Colabo

DataTalks

ChaOS — Tue, 17 May 2022 13:32:24 GMT

DataTalks (part of Colabo.Space ) is a methodology / framework to describe systems' knowledge and data artefacts and their storage and representation through data schemas. This helps us to rapidly change the system, adapt it to new requirements or domain reinterpretations and make it more transparent to end-users.

We can change the system in multiple aspects:

extend and change knowledge and data artefacts
change their representation
change their relationships
change the way knowledge is stored or
switch from local storage to remote API-enabled store

In that sense it reminds of a conventional no-code and low-code platforms but the main aim is to

support a development paradigm-shift where the system is more transparent and its evolution is more accessible to domain experts and end-users
optimize development work and make it more agnostic of execution place (tier) and frameworks

DataTalks strongly relies on the KnAllEdge data store and the ColaboFlow methodology / framework.

Poetry on the road

ChaOS — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 13:19:01 GMT

please read more at https://cha-os.org/en/poetry-on-the-road/

Colabo.Space International Usage

ChaOS — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 14:06:09 GMT

illustrated through events and ecosystems being built upon Colabo.Space

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Intro

CoLabo.Space is used on multiple international events in Europe, Americas and Asia. It empowered multiple conferences, forums, eco-camps, hackathons, and communities in many countries around the world.

Integration (Apps/Ecosystems built on top of Colabo.Space)

CoLaboArthon

Colabo.Space is a Socio-IT core of the CoLaboArthon.

CoLaboArthon is a framework/initiative for a rapid collective, and interdisciplinary research, education, artistic and collective creation of knowledge, collective awareness, ideas and emotions. Its outcome is a collective piece of art+research, usually performed for a social innovation and change.

CoLaboArthon, and projects developed on top of it, are supported by
Republic of Serbia, MINISTRY OF CULTURE AND INFORMATION and many partners/experts

More at CoLaboArthon.

EcoColabo

EcoColabo is a platform for facilitating European cross-border climate actions and collaborations.

EcoColabo is used at multiple Climathons - the biggest collective climate action taking place in 55 countries.

EcoColabo is supported through partnerships with the City of Belgrade, Chamber of Commerce and Industry Serbia, international organizations, companies and associations from Norway, USA, Russia, Italy, Greece, Romania, Belgium, Croatia, and Montenegro.

Play Sustainability! Edu-Game

an internationally awarded mobile-supported Edu-game featured at several international occurrences.

Participants are learning of and experiencing UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through solving real-world problems.

More at https://cha-os.org/en/play-sustainability/

LitTerra

LitTerra is a world of literature; a place where readers can explore books and walk through them.
More at LitTerra Ecosystem.

Events (empowered by Climathon.Space)

ReMaking Tesla

International Education Forum for Interactive and IT-Augmented Education.

ReMaking Tesla focuses on development of collective creativity and innovation

It is supported by Republic of Serbia, Ministry of Trade, Tourism and Telecommunications

More at https://remakingtesla.com

Climathon

Colabo.Space empowered multiple Climathons - the biggest collective climate action taking place in 55 countries.

Sustainable Development

Several Sustainable Development events, workshops, etc are empowered by Colabo.Space

More at https://cha-os.org/en/sustainable-development/

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Colabo.Space Components

ChaOS — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 13:49:19 GMT

Colabo.Space is built with highly modular approach in mind (you can check its Puzzles approach).

The figure below illustrates some of the Colabo.Space main Puzzles (modules)

We list several of them with links for further reading:

KnAllEdge

a data store for Colabo.Space applications
KnAllEdge

ColaboFlow

a methodology / framework to describe systems through social-processes
ColaboFlow

RIMA

RIMA (Resources and Interests Mapping App/API) - a Colabo.Space component that describes communities, their members, expertise, interests, initiatives, projects, and sub-communities

RIMA

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RIMA

ChaOS — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 13:47:14 GMT

a Colabo.Space component that describes communities, their members, expertise, interests, initiatives, projects, and sub-communities

RIMA (Resources and Interests Mapping App/API) initiated from our need to create the first component necessary for understanding each other (in Knowledge Federation (KF) group, etc.) better, learning about shared interests between peers/members, and creating an online semantic “market” to match our peers' areas of expertise with requirements. This model was reiterated and improved during dedicated sessions of the KF working group.

The proposed component has already initiated fruitful dialogues through Colabo.Space and is in the process of building up future initiatives (projects) in Protopia, KF, ReMaking Tesla, and other communities. It also gives a basis/motivation for networking members of these communities who did not have the opportunity to meet in life.

This component provides the mapping of a plethora of areas of expertise (interests) and initiatives happening among group members into a visually interactive and understandable graph/network. It will also suggest otherwise hidden possibilities and benefits of a particular networking situation. Through its use, members become (visually) interconnected by their mutual interests and areas of expertise.

RIMA is not seen (only) as a standalone tool, but as a component, or as a layer in a system.

A system that we can integrate RIMA in is a sort of SoS (System of Systems) or SoA. It uses shared Data with the rest of the system and thus semantically upgrades system functionality. Тhis "social universe" has a deep and wide role: to be an underlying (and transparent) layer (RIMA Knowledge Pool) that provides data for many tools/services (that may be part of Colabo.Space or some other independent initiatives) so that they can change their landscape or semantically drive communication with the end users.

Through the current development of RIMA, we are working on building a knowledge space consisting of members, interests, and initiatives. It will also provide for clean, directed and topic-based communication.

RIMA's original features were developed from the WhoAmI system, presented by the authors at the KF 2012 conference.

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Colabo.Space Developers

ChaOS — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 12:12:47 GMT

a place for Colabo.Space Developers

If you are new to the Colabo.Space, take some time to read about Colabo.Space Development principles.

Colabo.Space relies on highly modular approach. Read more about Colabo.Space unique Colabo.Puzzles concept.

Colabo Core Stack is illustration:

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KnAllEdge

ChaOS — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 10:42:39 GMT

KnAlledge (part of Colabo.Space ) is a data store for Colabo.Space applications.

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Basic Principles

KnAllEdge - Colabo.Space Data Store

The following figure is a conceptual representation of KnAllEdge, a data store for Colabo.Space applications.

It is a graph-oriented store, and it is best imagined as a social graph, where each person is represented by a node, a social connection by an edge, and finally, a social group by a container in the KnAllEdge store.
Its focus is on simplicity, generalization and supporting a declarative and semantic design of the application’s entities.

Demonstration of KnAllEdge benefits

We will go through a real usecase implemented in the LitTerra Ecosystem.

LitTerra is a world of literature; a place where readers can explore books and walk through them.

We will see how the system implementation and development is drastically simplified after being implemented on top of the Colabo.Space and KnAllEdge foundation

KnAllEdge - Data Store - LitTerra Example (initial)

Let’s see an example. Here we have three types of entities: books, books’ chapters, and books’ authors

Entities are realized as KnAllEdge nodes, while the relationships between the entities are realized as KnAllEdge edges
Finally, corpora are realized as KnAllEdge containers.
This is all fine. However, ...

KnAllEdge - Data Store - LitTerra Example (changed)

… the main problem with this is that entities change over time; Books should support multiple authors, and multiple books might need to be organized in corpora:

This requires changes in the model, and changes require additional development time and costs and introduce delays and bugs.

Conventional Application Stack

In a Conventional multi-tiers App Stack (illustrated) there is no single point of truth, which means that if we need to change entities, like supporting multiple book authors, we will need to change the application at multiple places.

Additionally, many parts of our application will need to be replicated for each of our entities; books, authors, chapters, etc.

Colabo.Space Application Stack

When we build multi-tier app on the Colabo.Space and KnAllEdge stack, we can simplify the process by describing our entities through schemas. We will have one schema for each entity; like the book, author, and chapter schemas.

This helps us to have a generic application with a single point of truth - instead of changing the application at many places we can simply change the schema.

Design Patterns

When should we identify (isolate) something as a separate entity

Short answer: It is all about data integrity and single point of truth.

Imagine you have a book entity and one of its properties is the name of the book publisher. It makes sense to provide just a textual field which will contain the publisher name and provide it for each book.

The first problem is: what about repeating the same publisher in mulitple books:

Retyping
Providing mistakes
what if publisher name change, should we propagate change in every book, etc

What if we want to provide the publishers' address?

It seems that publisher is an independent of book, and as such it should be isolated as an unique entity which will be associated with book through edge.

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Puzzles

ChaOS — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 05:55:42 GMT

Info

Migrating code into puzzle

Migration of an existing code is rather straightforward when using TypeScript or node.js. First you have to identify a puzzle boundaries, then you need to create a new puzzle:

cd 
colabo puzzle-create
# provide all necessary parameters

When a new puzzle is created, you need to move the old code into the puzzle. Finally you should change all puzzle references from the previous relative imports into global imports through the npm package name associated with the puzzle.

Publishing Puzzles

Backend

Go to the puzzle folder
run npm publish
this is demanding process regarding the package.json so you have everything right
it will end up published on npmjs.com
This is an example: https://www.npmjs.com/org/colabo-utils

Here is an example which of the puzzle @colabo-flow/b-services belongs to the colabo-flow colabo sub-organization (sub-space)

{
    "name": "@colabo-flow/b-services",
    "description": "This is a ColaboFlow service puzzle of the backend part of the Colabo.Space ecosystem",
    "version": "0.0.5",
    "private": false,
    "publishConfig": {
        "access": "public"
    },
    "license": "MIT",
    "repository": {
        "type": "git",
        "url": "git://github.com/Cha-OS/colabo.git"
    },
    "scripts": {
        "build": "tsc"
    },
    "main": "dist/index.js",
    "module": "dist/index.js",
    "dependencies": {
        "amqplib": "^0.5.2",
        "chalk": "^2.4.1",
        "uuid": "^3.3.2"
    },
    "peerDependencies": {},
    "devDependencies": {}
}

name - puzzle name. @colabo-flow/b-services"

description - puzzle description

version - any meaningfull version that follow semantic versioning

private - should be false to be able to publish

publishConfig - should be set as in example

license - you need to provide a license to be able to publish

repository - you need to provide a valid repository that will be linked to the published puzzle

main - it is the main entry point for the puzzle. It is the import and require point

module - it is used by bundler tools for ESM, and it can be treated same as main

dependencies - are all internal dependencies of the puzzle. It should contain both regular npm packages and other colabo puzzles that your puzzle depends on

Colabo.Puzzles

speciffic puzzles (components)

ColaboFlow

ColaboFlow.Go! presentation
- presented in the context of the Audio Commons project
ColaboFlow.Audit! presentation
- presented in the context of the Audio Commons project
ColaboFlow introduction
ColaboFlow infrastructure install

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ColaboFlow

ChaOS — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 06:53:13 GMT

ColaboFlow (part of Colabo.Space ) is a methodology / framework to describe systems through social-processes. In such way, we are able to rapidly redesign, recognize behavioral patterns and tune the system presence to needs of community or system providers (like GLAM institutions, schools, etc). Considering visual model aspect, it aims to be the social extension of BPMN.

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ColaboFlow is a set of mechanisms necessary to perform and coordinate the activities that take place in communities during the face-to-virtual processes. The best way to think of ColaboFlow is to think of the visual representation of workflows. The visual representation of ColaboFlow extends the BPMN standard in order to promote more flexibility, performative freedom, and fuzziness, and to integrate observational and evaluation support.

ColaboFlow Components

ColaboFlow provides three core components:

ColaboFlow.View provides a visual representation of community practices. Practitioners can start with their "soft" understandings of the practices, and through dialogical evolution, they are capable of building "solid" process models (flows) of the community practices.

ColaboFlow.Audit provides an unobtrusive and passive mechanism for augmenting of systems, practices, and communities with structured processes (flows). By using the ColaboFlow.Audit integration, we can get insights on the system behavior and necessary improvements of the flows.

ColaboFlow.Go provides mechanisms for coordinating face-to-virtual practices (flows). It supports community members' activities, exchanging knowledge artifacts between the system and community (face-to-virtual transfer), activities that should be executed on a machine (like NLP^[1] analysis, clustering, and evaluation among others) and provided back to the community.

Examples

ColaboFlow.Audit

At the following image you can see a part of the ColaboFlow.Audit dashboard that shows the stats of a flow visualized at the top, helping us to understand bottlenecks, problematic flows, etc. (The following three picture shows Audio Commons project funded by H2020 grant)

ColaboFlow.Go Micro-Services

On the following two pictures we see previous and ...

ColaboFlow-organized system:

ColaboFlow.Go Face-to-virtual practices

In ColaboFlow we have extended BPMN standard with various aspects. Here we present an subset of them relevant for the following example:

At the following pictures we present a flow of the workshop that we conducted at the Erasmus+ Everyday Heroes.

ColaboFlow and evaluations

Eventually, we can "sample" the community outcomes at particular "points" and get visualization graphs (with more details at the Sustainable Development):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing ↩︎

development

ChaOS — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 23:00:04 GMT

Development - General

As Colabo.Space is an ecosystem, consisting of both methodologies, tools, components and proto-websites, developing Colabo.Space can be done in various manner:

Programing Collective Mind - practicing it through Colabo.Space prototypes
Developing Collective Mind Ecosystem - integrating ColaboFramework puzzles into a community IT ecosystem
Developing Colabo Puzzles - extending, fixing or producing colabo puzzles
Developing ColaboFramework - contributing to Colabo.Space repository with infrastructural colaborative changes

Programing Collective Mind

This developing is rather through социотехники (sotsiotekhniki) by practicing provided proto-websites designed for specific communities.

One of the examples is (NOTE: Currently SSL certificate is not set properly, so you need to go through browser scurity warnings to reach the website) https://fv.colabo.space/

This proto-websites goes around Sustainable Development and UN's SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) as a tool for transforming community thinking, group mapping and dialogue and helping in creative thinking and innovative solutions.

The "Developing Collective Mind" development is out of our current focus, as it requires remotely trained facilitators, and we still do not have rigid documentation and ecosystem that would support such model. Therefore, we rather prefer to partner with communities or organizer (like Erasmus+ projects, or various forums and communities) where we use such proto-websites to demonstrate and evaluate Colabo.Space capabilities.

Developing Collective Mind Ecosystem

This kind of development means that a community is actively engaged in designing and developing a collective mind ecosystem based on the ColaboFramework.

It either means that developers will:

Create a Colabo.Space application/website and build it on the top of Colabo puzzles, or
Integrate Colabo puzzles in an existing ecosystem that community practices

Either way, the main focus is on using and integrating already existing Colabo Puzzles. In such way the community is extending its capacity with colaborative face-to-virtual capacity through ColaboFramework and Colabo.Space principles.

In order to integrate existing colabo puzzles there is no need for a special development infrastructure. This is due to the fact that Colabo puzzles are available as an independent npm packages. This makes it easy for a developer to simply add all necessary puzzles into the npm dependency file package.json.

More info on various colabo puzzles can be found under Colabo Puzzles Map

Puzzles are divided into subspaces, where each subspace defines particular aspect of the collaborative augmentation. We have flow subspace (providing ColaboFlow support for fuzzy (work)flows), rima (providing communities mapping and their interests), knalledge (providing knowledge representation with KnAllEdge component), etc.

Each subspace provides multiple puzzles for all necessary purposes that the subspace covers. The flow subspace provides puzzzes audit, go, session, etc puzzles.

Finally, from the perspective of puzzles' placement, each puzzle belongs either to backend, frontend, service, or is isomorphic (i.e. used at any of places). The puzzle name prefix determines its placement, b, f, s, i, respectivelly.

This brings us to the final npm namespacing for each puzzle, consisting of the domainspace, placement and puzzle's name: @colabo-/-, for example: @colabo-flow/f-audit, @colabo-flow/b-audit, @colabo-topichat/b-clients-orchestration, @colabo-utils/i-pub-sub, @colabo-flow/s-go, etc.

Developing Colabo Puzzles

Colabo Puzzles are core components of Colabo.Space ecosystem. Developers extend and fix existing or create new colabo puzzles in order to fulfil their community needs or to provide additional capabilities for a global Colabo.Space community.

In order to develop Colabo Puzzles, a developer needs to install Colabo.Space dev environment. It consists of:

cloning the https://github.com/Cha-OS/colabo repository
installing Colabo CLI Tools
following procedure for developing and building colabo puzzles
publishing updated/new colabo.puzzles
integrating and testing the puzzles

Developing ColaboFramework

This is more engaged work on Colabo.Space ecosystem, and currently it is maintaned through core group of developers and discussion and drafting with expert groups and partners.

Nevertheless, this is the most fundamental work on designing a collective mind, as it shapes models, design practices, understands needs and helps in the interoperability of systems and communities.

Work in this domain usually propagates to the whole system and often relates to the ecosystem breaking changes.

Additional development links

Installing

INSTALL Colabo.Space

Deploying

Deploying is automatized through Ansible system. Here you can find instructions on how to do it: Colabo.Space deployment (Ansible)

NOTE: We are using OpenStack Cloud provided from UiO.

Documents for each Ansible playbook is at Ansible Playbook docs

Development

DEVELOPMENT CHEATSHEET

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Colabo.Space

ChaOS — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 23:22:26 GMT

Colabo.Space is socio-technologically augmented ecosystem for collaboration and augmentation of scientific and creative communities and group processes. It is continuosely improved in an agile way through research work, conducting workshops and adopting newests socio-technological trends.

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International Usage

Colabo.Space is used as foundation of multiple international multidisciplinary events and multiple ecosystems are being built upon Colabo.Space

More about it at Colabo.Space International Usage

Demonstrative video

Best way to understand the ecosystem is to watch the short video demonstrating it in practice:

(Vimeo link to the video, more about the event: @ KnowledgeFederation, @ Tesla Congress)

Design Principles. Guiding Philosophies

It is a working and everevolving prototype of the Collective Mind. The Collective Mind is both a concept and a hope. The hope is that a community, a society, or the humanity as a whole can naturally co-evolve and achieve a higher level of knowledge, coordination, decision- and action-making, and, ultimately, higher level of consciousness.

The Colabo.Space ecosystem consists of a set of principles, socio-technical methodologies and online tools for supporting efficient collective collaboration. Among others aspects (spaces), it aims to provide the user with a knowledge space, together with an action space and a dialogical space, all coexisting in one collaborative ecosystem.

At the top level, the central role of the Colabo.space ecosystem is a "moving" role across all "stakeholders" of humanity. We want to keep a continuous dialogue and exchange of values across humanity both in order to give a power of each stakeholder to contribute and change the world for better, but also to keep the momentum of sustainability and thrivability as shown on the following diagram:

Building Components

Colabo.Space is built with highly modular approach in mind

Several Puzzles (modules) collaborate to create Colabo.Space:

For detailed list and further reading: Components

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