Open Governance and Learning

Joe thought it was a good idea to copy the terms from the Piratepad, both for backup purposes (in case Piratepad goes away temporarily, and because it might be useful for us to give these terms a close reading and see if we agree/disagree or would like to extend these definitions (which may end up being a particularly foundational set?).

I agree with Joe that "creating a shared glossary
seems to be a nice instance of "open governance and
learning". So here the terms are. I am thinking about
questions that could help turn these short definitions into more developed essays (please come up with questions too!). I also think that many of these terms can be used to create a sort of grid of elements to keep an eye on when analyzing a case.

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Case studies
* - What's model do they try to use? What actually happens? What worked well and what was frustrating or ineffective? What's the scale of the effort? One person? 10,000 people? 7 billion people? In their world, what do they consider "best practices" for open governance?

Discourse analysis
* For example, one way we might bring audio into written form(qualitative analysis of a discourse) is to listen for (in this case best practices) and apply key words to portions. First making a list of practices, then sorting them into useful categories for the intended audience, for p2pu or others.

Gaja University
* ecological governance: 150 people in North and South America.

Healing
* we might look at "healing" as an improvement on something that is not working well. A conflict may hurt. It may be healed in any number of ways. Healing may come from amputating the hurt limb. Or healing may occur by hearing the limb's voice "there is burning here" Healing
happens when the entire body responds to that limb by moving away from the fire. Or healing may be done by understanding differences in how the left and right arms experience the world, and taking that difference in account when seemingly "conflicting messages" are combined in the future. Healing might be "renormalization" or organizationally learning new expectations after a period of change.

Individual's learning
* the subjective experience of each individual has an impact on the learning the organization accumulates about itself and about the rest of the world.

Learning
* a change in behavior as a result of experience

Negative case studies
* groups that tried to implement open governance and it didn't work out

Norms
* shared expectations about what is best, or appropriate, see "best practices".
* See also Benkler on norms as one way to help fulfill the
"integrating" function that combines modules generated in a
peer-production environment. The norms will indicate what modules are "appropriate to" or "good enough for" the project, and also also how they should fit together (e.g. "good fences make good neighbours").
Technologies that "do" integration are likely to embody
community/organizational norms (see "Transparency").

Organization
* Since we seem to be using this word a lot, we might as well try to define it ;-P. Maybe an "organization" is roughly what happens when a set of norms is made transparent.

Organizational learning (or "learning-as-a-group")
* We might think good "organizational learning" should include establishing understandings of "norms" or expectations about what is best, at least for now, or what is considered a beneficial goal in the long term (see "norms").

(Organizational) partnership (also "Consortium/Coalition/Collaboration/team-up")
* This seems like an interesting case because it requires
organizations (not just people) to work across their boundaries and find (sub)sets of shared norms. It can provide one model for what happens when people get together to collaborate, too, though probably not a perfect one.

Peer-based learning
* see peer-to-peer learning

Peer-to-peer learning
* see http://open-governance-and-learning.posterous.com/peer-to-peer-learning

Protocol
* relation to standards, as in open standards

The Farm
* Intentional community in Tennessee USA.

Transparency
* Often applied to processes like voting or accounting.
* Many governments have some variant on the "freedom of information act". But many also have state secrets. Similarly, a governance model like "rough consensus" may be perfectly open, but not completely transparent as to how it works.

Transferable knowledge and/or skills
* skills and knowledge that are applicable in new contexts
* example: transferring best-practices from open governance
environments to more closed environments. How might a
(communications?) consultant transfer knowledge from openly governed projects to private and/or closed working bureaucracies? (thanks, Adil)
* transferable across scales, for example transferring skills from face-to-face organizations to global bodies.

Transformative learning (thanks, Patrick)
* experience which changes the learner, and/or the learner's environment
* personal transformation; affecting a person's internal sense of the world, or actions toward others.
* structural transformation; affecting power relations
* example: A government organization on natural resources may voluntarily negotiate with a private company or other non-governmental organization. The negotiation might result in "transformational learning" that changes the way these decisions are made in the future (structural transformation). It may transform the individuals involved as well (personal transformation).