Project date: 1996
Full title: Facilitating Community through Information: A Suite of Software-enabled Participation Tools. This proposal was submitted in 1996 in response to Intelligent - Information - Interfaces to European Commission DG XII.
The objective was to carry out investigations to provoke and reinforce action, by companies and organizations with appropriate resources, to develop software tools which support real-life communities. Prototypes, know-how and operating procedures were to be developed and tested with communities. These complementary tools would have involved a variety of overlapping research challenges. The focus was on developing application of tools rather than on the tools themselves.
The project comprised a suite of 18 complementary modules which could enhance community dynamics and the sharing of information between people in local communities under a variety of conditions. The proposed modules were the following: Crowd-to-Community Transformation; Territory As the Map; Sustainable Community Database Facility; Community Database Content Integration; Micro-Community Facilitation; Commitment Database and Relationship Contracts; Meeting Participant Contracts; Participant Messaging in Conferences; Wired (or Wireless) Face-to-Fact Meetings; Meeting Commentary Tracks; Meeting and Interaction Discipline; Issue Tracking and Trajectories; Dialogue Support; Configuration Patterning, Design and Support; Refugee Camp Satellite Link; Interface on Community Problems and Initiatives; Ecology-Based Role Metaphors of Opportunities of Community Participation; Art of Navigating Conceptual Complexity.
Associated partners for this project were: the Swedish Institute for Social Inventions (SISU); the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), Denmark; Global Action Plan for the Earth (GAP); IAPCO Institute for Congress management Training (IAPCO-ICMT); the International Association of Professional Congress Organizers (IAPCO); the Institute for Social Inventions (ISI, UK); the Lebensgarten Community (Steyerberg, Germany); and Findhorn Foundation (Scotland).