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This thread is preserving initial discussions on ontology based
modeling of complex social processes.
Paul S Prueitt
Digital-Colleges, a discussion about the business plan
I am so pleased to have the various comments and to be back at my home in Taos New Mexico.
Knowledge management for communities requires the expression of points of view.
Our collective social skill at this expression varies over various communities. A "compete" shift in the control of this expression is what the Group proposes. As a first step we will give to the educational systems (of the world) an information technology that is open source, unencumbered by IT vendor ownership, and optimal. This shift is one that will reduce, and then eliminate, the ability of IT to control the nature of information within the community of scholars.
Our intellectual position is that many or all of our social institutions are burdened by the first generations of vendor controlled information structure. The positive value of information technology is not depreciated in an objective and scholarly recognition of the undue control now held by the various media and information technology owners. However, we acknowledge that reaction that has been experienced by those of us who have seen the nature of this situation.
A specific position is developed in the Resilience Project’s White Paper. The context of our business strategy lies in this historical context. We take a small step that extends specific enlightened software and a service model that Ivan demonstrated over a seven-year period, and we combine with this service model a simplifying technology. The process modeling software, that we have selected, bootstraps the service model, and helps us design the deployment of the simplifying technology. This bootstrap activity is where the short-term investment opportunity lies.
I feel that an investment of 80 – 100 K over the next 60 days can return that investment within a short period of time and give the investors a stake in the new historical context. However, I know that those with business savvy may see the opportunity differently. The trap that becomes active is “empire building”. The strategy is to make millions and own the process.
Digital-Colleges is well branded to take credit for helping the education communities take control. We expect that loyalty to the service model deployed in 43 school districts in California will be the source of rapid development of the process modeling aspect of our business model. The particular history of the service model and the recent hostile take over of Digital-Schools is a clear illustration of the trap that we speak about.
However, the Digital-Colleges business model is quite different from the classical IT business model. As founders of a new business model, we must make an investment of our time that is fully compensated and then we must allow that investment to be combined with the efforts of the communities we will serve. We must violate the typical business model that seeks to internalize profit and externalize responsibility. To do otherwise is to fall into the well-understood trap of empire building.
Today, corporate IT entities take ownership over all outcomes and use this ownership to enslave the customer to future contracts and to a top down imposition of process control. To do so again would be to violate the Digital-Colleges service model.
Our envisioned result will be an information system that is owned not by a business process but by the education community itself. This process will take 5 to 7 years, I estimate. The ownership issue is key, since without the faculty, staff and administration feeling this ownership; the processes will be defined in precisely the same way as IT services now define processes. The Digital-Colleges business process empowers the customer in ways that are not even easily conceivable given the well understood experiences of schools with IT vendors.
The experience that we are in a position to offer, now; is simply not anticipated by anyone. Paradoxically, the market is very ready for this un-expected shift in behavior.
Regarding to possible take over of Digital-Colleges by
large well financed IT vendors:
This is a clear danger to anyone investing in Digital-Colleges. However, there is an additional surprise beyond the service model.
We plan to use a new process-mapping product. This process-mapping product can be duplicated and the data persistence moved to an n-ary technology where all features of the process modeler and instrumented relationship to the data persistence migrated to a simpler and more powerful architecture. So, my strategy would be to drop the first use of the process modeler and replace with a true knowledge operating system within two years.
My proposal has been to allow OntologyStream Inc to develop this technology as I already have a seven-year history regarding the use of referential information bases and ontological information bases. I have always approached the concept of Digital-Colleges as a means to demonstrate a "complete solution" to individualizing information control, within a ontology framework. This complete solution is seen in the Aspects Framework. [64]
I remind you that the entire world’s economic system is about to undergo deep change as new utility functions are imposed by a cap and trade regime for carbon use. Cap and trade with government incentives to individuals and standards for all will be the way of the near future, I predict.
So, as a source of future income I am offering (to you and others who invest time and resources) system like the one I designed by US Customs, where all commodity transport is measured and monitored. The key to gaining these types of systems is education, and the Digital Colleges effort is directed at allowing colleges the economic freedom to address the critical mission that the colleges, universities and schools are only partially addressing.
The education community today can be understood best by being informed by the history of education, and by recognizing what this history shows. To reveal an objective understanding of this history, and to express this in OWL with Topic Maps linked to a wiki will bring the Group within the educational community. The commercial grade process modeling system we will use first is a technology provider and as such the mission of technology provider is quite different from the mission of the university, college and school district. This will require an adjustment at the end of the second year.
Community colleges in CA right now have adequate cash for a reform of the use of IT. We have a window of opportunity where the interest and the capabilities are aligned. The process that we are discussing would target a complete revolution in how IT is regarded by the faculty, staff and administration of these 117 colleges.
Initial process mapping at each college should cost between 10 K and 40 K, depending on how far the individual college feels they should go. In each case, we will start with human resources and payroll processes and then develop a model of the interface between the college and the financial systems. But beyond this, an e-Learning interface will be applied to areas such as enrolment, college development, planning, curriculum development and all areas that one finds listed under the responsibility of a college president.
With 30% of all college president position unfilled, the need is actually for a community-based process to take responsibility for the traditional roles of the president. The observation that may be made by the community and expressed in the wiki is that the position of president cannot be filled because the control and support mechanisms of a community college have become unmanageable.
So college governance should be deeply understood by our team. I will take the role in being the scholar whose understanding of the history of college governance in California can be expressed in talks before the faculty and staff. But more importantly, this history and this understanding will be expressible in the terms and phrases of the various wikis, and in the reification of the particular into universals [63] as expressed in the open process that produces and maintains the topic maps and ontology.