

While decisions primarily concern active change—how irrelevant would it be to take decisions about things outside of our control?—, modelling of indirect or passive change will often shed light on more active change and therefore on decisions.

Hence, in CommonOutcomes, we are not only interested in modelling active change, but also in all the changes that are connected to it. For only through systematic threading of its connections can we measure the impact of change on a community.

Community-based change

Attempts to assess the relevance or impact of change also highlight the necessity to tie it to specific communities or contexts. Otherwise, the formulated change will necessarily remain vague and prevent its adaptation to local or specific contexts. A priori, the co-modelling community may not be the same as the impacted community. To be properly represented, the impacted community needs to be involved in the co-modelling process. Note that this is a necessary but not sufficient condition for appropriate representation, which will require carefully designed interface and processes.

The question of proper representation and processes is far from solved, hence the modelling choices laid out throughout this wiki remain open to change themselves. Let us just finish this section by mentioning that a key ingredient for prioritising and representing community-based change lies in evaluating the support for change in concerned communities in a debiased manner.

Beyond Theories of Change

We commend the process of building a Theory of Change (ToC), i.e. "an explicit theory of how and why it is thought that a social policy or program activities lead to outcomes and impacts" according to the corresponding Wikipedia article. The process is generally collaborative and its result congealed into an outcome pathway.

However, there are several limitations to ToCs' effectiveness in catalysing change. First, despite attempts to formalise the process, ToCs often use different vocabularies and representations, which hinders their clarity and interoperability. Second, despite attempts to democratise the process, they are often carried out for compliance reasons³, and thus not genuinely co-produced and maintained by the interested community. Last but not least, ToCs are isolated on a per project or per organisation world-view, limiting the possible synergies in connecting causal pathways, the social interest of building a shared representation of change at larger scale, and the incentives this could bring to build and maintain those representations.

One of the tenets of CommonOutcomes is to model not just change within isolated projects, but to consider and interconnect those efforts and visions together. We deeply believe that the result of building a shared model of change—a sort of meta-ToC—has the potential to be much more than the sum of those ToCs, unleashing the collective intelligence hidden within the diversity of community visions.

While we shall not underestimate potential difficulties, let us stress that this effort is different from modelling the world itself. As such, CommonOutcomes is less an attempt to detail the whole reality and complexity of any given project than to map, enrich, and interconnect independent causal pathways in a common graph of change, within a common space and using a common vocabulary. Connections will be valuable only insofar as they lead to desired outcomes, and facts required mostly "just" to ground those connections.

Importantly, this effort is not just aimed at providing a shared, open change model to "the public", it fundamentally relies on communities to take the main role in co-producing and maintaining this model.