each action-learning journey produces 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 work toward realising their potential and expressing their essence.

capacity-building can happen in many different dimensions. we call these dimensions aspects.¹ below is a short list of examples…

• networking
• financing
• storytelling
• law relations
• land relations
• youth engagement
• impact assessment
• food-ing
• health systems

each aspect makes visible one view into the application of practice on-the-ground. we make this visible with currencies. ²

each case-study therefore aims to develop one or more practice-currencies. making visible this dynamic interplay between action (practice) and learning (evaluation, aided by currency), is the purpose of a case-study.

currencies are the verified measurements that form the foundation for data-backed storytelling. all the additional media - meeting recordings, photos, audio notes, design documents - are (qualitative) layers of additional context that give wholeness to this underlying (quantitative) account.

1. Curation - the most polished, and also the most abstracted. see prisma.events 
2. Archive - more complete, and also more raw and rugged. see docs.prisma.events 
3. Integrations - custom applications serving specific data-transformations. see evaluate.prisma.events  and timelining
4. Aspects - practice-currencies. lowest-level detail, leveraging accounts of peer-to-peer interactions.

the purpose of enrolment and ground-potentialising, in the lead up to action-learning journey intensives, is for the whole system of place to become more visible, and for a place-sourced practice to be identified. these place-sourced practices are what animate the multi-stakeholder, multi-level enactment, opening up pathways toward whole-system transformation.

Purpose

case-studies serve the purpose of show-casing the work on-the-ground to a broader audience. there are two main audience-groups:

1. other practitioners who want to see practice being applied, to learn and integrate into how they apply practice in their own places
2. external evaluators who are looking to resource meaningful work

case-studies are an interface into action-learning - real-time, multi-perspectival. they are an ongoing story-ing process: story-making about the ongoing unfolding of the potential of place. prisma’s offer, as a distributed incubator, is to onboard hubs into self-publishing capacity. over time, our work becomes one of supporting the formation of a distributed, self-organising hub-network: one where each hub is able to resource and carry-out systems-change work on-the-ground, whilst also being part of a network that is able to make visible and coordinate their activity as a whole.

Key Enabling Capabilities

Footnotes

1. aspect  (n.): late 14c., an astrological term, “relative position of the planets as they appear from earth” (i.e., how they “look at” one another); also “one of the ways of viewing something,” from Latin aspectus “a seeing, looking at, sight, view; countenance; appearance,” from past participle of aspicere “to look at, look upon, behold; observe, examine,” figuratively “consider, ponder,” from ad “to” (see ad- ) + specere “to look” (from PIE root *spek-  “to observe”). ↩

2. Currency as current-see . Current  (adj.): flowing. ↩