Underneath each of the key principles of successful commons approaches is the efficacy and efficiency of communication. As the complexity of the boundaries, resources, and rules increase, and the diversity of the perspectives, ontology, and goals of participating organizations grows, communications become strained. We tend to reconcile the challenges of noisy inputs using standardization, but standardization comes with tradeoffs to expression and flexibility - and one organization's noise may be another organization's signal. In practice, these tradeoffs are often revealed when organizations work together to collaboratively produce formal information products, such as multi-party grant applications. It is not uncommon for even well-resourced organizations to fail to resolve differences in order to meet deadlines for grant proposals or to simply externalize the process entirely, often at great cost.
This presentation will investigate the insights gained from a 5-year exploration of the development and implementation of protocols for collaborative production of complex information products within an interdisciplinary ecosystem of small-firms, community and university labs, nonprofits and NGOs, communities of practice, and government agencies. Originally driven by the questions of "What happens when the diversity of perspectives is a community's strength and the standardization of communications might undermine it?" and "How can we provide knowledge infrastructure for a community that maintains genuine variety while still allowing for genuine variety and differences in approach, while still reliably allowing for eventual convergence?", the results of this exploration show that, despite the complexity of natural language, best practices from Social Systems Engineering, Memetic Analysis, and Model-Based Systems Engineering allow for protocolization and reliability in communication. The resulting frameworks and insights have broad implications for collaborative knowledge production, safe use of natural language AI, and information exchange between firms with varied requirements and contexts of operation.
