We've been around for six years now and we were overdue for a refresh on the web site, so here it is. It coincides with other business changes as we look forward. There will be more annoucements on this, and I will blog in more detail on many aspects over the next few weeks and months.
Its an exciting period for us, and it involves a lot of change. We don't expect to get it right first time, and in the case of the SenseMaker® site we are developing it in public – a sort of perpetual beta! So be kind and feel free to email me directly.
The headline changes are:
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SenseMaker® 3.0 has been designed as an ecology from which many applications can emerge. Some of those we will do, some will be done by formal partners (expect some major annoucements there soon) and some will just be done by people who are passionate about them. To enable that we are opening up the development environment. The first training course has taken place and more are being scheduled in the next few months. Aside from creating better and more flexible SenseMaker® projects this will open up the space for people with bright ideas to create software within the SenseMaker® ecology, reducing development cost, increasing functionality. Our brand is now Powered by SenseMaker®, a play in part on the famous Intel inside.
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We need to invest more in the methods, not only in creating new ones but improving documentation, supporting tools and the like. My original vision that this could all take place in an open source environment proved somewhat idealistic. A lot of our material got republished with some acknowledgment, no one really contributed to the wiki. So we've introduced a small fee that will allow us to dedicate staff to that task. I'll blog more about this during the week and just to make it very clear, if there is a need (with the Agile community for example) to release some methods without any restrictions we will do it. This aspect of what we do is now branded as the Cognitive Edge Network. We will also be holding gatherings on three continents later this year to bring people together. Those gatherings will be participatory events but will also bring network members together with some the wider academic community of which we are a part.
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The Cynefin framework, both its domains and dynamics, has been front and centre of thinking in this space for a decade or more now. We will be building on that brand with additional material, ideas, tools etc. The whole field of cognitive complexity, or naturalising sense-making is gaining more and more recognition and we want to increase our contribution to both thinking and practice in this field. That work will come under the Cynefin brand.
Now there are other changes that come with this. Different business models, staff changes, our starting to increase the work we feed to the network and the like. I can't cover it all in this first blog post (and I am using a different blogging tool). If you have questions ask!
