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eSRC Publication Number:

esrc00005

Title of document:

Cities, human well-being and the environment: Conceiving national regulatory knowledge systems to facilitate resilient knowledge, knowledge based development and inter-generational knowing.

Author: Richard Vines.

Date of release: 2010-11-16 submitted to the 2010 Knowledge Cities World Summit.

Abstract: This is a PowerPoint presentation based on the paper given to the 2010 Knowledge Cities world Summit held in Melbourne in November 2010 (see http://repository.unimelb.edu.au/10187/9036). Specific attention is given to communicating through the use of visualisations. We suggest that innovative regulatory systems rely upon information and public knowledge – and the maintenance of that knowledge through time. We discuss the implications of thinking about public knowledge in this way and show how support systems might be conceived to allow for the evolution of public knowledge through time. Examples of the network graphs associated with the use contextual information management are discussed in some detail. All of this is set within the wider objective of reducing regulatory burden and burden creep. This material would be of relevance to stakeholders that are concerned about the way government intervenes in the economy. The presentation provides insights as to how the various instruments of regulation are being transformed through the use of digital publishing tools and approaches.

URL: http://repository.unimelb.edu.au/10187/9036

Date deposited in Repository:

2010-12-07

* The Digital Repository is a centrally administered library service for managing University of Melbourne digital resources from individual items required for course delivery to large collections that are of cultural or scholarly significance. The Repository contains digital objects including: research papers, theses, journal articles, books and book chapters, maps, video and audio recordings, photos etc. University of Melbourne Digital Repository URL: http://repository.unimelb.edu.au

http://repository.unimelb.edu.au/10187/9036�

http://repository.unimelb.edu.au/�

Cities, human well being and the environment

Conceiving national regulatory knowledge systems to facilitate resilient knowledge, knowledge-based development and inter-

generational knowing

Richard VinesRichard VinesHonorary Fellow: Honorary Fellow: eScholarshipeScholarship Research Centre University of MelbourneResearch Centre University of Melbourne

Email: Email: [email protected]@netspace.net.au Mobile: +61 417104144Mobile: +61 417104144

AcknowledgementsThe traditional owners of the land, peoples of the Kulin Nation, elders past and

present


……

Victorian Government, Office for the Community Sector under the Better Integrated Standards and Quality Assurance Systems initiative

……

eScholarship Research Centre, University of Melbourne (Gavan McCarthy, Michael Jones and Chris Kirk)

See also the list provided in the written paper

Cities rely on all sorts of different infrastructures and networks (for example …)

•Health and community service networks•Public transport networks•Roads and port networks•Waste management networks•Waste management networks•Food production and procurement networks•Carbon consumption measurement networks•Tourism networks for city populations

All these industries are (and need to be) regulated

Human well being

Cities

InteractionsPhysical assets

Regulatory systemsInfrastructures, service delivery networks etc

being

The environment

Interactions

Legislators

Social capital assets

These systems rely on information and public knowledge –and the maintenance of that knowledge

through time

The information management challenge associated with the storage of nuclear waste is a worst case scenario of what happens if we get this challenge wrong. This represents an

archetypal knowledge preservation and utility challenge


Epistemic loss of knowledgeEpistemic loss of knowledge

– where there has been inadequate preservation of the knowledge necessary to explain the context, structure and meaning of information

Source: McCarthy, G*., and Upshall, I. May 2006.Radioactive Waste Information: Meeting our obligations to future generations with regard to the safety of waste disposal facilities. International Council of Archives.

* Gavan McCarthy is the Director of the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne


The huge time frames associated with the management of nuclear waste

… highlights the need for resilient knowledge and inter-generational

knowing

Our claim is that the use of contextual information management has the potential to

…turn the challenge of the epistemic loss of knowledge on its head

Why?Why?…..

… because of the un-necessary and costly regulatory burden creep and because of the significant global

challenges we now face.

There is much we can collectively accept to forget (just to cope as humans – we cannot function if we remember everything) but there is also stuff we cannot afford

to forget

This clearly represents a regulatory challenge – witness the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ crisis as an example of the sorts of risks involved

Contextual information management as an archetypal solution

… this is understood as the representation of


complex networks consisting of entities (people, organisations, committees, divisions, events etc) published resources, archival resources and digital objects linked by

relationships. All entities, published resources, archival resources, digital objects and relationships are dated so that both are understood within a time continuum

Entities act as surrogates for real life objects, events, ideas, document structures etc etc

The HRCommittee

(1st April, 1998 – present)

Selection Policies

(Version 1, 2 and 3)is responsible for

CSIR(1926-1949)

CSIRO(1950-present)

was previous to

Example 1 of contextual information network:

Encyclopedia of Australian science on line


Source: http://www.eoas.info/

Networks of organisationsNetworks of organisationsCSIRO and the Cooperative Research Centre clusters

ScientistsNote: This is a work in progress:

the next stage is do the connections between scientists

and organisations

These are contextual information network graphs that act as surrogates of real world complexity


Who Am I? project and Pathways websitehttp://www.pathwaysvictoria.info/


Govt Dept

CSO Archival centre

‘Manages the records of’

State Library

Mostly organisational entities

Through contextual information management we can break down the complexity


Who Am I? project and Pathways website


Merger to create MacKillop Family

Services

Ran / is run by relationships (time perspective)

Previous – subsequent relationships (time perspective)

Salvation Army ran several homes

Christian Brothers

St Vincentde Paul

Sisters of Mercy

St Vincent de Paul was run by the Sisters of Mercy, but later run by the Christian Brothers


Australian Women’s archives projecthttp://www.womenaustralia.info/


Returning to the central claim that the use of contextual information management has the potential to turn the challenge of the epistemic

loss of knowledge on its head, I now want to show

…how dealing with the problem of regulatory burden creep can give

momentum to this claim

Our central hypothesis:

The continued enactment of print-based regulatory tools (including the use of on-line PDF documents)

is contributing to the problem of burden creep.

These matters are of fundamental importance as to the shape of government interventions in market based economies.

Our claim therefore is a big scale one

To discuss this hypothesis, we must first ask the question … what are schemas and standards and what function do they fulfill?

We define a schema as the semantic and organisational structure of a cognitive process

Source: Vines, Hall and McCarthy (Forthcoming). Textual representations of knowledge support-systems in research

intensive networks. In Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research: Towards a Semantic Web. Chandos Publishing Ltd

Standards involve negotiating and implementing norms

Source: Vines, Hall and McCarthy (Forthcoming). Textual representations of knowledge support-systems in research

intensive networks. In Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research: Towards a Semantic Web. Chandos Publishing Ltd

The aim of influencing behaviour represents the

normative objective of quality standards

The influence on behaviour

Reconciling tacit knowledge and normative standards

Standards can be rendered through HTML and thus to a browser

Creating an evidence scaffold for on-line

collation of evidence

Three tiered schema imposed on the standards

This evidence can be multimodal. Video, photographs, text etc.

Can this process of evidence collation be made more efficient across multiple

standards?

Can an integrated evidence scaffold Can an integrated evidence scaffold be created across the five standards?

Visualisation of five different quality standards

Housing

2006

Housing

2005 (not mapped)

Family

Relationship

Services

Disabilities

Life Areas

Guide(not cross

Disabilities

industry

standard

Family Services /

Out of home care

Home and

community care

(not cross

mapped)

Source: Better Integrated Standards and Quality Assurance Systems project Acknowledgement to the Office for the Community Sector

Then mapping areas of semantic equivalence across these documents- an example of a visualisation not visible via print-based work cultures

This reveals the hidden burden – provides objective evidence of what people have been complaining about for a number of years.

How to harmonise, whilst taking into account current work cultures and practices???

Disabilities quality framework (4 documents)

Structure and internal cross references within the standard

Document 1

Life areas guide

Document 2

Industry standard

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

15

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 916

Disabilitiesquality

framework

Document 3

Disability outcome standard

Document 4

Organisational self assessment

1 2 3 4 5 6 71 2 3 4 5 6

These are cross referenced to the

industry standard

These are cross referenced to the life areas

guide

Document 1

Evidence guide

S1 S3 S5 S7

Family services and out of home care sector (2 documents)Structure and internal cross references within the standard

S2 S4 S6 S8

Document 2

Client Record Review tool

For example

The challenges of schema harmonisation(and the need to integrate tacit and explicit knowledge cycling)

SECTOR A SECTOR B

A new dynamics of difference

Unstructured tagging

Semi-structuredtagging

Structuredtagging

Structured tagging

Semi-structuredtagging

Unstructuredtagging

The schema harmonisation challenge

Client tagging

Client tagging

Source: Vines, Hall and McCarthy (Forthcoming). Socio-technical aspects of knowledge support-systems in research intensive networks. In Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research: Towards a Semantic Web. Chandos Publishing Ltd

Conceiving standards harmonisation processes on an intra and inter-sector basis

Regulations (ie standards) as

theories of the world

Testing these theories in practice

Reflexive knowledge processes

Reflexive knowledge processes: .. towards a regulatory knowledge system?

Feedback loops

Sector based standards – data dictionaries

Enterprise-based schemas – data dictionaries

Feedback loops

Feedback loops Feedback loopsThese are theories that provide data as a decision support system

The knowledge principle: theories are fallible and need to be continuously reviewed based on the evidence of what works in the world

Theories evolve through time – for example, the theory of evolution through different editions of the theoryThanks to Chris Kirk for bringing this to my attention

http://benfry.com/traces/

Human well being

Cities

Interactions

Regulatory systemsInfrastructures, service delivery networks etc

being

The environment

Interactions

Legislators

&

Cities are not static places. They continuously evolve.

How to design regulatory systems to allow for

evolutionary possibility?

Designing regulatory systems to support the dynamics of knowledge acquisition

(refer to our paper for underlying theory)

General theory of evolution(Karl Popper)

The logic of pragmatism(Charles Pierce)

What do we mean by evolutionary possibility?

(From Hall 2005, after Popper 1972: pp. 243).

(Karl Popper) (Charles Pierce)

Adapted from J Sowa, 2009

Legislators

Acts of parliament

Published resources such as practice guides, that form part of the basis of legislative intent

Need to look at the “instruments of

regulation”

Legislators legislative intent

Corporate bodies and their roles in promulgating the intent of the legislators

The continued evolution through time of the evidence base

How can contextual information management help with this?

.. can help visualise inter-relationships between entities that guide the administration of regulatory interventions at a particular point in time

Contextual information

Family Services and Out of Home Care Standard

Legislators

.. or it can assist identify the strengths and weaknesses of implementation of legislation


Legislators

… or it can highlight inconsistencies of focal levels of practice across different sector networks


Legislators

… or variant social languages associated with different services frameworks such as case management


Cross-map using the terms ‘case management, ‘case’, ‘management (case)’

Legislators

Using principles of contextual information management to build regulatory

knowledge systems

State and national instruments of regulation

Can we design new regulatory systems drawing upon a new paradigm of

contextual information management?

Contextual information management

can be used to build data sets which

through analysis can lead to the

State standards

State standards

Intra state harmonisation

lead to the harmonisation of state, national and international standards

standards

National Standards(for example,

COAG framework in Australia)

Inter state harmonisation

Contextual information management and

public knowledge spaces

This type of resource provides a glimpse about what might be possible to support inter-



public knowledge networks

This type of network provides a glimpse

about what might be possible to support knowledge-based

development

We need to be more aware of the complexity of the knowledge space within which regulatory interventions take place



regulatory interventions take place

Using a print-based work / information culture it is not possible to see the interconnections arising from contextual information management and the

evolution of an evidence base through time

Regulatory interventions need to change in response to changes

in the knowledge space



Legislators

The objective is to amplify positive

emergent patterns

This type of visualisation provides a glimpse as to what we mean by a regulatory knowledge system

The intent is to represent the real world in a way that allows for the monitoring of

interventions to support public knowledge objectives through time



Legislators


Contextual information management allows for different systems to intersect and for the evolution of completely

new connections



Legislators


Conclusion

After the invention of the Gutenberg Printing Press in the mid1440’s it took over 100 years for the basic navigation

architecture of the book (tables of content, chapters, index structures) to emerge

In the 200 year period after the invention of the printing press, an education revolution emerged across Europe

Can digital technologies and their application to new regulatory systems unlock a period of sustained

transformation based on

Knowledge-based development

resilient knowledge and intergenerational knowing?

Conclusion

How well equipped are those involved with the administration of our cities (and their hinterlands) to adopt the notion of knowledge based development and by implication, develop expressions of resilient

knowledge and intergenerational knowing?

Are we building capability for this, or are we still enacting old paradigm regulatory tools that will only enacting old paradigm regulatory tools that will only

exacerbate continued regulatory burden creep?

Cities, human well being and the environment

About the eScholarship Research Centre

www.esrc.unimelb.edu.au

• The eSRC is part of the University of Melbourne’s Library and serves both an an academic centre and a focus of infrastructure design testing and deployment. It was created in 2007 from the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre 1999-2006 which formed part of the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Arts. The centre works closely with the Director eResearch in the development and implementation of strategies and policies to enable the building of 21st century digital and networked infrastructure, to support research, knowledge transfer and teaching and learning –both within the University of Melbourne, but also on a wider national and international basis.basis.

• The Centre comprises a mixture of academic researchers, archivists, librarians, systems analysts, technology developers and programmers, project managers, information technology support staff, web design and use-ability. For example: our academic researchers participate in Australian Research Council funded projects in a variety of roles from Chief Investigators or Partner Investigators to perhaps being part of a broader team providing technical and infrastructure support.

• For more information refer to: http://www.esrc.unimelb.edu.au/ .

Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s:

VINES, RICHARD; MCCARTHY, GAVAN; Kirk, Chris; JONES, MICHAEL

Title:

Cities, human well-being and the environment: conceiving national regulatory knowledge

systems to facilitate resilient knowledge, knowledge based development and inter-


Date:

2010

Citation:

Vines, R., McCarthy, G., Kirk, C., & Jones, M. (2010). Cities, human well-being and the

environment: conceiving national regulatory knowledge systems to facilitate resilient

knowledge, knowledge based development and inter-generational knowing. In Knowledge

Cities World Summit, Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre, Victoria, Australia.

Publication Status:

Unpublished

Persistent Link:

http://hdl.handle.net/11343/28941

File Description:

Powerpoint

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