Reprogramming anthropocene - crowdsourced governance of trans-technical systems

Abstract

Anthropocene happens to be the largest socio-material system ever created. Mankind is daily interacting with that system; there are many bonds and loops between the system components. Every innocent step is an interaction, every need / desire or a resource requirement, every wish to redesign even a smallest corner of the planet, or even helping one species to survive, reflects as a loopback to the planet reinforcing in that sense, through that (mostly negative) feedback, the concept of the anthropocene.

Interactions are inevitable - micro-interactions build more observable and articulated actions which “crystallize” into patterns - chains of decisions and actions; we call them trans-technical patterns / bouquets. Finally, trans-technical patterns are loosely coupled into interconnected trans-technical processes.

Those interactions are hard to recognize individually on that rather complex process level, and very often performed in Brownian-motion manner stochastically and by enormous number of actors in the anthropocene making it hard to observe and track. Still, following the principles of the minimal energy paths (as simple as walking across the same stepped through path across park) or following leading social behaviours, patterns got recognized, reinforced and eventually encoded in the embodiment of society, culture, and finally the anthropocene system in whole. We explain how this processes are one the most fundamental mechanisms of running society shaping anthropocene and how by acting on that level we are capable of governing anthropocene.

Recognizing the fact that majority of big systems that humanity relies on (like economy, education, government, education, etc) are governed through cyberinfrastructure, we see how real-world socio-technical process got migrated into the cyberinfrastructure and how power-structures and behaviour patterns are imprinted in it.

Our approaches are aligned with Bela Banathy's "True empowerment" - developing people’s competence to take part directly and authentically in the design of the systems in which they live and work, and on top of that increasing their motivation to take action.

We address motivations issues by incorporating techniques resulting from Self-determination theory and through Social and emotional contagion processes.

We introduce a concept of visual language for modeling those processes, together with an interface for domain-experts, capable of recognizing positive and negative trans-technical patterns, and present framework CollaboFramework for designing systems that follows those principles. We argue that the system design has to adapt toward more flexible loosely-coupled components that are capable of recognizing user interactions and processes and adjusting system experience and behaviour to achieve to most efficient results. That framework has to provide a set of system components that will provide mechanism, but also guarantee fulfilling principles. Through this framework we are capable of treating complex trans-technical interactions, political and business rules, power-structures, democracy laws/patterns and reprogramming trans-technical patterns imprinted in fabric of humanity.

We present examples of our framework through the CollaboScience - the infrastructure for collaborative practice of research and examples of extracting insights in ISSS community of practice, followed with three shorter examples of Charirty.Net, DemocracyFramework, CollaboArte.