Specification Drafts

This initial phase of Cairns v. 2.0 is designed to capture key information about the many different ways people have worked together within groups to solve a problem or make a decision. This knowledge gathering will both serve to provide data about how groups form, cohere and work. But it will also help to create a community among those committed to working in more participatory and democratic ways. Perhaps most important, by illustrating models the tool will eventually assist new groups to form and people to adopt more legitimate and democratic approaches where they otherwise may not have.

Cairns is not simply designed to study the sociology or organization of groups but to promote participatory ways of working and living. The visual interface of the Cairns Project creates a point of reference for the community of practice to discuss why a group successfully functioned.

5) A page where a user builds and saves a new Cairn, demonstrating how a particular group worked

6) A page where a user maps the community located at each Cairn and visualizes relationships and patterns

Page will show a blank, stylized Cairn with an option to 1) “build this cairn” or 2) “map the landscape.” There will also be an option to “add an event” or “add a writing.”

Building a cairn will require registration. This is the process by which a particular group describes its work.

Mapping the landscape is a visual form of searching whereby a user can see the groups located at each Cairn and the paths between them. It allows the community to visualize the range of collaborative practices and to see patterns emerging. This functionality should be open to all without registration.

User should be prompted at various intervals to view other projects and comment on them.

Eventually the homepage will also offer options to create new groups according to templates and to manage the work of groups.

The purpose of the registration is to identify an individual using the site, associate that individual with a particular organization, if appropriate, and enable the subsequent association of a given project with an organization and an individual. For example, John Smith of Planned Parenthood Federation of America uploads information about the April 2004 March on Washington, where seven organizations collaborated to make the largest March in U.S. history happen. The Cairn will describe the collaboration among the seven but participants will want to know who was responsible for uploading the information. In this way, Mary Jones of the ACLU can also describe the same project from her perspective and be uniquely identified.

During registration, participants will provide information about themselves, their organizations and their role in the group. They will generate an “avatar” or graphical representation of themselves that can be used to show authorship of a particular cairn and to place oneself within groups or in relation to others. This avatar may simply take the form of a colored flat which is placed atop the Cairn. This functionality will become more useful as the Cairns software develops into a wider suite of tools that enable collaboration and group formation.

Generate associated avatar – a small graphical object – that can be later used to identify who saved a particular project description.

The purpose of the organizational registration is to create a database of organizations and associated personnel in order to offer contact information and additional background on collaborative projects.

Need to keep in mind that projects will often exist independently of legal organizations and institutions and that these two categories may need to be merged. Need to think this through.

Initially, we will offer the opportunity to identify the organization to which you belong and to caption a cairn with the name of the project or group it describes.

Type of Organization (select from clickable list) (e.g. cultural, faith-based, grassroots)

Type of Organizational Practice (select from clickable list) (e.g. lobbying, activism, party politics)

Geographic Scope (select from clickable list) (e.g. international, national, local)

Ideology (select from clickable list) (e.g. activist, educational, charitable, conservative)

Sources of Financial Support (select from clickable list) (e.g. grants, advertising, commerce/e-commerce)

The person uploading the information should be identified. The system should indicate who posted this event by attaching the registrant’s avatar.

Events will be sortable chronologically and alphabetically. If we start to get too much content, we can add additional ways of sorting and searching.

Identify whether looking for: co-authors, researchers, data/empirical examples, critique/evaluation and to indicate until what date such persons are needed.

The system should indicate who posted this writing by attaching the registrant’s avatar.

The purpose of this screen is to allow a user to define a set of attributes corresponding to a particular participatory project or group.

The screen will show a CAIRN. The Cairn is a graphical information object that resembles a pyramidal mound of rocks. This is a graphical recreation of the cairn as metaphor. Each rock represents an asset that enabled the group to form, cohere and work. Hence each rock captures a single question about an asset of the group, e.g. size of group. By scrolling through the text on the face of the rock, the participant can select the answer to that question that best describes the group.

The Cairn interface reflects the taxonomy, initially developed by Prof. B. Noveck, to describe the assets necessary for the work of a particular group. The Cairn captures the key questions that must be answered to understand how the group formed, how it was maintained and how it worked together to produce assets. So the Cairn, as a whole, describes the workings of a particular group. The Cairns is not an organization. It is a visual representation of the component elements of a collaborative process. It is anticipated that the taxonomy will grow and change as we test it against empirical examples and as more people join the network.

Obviously, the workings of any community are more nuanced than any set of questions can capture. But we limit the number to encourage use and to focus on the constitutive elements necessary to replicate a particular best practice. Limiting the number of variables also facilitates better navigation through and comparison within the community of practice.

The architecture of the software must be flexible enough to accommodate changes to the taxonomy and the addition of new elements.

On this screen, users will start with a Cairn in its “blank state.” The attributes of each rock (i.e. the titles corresponding to each rock) will be visible but no answer choices selected. The user will select attributes for each rock, as indicated, and then “save this cairn” to associate a set of attributes as represented with a given project. The user will then associate his identifying registration avatar with the saved cairn.

The center of the screen shows an interactive rock interface of the stylized cairn.

There are five graduated layers of rocks. Layer 1 is closest to the ground and Layer 5 is the one closet to the sky. Each layer is labeled as follows:

Each layer represents a set of attributes or assets of the group that enabled the collaborative practice.

Within the layer there are rocks. Each rock corresponds to a specific attribute.

A rock is a graphical information object. The rock has a scrollable list of options, which correspond to a description of that attribute. In other words, the rock poses a question (e.g. total number of participants?) and the menu of answer choices corresponds to a set of answers to that question (e.g. 1000+).

Some of the questions posed on the rocks deliberately “shade into” one another. This is in an effort to capture the way different people describe the group. Related questions are near each other. In other words, proximity of rocks is relevant.

Once a user selects an option by clicking on it, that option is stored and displayed on the face of the rock.

Among the list of options should be “submit a new option.” Selecting this option pops up a small text window and allows the user to type a new answer choice. When the Cairn is saved, the system will e-mail the request to create that new option to the Cairns administrator.

Certain attributes will require further explanation beyond a simple multiple choice answer. It will be possible to create a questionnaire associated with a given rock-attribute as a way to upload additional material. Rocks with additional questionnaires should indicate that there are optional questions to be answered. Double-clicking on the rock will pull up such a questionnaire. For example, the rock corresponding to the attribute “Total Number of Participants” will have the following options: Very Large (1000+), Large (500+), Medium (100+), Small (20+), Very Small (>20). Double clicking on the rock will pull up a mini-questionnaire that permits free-text response: “What was the size of each group?” “What was the total size of the group?”

Once a rock has been “answered,” the color of that rock should change or deepen to indicate that the attribute has been selected and completed.

When a participant is in the process of working on a particular rock, that layer in which the participant is currently working should be highlighted.

When the user clicks on the final layer, the “Outcomes” Layer, the system will launch three “tokens” prompting the participant to place the tokens on the attributes most important to the success of the project. Placing the token on a rock will change the rock color to highlight that this is considered to be among the most important assets for the success of the group. A participant can use 0, 1, 2 or 3 tokens. In other words, if a particular tool and the size of the group were crucial assets for the group’s success, these attributes will appear in red. In this way, we will use color to show more meaning.

The Outcome layer inquires as to the success of a group. Once success has been evaluated by the user, the color of the Cairn should reflect whether the project was very successful, successful, less than complete success or a failure based on the intensity of the Cairn’s color.

When the user completes all the rocks or when the user clicks on “Save This Cairn,” he will be prompted with a list displayed in text of all the attributes and options selected. Attributes that have not been answered will be shown in red and displayed as N/A.

Participant will also be prompted to enter a name or caption for the saved Cairn. This caption will comprise a name, the dates and a 1-line description.

If the Cairn to be saved resembles another Cairn, system will prompt user if this is a related project. User will be able to connect Cairns.

Once the Cairn is saved, the participant’s avatar or flag will attach to that Cairn.

Clicking anywhere on one of these layers will bring up a list of specific methods used and the choice to add a new method. The participant should be able to select as many methods as desired. These should save as a list associated with the Methods layer.

Similarly, names of tools can be selected from a list of names of tools, e.g. Unchat, RSS, Wiki

Once selected, a tool name will appear under the appropriate attribute. In other words, if a user selects WIKI from the list, it will automatically populate the rock associated with collaborative editors. Users will also have the option to click on the rock correspondence to the attribute “Collaborative Editor” and bring up a list of brand names and select WIKI.

Ideally, each tool name appears on the list with a small rock icon, which can be dragged and dropped onto the Tools layer. As multiple tools in the same taxonomy are selected, the rock fragments into smaller rocks occupying the same space.

In addition to the Cairn in the center of the screen, there should be a list to the left or right, displaying names or projects with related attributes. While a user is inputting Cairn attributes, the list will show all other Cairns with the same Cairn states.

In addition to uploading examples of participatory practice, the Cairns Project will allow participants to search for projects of interest and to “map” the landscape of projects in relation to each other. This will help users see connections between Projects even where they do not know the organization.

In addition, as discussed earlier, selecting Cairn attributes will bring up lists of related Cairns with same or similar attributes.

But we also intend to provide users the ability to display three-dimensional, visual maps of the Cairns arrayed as data objects on a graph.

The map will allow users to resort data dynamically from the database and re-display the visual map according to desired coordinates.

On the visual map, it will be possible to see which groups are reporting "at the same Cairn." That is to say, the Cairn on the map is not about a particular group. Rather, it represents a set of assets or attributes and we can see which groups are located there -- describe themselves with those attributes.

Once the starting point is selected, the user then selects a particular factor (rock) on which to concentrate. Depending on the number of states that rock has, this creates (automatically) the same number of paths leading out from the central rock. (in effect, the paths represent changes that might be made to the cairn to find another cairn (and associated lists of organizations) that are substantively "close" to the central cairn, along the dimension corresponding to the selected factor.

At the end point of each of these radiating path, another cairn is automatically located -- corresponding to the cairn that is similar to the central one and that differs by only one factor. The user chooses a second factor on which to explore cairn space. Again, depending on the number of possible states of this factor (rock), each cairn at the end of the path from the central cairn generates another set of radial lines leading out (at smaller scale) to a new set of cairns that differ by one factor setting. A third factor choice is made, and another (smaller scale) set of radial lines is drawn. The result is a hierarchically nested graphical space that allows a user visually to navigate to different cairns, following paths defined by choices of alternative states for particular factors. The mini-cairns at the end points of these radiating graphics can then be color coded, specially, in the map view, to show such attributes of the Cairn, such as: 1. how many groups have reported at this cairn, 2. active discussions at this cairn, 3. lots of organizations at this cairn report that they are successful, etc. (the user choses what aspects of the cairn (or the whole population of organizations to be found at the cairn) will correspond to the color, size etc. settings of the minicairns shown on the map.

Cairns Specification (as of May 10, 2004) Cairns Taxonomy and Cairns Visuals