Theory of Knowledge

Introduction Pages

• Categories
• Content Templates
• Create a New Page
• Create a New User Account
• Dynamic Page Lists
• Effort Page Format
• Formatting Templates
• Governance
• Landforms
• New Editor Resources
• Page Types
• Sandbox
• Social Contract
• Style Guide
• The Big Picture
• The Credit Box
• Topic Page Format
• Video Tutorials
• Wiki Markup Tutorial

This platform aims to intervene in how written knowledge is generated, stored, synthesized, distributed, and lost among Workgroups in the Salish Sea. We hope to amplify knowledge creation, increase synthesis, and reduce loss. This work supports the quality of Best Available Science, critical for regulation, and may create a pathway for consideration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous Science. While we often associate knowledge with Education, our institutional education systems only touch a small portion of our overall shared pool of knowledge, and are limited in the kinds of knowledge they manage. Meanwhile other areas of knowledge generation or synthesis are less endowed with infrastructure and public subsidies. This platform does not propose to resolve all these tensions. However, through the process of developing and refining the platform, we are proposing a practical use of technology to interact with cross-cultural knowledge management to benefit our bioregion.

Assumptions about How The Platform Functions

1. We increases storage and distribution of knowledge generated through field work - Field work in ecosystems generates unique and useful knowledge that is often not stored, and is rarely distributed or synthesized. As a consequence field work observations are not well integrated into our knowledge of place. Natural History is the fertile progenitor of place-based knowledge and robust research.
2. We store and enable synthesis of technical Products that would otherwise be lost. - Technical products generated with public funding are frequently stored wihtout context, buried in archives or hard drives and are forgotten, effectively lost, and are often not included in synthesis.
3. The platform provides a structured mechanisms for storage and aggregation of place-based knowledge - Through field work and product development we build Place-based knowledge. However we rarely synthesize knowledge into a record of what we know about a place--our academic systems favor new breakthroughs in generalized knowledge, rather than incremental accumulation of place-based knowledge. Depending on generalized knowledge weakens our ability to provide rigorous stewardship.
4. The platform reduces barriers and creates incentives to create a learning feedback loop from field work and place-based knowledge to generalized knowledge - Ecosystem stewardship and knowledge creation are frequently not connected due to a range of social dynamics.
5. These mechanisms in combination can increase the quality and availability of scientific evidence for deliberation and decision making - The Best Available Science used in ecosystem decisions is often limited to a very small pool of generalized knowledge.

The Dynamics of Categories

To make the information on the platform accessible requires a system of categorization. How we categorize then has an effect on how we perceive knowledge of our social-ecological system.