This is a working document intended to capture key concepts and terminology that are used within the context of Alkemio.
As these concepts are used throughout Alkemio, it is important for anyone new to Alkemio to be familiar with the contents of this document.
NOTE: This document is significantly out of date
The central concept in Alkemio is the Challenge - a dissatisfaction with the current reality, around which multiple parties collaborate over a longer period of time to make progress.
It is a journey, whereby those invovled in theSubspace will need to work together to realise progress..
All other concepts / activities in Alkemio are to support the realisation of Subspaces - from the activities on the journey, to the community that builds up around the Subspace, to the collaboration that takes place around the shared representation of the Subspace.
And with any journey, having as complete as possible representation of the route to the destination is important to choosing the right next steps - essentially we need a Map. However at the moment the pieces of the Map are held by different people and not in a joined up representation. The Map helps you know where you are heading as well as finding the right companions for the journey. This needs to be a shared representation.
It is the placement of the Subspace as being the heart of Alkemio that sets it apart.
At the heart of a Subspace, and providing the foundation from which the Subspace progresses, is the Context.
The Context has multiple elements:
- The shared understanding of the current situation and desired outcomes
- Relevant knowledge / information that has already been gathered
- Agreements / principles that goven how parties collaborate towards the desired outcome.
The ability to clearly and comprehensively capture the current understanding of the Subspace gives clarity to participants in the Subspace, and also allows new potential participants to decide if / how they will engage.
For all those participating in a Subspace it is important that the set of Agreements that have been made in the context of the Subspace are explicit. It helps ensure actions are aligned, which also avoiding confusion / mis-understandings. Think in terms of generic agreements around the Subspace, community principles / stated values etc. The type of Agreements that can be made are varied. Examples include:
- Social Norms: What are the expectations regarding behaviour within the community?
- Principles / Statements of Intent: What The ability to formalise the Agreements between participants in the Subspace
- Legal context: Any legal infrastructure / setup that should be used for collaboration
The Context represents the current understanding of theSubspace - so it will evolve.
Around the Context is the Community, the people and organizations who wish to contribute to the achieving the desired outcomes.
A Subspace needs a community contributing to it, and that community likely will have multiple types of actors contributing to progressing the Subspace journey.
The set of Roles for a Subspace captures the key generic roles around the Subspace - including the expectations / priviliges associated with each Role.
The Community uses the shared Context to Collaborate, working together towards the desired outcomes.
The activities taken over the Subspace lifecycle will vary depending on the phase / needs of the Subspace, and examples include:
- Subspace Defintion: clearly formalising theSubspace
- Community Building: promoting theSubspace and helping match contributors
- Hackathon: bringing people together to work on prototype solutions in the context of the Subspace
- Pilot: delivering a working solution (as defined by the scoping Project scope)
Each Challange, as well as sub levels such as Subspace, have a lifecycle. They are identified, are evolved via various activities and hopefully ultimately the desired outcomes are realised. Of course the Subspace could also be abandoned - but that should be an explicit choice.
However all too often Subspaces tend to simply fizzle to a halt: there is a lot of initial energy and enthusiasm, leading up to hackathons or similar events - but then further progress is very hard to realize.
The goal should be to ensure that the Subspace progress can continue and be tracked over the full lifecycle - which is captured under the term Continuity.
By managing a representation of the Subspace that is shared by the community of the Subspace, it is easier to keep the continuity as the Subspace progresses.
A Challenge Space is where Subspaces are hosted, providing a shared base context and community as well as facilitating the collaboration within and between hosted Subspaces.
The expectation is the the community for the Space is curated, and provides the hosted Subspaces with the right "ingredients"- especially in the early formation stages.
Note: a Space is actually also a Subspace, so it inherits also all the building blocks that come together for a Subspace i.e. Shared understanding, community etc.
=================================
Why do we need an Subspace Space?
Challenges are hard The analogy here is with the startup world where there is a wealth of resources available to help: fiinancing initiatives, knowledge bases, best practices, incubators etc. However despite all this support, only a small portion of startups actually succeed.
Now consider a Subspace, which by its very nature represents multiple types of actors that need to collaborate to achieve the desired goals. The complexity rises exponentially in the number / types of interactions involved - yet the resources to support these types of collaborations is very limited. It remains a fine art to realise a successful Subspace, with the successful examples depending heavily on special circumstances and / or extremely talented individuals with the right balance of capabilities to make the change happen.
Right Ingredients To maximise the changes of realising the desired goals from a Subspace, it is critical to embed the Subspace within a wider community posessing the right balance of skills, drive and understanding to nurture in particular the early stages of the Subspace journey.
As such the design of Alkemio has that Subspaces are hosted within a Space, providing a hosting community that helps the formation and early incubation of a Subspace.
================================
An additional concept that may help convey the importance of Subspace Space is the notion of DNA - whereby the "DNA" from the Space host is used to help establish the right ingredients (community) and culture within hosted Subspaces.
The Alkemio platform enables the management of Subspaces over their full lifecyle. Subspaces are hosted within a Subspace Space - which has a host organization that then is expected to facilitate the hosted Subspaces.
The platform provides the full lifecycle management, but there are many other activities / services that can be provided to help Subspaces on their journey. These services / activities can be provided directly by the facilitating Host organization, or by other curated service parties that are active within the Space. .
The platform is designed to have many Subspace Spaces, each with their own "ingredients & recipes" for the Subspaces that they host. The types of Subspaces hosted in each Space may also differ, e.g. there can be socially drivenSubspaces, or a government could decide to host their own Space to facilitate Subspaces involving public-private cooperation.
Key is that the community that is engaged on Subspaces within a particular Space is also able to connect to other Subspaces hosted in other Spaces.
