Cairns

Navigating the landscape of participation and collaboration.  Building the network of collective action.

Throughout history, travelers have collaborated in building Cairns: stone monuments to mark the path and collectively navigate new territory.

Like these travelers, we solve problems and tackle the challenges of civic, corporate, cultural and political life in groups. Together, we can do what no one of us can do alone.

Cairns is graphical groupware designed to help those working collaboratively to evaluate and compare their own experiences and to search and learn from the experience of others.

Cairns can help you to evaluate, design and manage your group project.

Click here to see how Cairns works: http://dotank.nyls.edu/projects/Cairns

Use Cairns to:

• Evaluate a community project, government consultation or business outreach program
• Understand the experience of members of your group
• Compare the tools, methods and lessons learned by others
• Expand your toolbox with new ideas and technologies
• Publicize the results of an organizing effort, a citizen engagement project, a corporate collaboration or any kind of collective action
• Recruit others to your group or project
• Share methods for evaluating your project

 Who uses Cairns: 

• All groups engaged in collaborative or participatory ways of working
• All those wishing to find people, methods, tools and groups working in collaborative or participatory ways
• Governments, NGOs, transnational organizations, local grassroots groups and corporate teams

 What is Cairns: 

• In short, Cairns is a web-based visual map of the landscape of groups
• The Cairn Builder is a visual questionnaire used by members of your own group to evaluate and describe a project
• The Cairns Visualizer is a searchable visual inventory of all groups in the Cairns database
• Cairns is browser-based and requires no downloads
• The Cairns software lets you create a graphical picture of a group and its assets and to compare the picture as seen by each member of that group

 Why does Cairns work:

• Cairns is based on an information taxonomy designed specifically to understand the workings of a group
• Cairns captures that information visually to make it easy to understand the assets, values, goals and success of a collaborative project
• Cairns is simple to build, easy to visualize and to compare
• Cairns is multi-purposed. It can be used at any stage of a project to evaluate, plan, and manage
• Cairns uses visual and graphical presentation of information to make complex and dynamic social practices more intuitive

 How does Cairns work:

• Cairns is based on a “taxonomy” of questions about the goals, organizational structure, tools, methods and output of a group. 
• By answering these questions, participants “build a cairn” to describe their own work, rather than replying on third-parties to do so. 
• Users of the software can search the Cairns by navigating a visual map of the “Cairnspace” and seeing other related projects. 
• At every Cairn, users can add comments or create a weblog to generate conversation and build the community.

 The Cairns Project is in its beta phase, your participation is vital for building a network for collaborative practice. As more groups join the Cairnspace, the Cairns Project will enable groups to manifest themselves through deliberative and reflective evaluation.

Join the Cairnspace. Start building your Cairn today.

For more information please contact us at: infolaw@nyls.edu