From Systems to Patterns: Toward curated web-networks of shareable knowledge in the age of clickbait and fake news

Abstract

One of the most urgent issues today is the need — too often unmet — to develop and apply useful shareable knowledge to work effectively to meet our growing challenges. This issue is especially urgent in light of the rise of social media, information “bubbles”, clickbait, and other disturbing trends on the World Wide Web. Yet Wikipedia and related resources offer intriguing counter-examples. They begin to show ways that knowledge can be gathered, curated and shared effectively within a larger community, in much the same way that scientific knowledge is curated through an open-source process of peer review. Wiki was actually a direct outgrowth of the work of the architect Christopher Alexander, who developed “pattern languages” to capture actionable knowledge in relational, flexible, language-like forms. This talk will explore the close relationship between systems science and pattern languages, and the remarkably fruitful output that is now converging in interesting and hopeful ways. The presenter is a long-time colleague of Alexander, and a scholar on his work and its implications.