Seeing through shared representations of our neighborhoods. We need to be able to point to things that we all can see in order to be on the same page; in order to collaborate, coordinate, cooperate, co-design, and co-identify.
In addition to seeing and pointing, we need to have the contexts--the stories with settings times and places and histories),actors, plot, themes (purposes) at hand, easily understood and commented upon, extended, corrected, diverged from. This requires some digital technology if it is to scale beyond the cave wall or the office white board.
My current set of technologies include TheBrain, Neo4j, and Tom Sawyer Perspectives. These three platforms must be able to represent the same data for different perspectives--all in an attempt to make sense of complexity with the goal of cooperation in neighborhoods.
Of the three, TheBrain is the most user friendly tool for Neighbors to Represent their Neighborhoods with context attached. They can relatively easily create meaningful representations of their neighborhoods as networks / systems. They can do so in an ongoing fashion. TheBrain is the starting technology. It can export JASON files that can be imported into the other two platforms.
Neo4j is a robust property graph database that can handles any number of notes (parts) and connections (relationships, links, edges). It enables complex queries and analyses of relationships. However, it is inadequate for displaying the resulting graphs and tables resulting from queries.
Tom Sawyer Perspectives is an application development platform. It is capable of creating user friendly web applications that allow regular people to explore, visualize and understand the network / system that is their own neighborhoods and its relevant environments--once the data are entered into the application (in the first case from either Neo4j or from JASON files from TheBrain.
Our Current Tech Challenge is getting the JASON file from TheBrain into both Tom Sawyer Perspectives and Neo4j. I should mention that Tom Saywer can both read from and write to Neo4j.