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Holoscopic

infrastructure for the new social internet

How it works

TLDR

• Holoscopic is a platform for having group conversations that produce knowledge
  • About how to have group conversations that advance human culture
    • Holoscopic combines tools from social media and open democracy for an examination of our culture, creating models of social discourse that enable groups to see and act from the perspective of the whole.
    • Each exploration generates structured repeatable processes that can be copied, altered, stacked, studied and compared on common data frameworks so we can collectively advance the conversations that define our society.

Make maps of culture

Concept: Maps transform the world

Maps transfer knowledge from one to another

(Maps began as communication between individuals: "Over the hill, through the pine trees, cross the stream by the big rock then go to the base of the nearby tree...")

Maps let us compare and expand knowledge across time

(explorers venture out to discover the world and bring back maps of their route. Those maps are copied and taken on new journeys, each adventure expanding or refining the collective project of knowing and navigating the world.)

Maps allow us to see the whole

(Though first recognized through study of the night sky, at some point the idea spread that all the far lands of the world connected in a great loop. Maps make this real. You can hold the globe and identify all its parts. This was a radical shift in perception for human kind. The flat map with fuzzy unknown around the perimeter become a globe. Known.

The project of map making entered a new phase. No longer expanding in size but filling in layer upon layer of useful information.)

Maps unify layers of intersecting knowledge

(The atlas was born. And Google Earth and Maps. Earth sciences, industrial planners, bureaucrats, everyone with information to share mapped their data onto the surface of the globe. New functions became possible. We can zoom in and out from a view of the milky way to the furniture you keep in your backyard. In place of landmarks we have coordinate systems that allows us to coordinate on a global scale, build navigation systems that automatically plan your journey on, foot, road, boat and air. In a sense the world is unknowable and ever changing. In other ways we can see it completely and these ways are functionally very empowering for us.

Next: How do we take the transformative power of maps and utilize it to advance human culture? )

Activity: Mapping Culture

Why Map Culture?

To See as Collectives

Despite the grand promise of maps ability to reveal the whole, these culture mapping activities are not global in scale. This is not so much an attempt to “see everything” as a set of tools that allow people to see more completely the communities and movements that they are a part of; the premise being that we need to hone our collective ability to see before we can coordinate harmoniously at greater scales.

To See Spectrums

Culture exists on a spectrum.

There are the definite artifacts of culture—the objects, the recipes, the ritual practices—but within society these manifest to varying degrees, with some placing great meaning and others merely gesturing towards past meaning. Other parts of culture are implicit, our way of describing how things get done. Within and between both there are countless nuanced variations that

Maps help us place our varied relationships on spectrums so that we can develop more nuanced language for coordinating across beliefs.

To Navigate Change

We witness the every-day feelings, desires and decisions of those in our life but when it comes to societal change we often only note official events: a new law is passed, a new technology hits the market, war, IPO, launch, collapse. If we want to scale a culture of collaborative innovation we need more nuanced feedback loops for the ways that we are all gradually changing.

What do we map?

We map our relationship to ideas

This platform is not directed as answering any particular questions. Instead it is a tool that allows groups to answer their own questions as collectives. Purpose, prosperity, truth, leadership, wealth—our ability to create thriving systems depends on our ability to see, together, a clear vision of what we hold important.

We map “wholes”

What does completeness look like in individuals, in relationships, family, community? How do they combine to build whole society? More about this below in Studying Collective Identity. In summary, much of how we view the world is through the language of separation. Country, religion, race. We have a rich taxonomy of difference. This platform is intended to visualize and develop a language around the experience of social completeness.

How do we map?

Social Maps

The basic interactive element is a group sharing activity that allows a group to quickly visualize their relationship with a thing or idea. These are created by and for community members as a form of group conversations. The steps:

• Pick a topic: Purpose, prosperity, religion, whatever is important.
• Identify a cultural intersection: this is the landscape where participants ‘map’ their experiences. Examples is popular culture:
  • Attachment Theory: relationships map connection styles on spectrums of anxiety V avoidance
  • SWOT Analysis: project teams map priorities on spectrums of internal/external V helpful/harmful

• • Thinking Ladder: political conversants map discourse on scales of liberal/conservative V scientific/tribal (Tim Urban).
• Select Elements: These can be things, beliefs, behavior patterns, intentions, plans. In response to a core question, each participant places a piece of their personal context on the collective graph and leave a comment describing its significance.

• Vote and discuss: Participants vote on collected elements and comments that best illustrate this cultural landscape for them.
• Repeat: participants can repeat social maps in new crowds or propose new intersections for observing collecting seeing.

Learning Sequences

Where social maps could be seen as a simple feedback system similar to social media or community surveys, their true value is revealed by connecting them in series as part of a collective learning. These are discussed next.

Study Collective Identity

Concept: The Journey to Wholeness

Wholeness = seeing all the parts in place

Internal Family Systems is a therapeutic system that sees human identity as composed of parts that compete or collaborate. It provides a framework for identifying, creating space for and or healing those parts. Success is described as the discovery of the core ‘self’ and its coming into leadership of the whole.

Before a person can instruct, shape, fix themself, they must see their self.

Wholeness = collective progress

As all the parts of a person have a kind of evolutionary urge, so do the individuals and collectives within a society. As we can see by the ideological conflict that afflicts our relatively prosperous society, it is not enough to have nominal, ‘objective’ progress, the evolutionary urges of all parties must be seen and integrated to achieve a sense of wholeness.

This is near unthinkable at the scale of society but there are scales and domains for which this can and does occur. This project is aimed at (1) making this particular brand of wholeness visible and (2) reproducible.

Collectives ‘see’ through ideas

Individuals see individuals.

We can each can witness the events that make up another individual’s life and come to ‘know’ them to a degree, through direct experience.

Collectives see archetypes.

The number of people for whom we can store and process direct experience is limited. To understand the collective we tell stories. To create meaning we position ourselves and others in relationship to those stories.

These could be ancient stories like those in religious texts, prompting us to maintain some crucial but fleeting knowledge.

These could be modern anecdotes that redefine our relationship with change. For example, the founding of scientific laws are always paired with stories. “We thought X but we couldn't explain Y, then we tried Z and discovered…”

These stories and associated values are given names and become leverage points for our collective discussions.

Whole Seeing ⇒ Collective Power

Like those that speak a common language, a group whose members all believe the same core stories is able to coordinate far more easily than those that don't because they don’t have the time delay or errors involved in translating.

On the other hand a homogeneous group is more fragile when entering unfamiliar territory because they must develop a new knowledge from scratch. This is very difficult when it conflicts with core beliefs.

Archetypal stories do not convey the full complexity of a human life and yet they allow us to know something about all who share them. In the same way we can design ideas that allow us to see and translate diverse ways of understanding the world.

Holoscopic imagines this as a process not of compressing diverse systems into one monolithic concept, but using tools to create shared maps of meaning.

In the same way that the individual becomes more effective when they see and align the various parts of their self, so too does any group become powerful when it is able to witness and channel its many expression. As individuals and groups harness this skill the greater human collective increases its ability to harmoniously co-operate.

Activity: Collective Introspection

This is a description of how social maps can be used by a cohort to observe and extract knowledge from a shared process of self exploration.

Pick a topic

An individual in the group observes some pattern in self or group. In order to 'sense' the groups relationship on the topic they create a map and invite everyone to join in a mapping exercise.

Create a feedback loop

Introspection involves more than categorization. There must be input and output and cycles that allow for refinement.

For instance 2 questions:

• Q1: "Who are we?" (Observe the distribution of ideas relating to a topic.)
• Q2: "What do ‘we’ do?" (Map the ways the various identities enact their ideas.)

Every time the loop repeats there is an opportunity to observe the evolution of both aspects.

Observe Change and Reframe

Change happens in certain ways.

For individuals:

• intended or unintended outcomes
• harmonious or turbulent relating

• moving toward simplification or complexity

For the group: either converging on or diverging from ideals and strategies.

When things go wrong we are forced to reassess, redefine our way of thinking or looking at a situation.

As a group finds itself coming into resonance around new ideas, the sequence of social maps provide a documented journey, stories that span from the individual to the collective, and a well-defined conceptual process that others can follow in order to validate or differentiate from.

Conceptual frames that allow us to see wholes at greater scales with less effort are like a social technology and like all powerful technologies, they spread.

Program Humanity

Can we make the evolutionary insights of individuals and groups into self-replicating knowledge systems? Can wholeness be as contagious as fear and division?

Concept: Open Source Social Algorithms

Here I take the ubiquitous example of ‘social programming’ as understood in the context of social media and repurpose it for the generation of whole-human social technologies.

Algorithms guide us through known solutions

In the context of mathematics or computer code an algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed, that can produce a desired change in state.

For a tangible example: the rubik's cube. This is a puzzle that most would consider challenging or complex but that is in fact "solved".

There is a sequence of steps someone can use to complete the cube from any state. No knowledge of the patterns in the cube are required, no creative experimentation and discovery, just reading the cube and following instructions. This is the essence of most algorithms.

‘Social Algorithms’ help humans decide what to do

To the concept of algorithm we then add a modifier: a ‘Social’ Algorithm is a process or set of rules that allow humans to solve complex creative problems in collaboration.

Unlike numbers or geometric concepts, humans are constantly changing. The challenges that we face in society are of a type that resists fixed sequences and predetermined outcomes. They require both the sensitivities and the creative inspiration of the human spirit to witness new solutions and bring them into being.

Social algorithms then are fluid feedback loops that place these human faculties at the center of a communal solution generation process.

Democracy

Democracy gives a set of practices for arriving at a prosperous society but it doesn't define what that state looks like. It merely creates a context where humans can have a better chance at assessing and improving their conditions. Steps: Talk about it. Vote on a course of action. Execute. Reassess who gets to talk about it. Repeat.

Science

Science is a social context for observing the world and arriving at common understanding. It doesn't tell us which experiments to perform or when we have it figured out or what the truth is. Humans remain the creative agent. In order for individual experiences to translate to others we perform a common set of steps. Something like, “Describe your observations, form a hypothesis, outline your methods, share your results.”

Open Source is Explicit

In the context of software, “open source” describes a codebase that is visible to all. Not only does this allow it to be audited by anyone. It also allows anyone to copy and modify its contents, put them to their own use. While democracy was certainly a step toward open source—when compared to monarchy—much of the operating system remains in the sphere of culture, an implicit understanding of ‘how things get done’. Here is where the specifics of open source software lend a powerful example.

Creating open source cultural practices then is not just about revealing secrets, it is about making the necessary steps (or thoughts and beliefs) explicit.

Holoscopic is explicit in that each social map frames a very specific conversation space, sequences of maps allow groups to navigate a specific chain of thought. Both of these are visible and repeatable.

Open Source is Evolutionary

The open source software movement has generated tools used by billions. It generates collective knowledge and technologies worth trillions [Harvard Paper]. All of this is made possible not just through hard work and goodwill but with a piece of technology for making the development process visible to and modifiable by the crowd.

Git and [Github] is a piece of crucial infrastructure that enables this asynchronous global collaboration, revealing not just the final product but every incremental change to the system. The experiments and missteps, the negotiations between collaborators, every step of the process remains accessible to all. When a party wants to take a piece of code in a new direction, copying the codebase to a new project is called “forking”. What results is a complete tree of decisions, divergences and convergences that reveal not just what worked but the process through which it came about.

Holoscopic is evolutionary in that sequences can be copied and altered. Users can begin with established tools and make nudging improvements or adapt them to their community. The evolution of how the collective accesses key ideas becomes visible through the chain of adaptations as their work their way through the community.

‘Whole’ Programming

Nobody wants to be programmed. That is, no one wants to lose agency, to be changed against their will. On the other hand if we can gain knowledge that makes our life better, we like that. Workshops, degrees, physical and spiritual disciplines are often turned into programs for transferring knowledge from one to many.

As soon as we begin to discuss the design of collective programs there are territory battles about what is good, who knows how to create it and its impact on the broader environment. Here I would like to reimagine this process, taking leadership from a game of authority and winner-take-all to one of collective investigation and iterative discovery.

Collectives gather, map their perceptions, intentions, and actions, and share the processes that generate insight. Imagine this like the spec of dust dropped into super-cooled water that produces a chain reaction of crystallization. Not via economic or peer pressure but because like all good technology it answers a question or solves a problem that was seeking completion.

Activity: Running Human Code

Certain patterns are both so deeply aligned and profoundly powerful that upon their initiation they spread and evolve infinitely. Life is the best example. This is a pattern of wholes (bacteria, cell, organism) forming larger emergent wholes (individual, society, planet). The goal here is to witness and develop knowledge about this process as applied to ideas.

Identify a topic

Pick a topic for the group to explore. Design a social mapping sequence.

Initiate feedback loop

Set up sequence of social maps in the Holoscopic app and invite community to join.

Let the collective steer

Allow the crowd to take over. Participants can propose their own social maps, vote on which to complete.

Visualize the results

Graph the evolution of maps.

Close and Document

After participation drops or a set period of time close the sequence and document on the wiki.

Participate

Wiki

You are reading this on a wiki. A wiki is a form of publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. That means every aspect of this site can be edited by its users. This is also where we document learning journeys and algorithms (see below). Every page of this site can be discussed on its talk page. Click here for instructions on using the wiki.

Social Maps

Social maps are the basic unit of collective sensing for this project. Use these to probe for topics that are ripe for collective learning. The intention is to find topics + communities for which there is some creative tension, some diversity of vision without being a crippling trigger zone. These can be one-offs, or part of a collective sequence (below).

Open Learning Sequences

Open sequences allow a cohort of people to explore meaningful topics through peer generated, visualized discourse. These are open ended explorations of collective identity related to a topic.

These use social maps to propose questions to the collective. How do we see x? What we want to do for y? How has z changed our perspective?

When they produce insights they can be documented and presented to larger communities as Social Algorithms (below)

Social Algorithms

Algorithms = programmed map and activity sequences. Social experiments with stated hypothesis and method. As discussed in “Programming Humanity” above, these are intended to be created through a process of communal investigation.