Story Publishing
Our events aim to produce a story. This is a story about the application of practice on-the-ground among networks of real people and places. Practice is applied to grow the capacity for evolution of these systems, so that they can more fully express their unique development pathways, particular to that local context.
Capacity-building can happen in many different dimensions: networking, financing, storytelling, law relations, land relations, youth engagement, impact assessment, food systems, and health systems, to name just a few. We call these dimensions Aspects.
In order to tell the story of how these systems are evolving, we equip partner hubs on-the-ground (community centres) with what we’re calling a Publishing Stack. It’s a set of applications they can use to generate and present data from multiple different perspectives, addressing different levels of storytelling abstraction.
Preliminary Examples
In order to demonstrate participatory story-publishing, Prisma has developed and deployed several applications as templates, for hubs to extend and make into their own. Two of these are Docs and Timelining.
Docs is a static-site generator, written with hyperlink text, enabling networked collaborative writing (like a “digital mind” / “digital garden”). This is relatively common.
Timelining is a take on contribution accounting, designed to be agent-centric and voice-first. Used in combination with facilitating social innovation practices during in-person events, this creates a very accessible way to start making visible emergent collective processes.
Below shows one way to visualise how these data feel different. Docs is more structured and changes less frequently. Timelining updates happen at much higher fidelity, but the data is at first less structured. Both are temporal graphs, meaning the data is oriented, by design, for change and relationality, in complement to the nature of how we facilitate teams to approach their work on systems. More on this below.
Federated Hub Network
By propagating those apps across a network of physical hubs, as we did during CATS, we are able to quickly onboard otherwise disparate centres of activity into a system of being able to make themselves - and how they’re organising - visible as one whole.
In this way, every organisational context can author their thread of the collective story. Since these publishing stacks are instantiated in their own, self-managed compute environment, they can choose what developments they publish (make public) and when. The aim is to drastically enable visibility without compromising sovereignty.
Languaging
This work is about enabling hub networks and their partners to be in dialogue within rapidly evolving and highly adaptive organisational contexts, without getting lost in the complexity.
By vectorising the multi-level, multi-node structure of the distributed publishing stack, we can perform advanced information retrievals in response to natural language queries - on data innately oriented to the temporal and relational nature of working on evolving systems.
During CATS we made 47 cryptographically-secured app deployments, to 13 distinct cloud environments, and within the space of 2 weeks, several hubs had generated over 500 timelining data points.
This UX-mechanism (timelining) has been designed as a wrapper around a verifiable measurement (smart contract). These measurement points are the basis for community-led value-signalling. Aggregating these value signals from the ground to the network level is the purpose of the publishing protocol.
This is how prisma as a system is working on enabling communities on-the-ground to be part of languaging the value of one network as a whole. The underlying relationship between protocol infrastructure and hub networks is the same across multiple hub network instances: creating publishing capability, visibility and liquidity participation.
