Samara's Technology

Page status (temporary)

Technology is a core enabler of Samara - not as a driver ("code is law", see About DAOs and DHOs) but as a vehicle to accelerate our thinking, to organize our knowledge and to coordinate our Information and data flows. We use technology to support our internal workflows as well as our external presentations of who we are and what we do. In other words, our technology is here to help us understand the pilot projects (what and where), our audiences (who and why) and eventually to support the technology needs of our future clients (e.g. helping them to implement messaging, publishing or marketing solutions in the Open Source space). As such, Samara will focus on three core technology areas (and possibly a fourth one in the future): 

1. Websites and Stories
2. Data Repositories, Taxonomies and Data Mapping
3. Surveys and Data Analysis

Websites and Stories will be our medium for sharing the deeper experiences and diverse histories of the many pilots that Samara is going to be involved in. For this to happen, we will create a decentralized web-content publishing system to funnel the creative energies of the many activities in the field to content authors and publish the content on our website (domain TBD?).  The website will also be the outlet for our data mapping and data analysis activities as well as our front-end to capture survey activities and other interested parties.

Data Repositories, Taxonomies and Data Mapping are ways to collect, process, and map our data in worksheets, tables and repositories (without development efforts) and present our data in social systems, complex adaptive systems (CAS) and network mapping tools (such as Kumu). These visualizations will help our partners and participants to understand the complex relationships and interactions on the ground and explain the impact we can have with our solutions sets. In other words, we are able to blend systems thinking, stakeholder mapping, and social network analysis to help participants turn ideas into impact. Furthermore, taxonomies such as OneEarth's Bioregions 2020 or WMO's Global Climate Indicators will help us categorize data sets for broader audiences. 

Surveys and Data Analysis is concerned with understanding stakeholder concerns and capturing qualitative and quantitative feedback and data points from our work on the ground. It is by far the easiest and most cost-efficient way to collect and process this type of data either through online surveys or questionnaires or by directly interviewing people on the ground (which can be done through video conferencing or calls). Connecting surveys with data repositories,  we can later expand theses efforts to collect sample data for various bioregional and global impact measurement frameworks, such as Kate Raworths's Doughnut Economics [Ra2019] or the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [Un2015] in a given region or bioregion.