Living System Blueprint, Take Two

|Image from Ritwik Dey|http://www.flickr.com/photos/ritwikdey/425995583/in/photostream|

At the end of last year, I posted a piece about our work with an early childhood system change initiative through the Graustein Memorial Fund in Connecticut.  At the time we were exploring different formats and technologies for creating a new “system blueprint” for early childhood development in the state.  Our post and related tweets asked for possible resources to conceptualize and create a living blueprint for this dynamic system, and I wanted to give an update about what we have heard so far and where we stand in our conversations.

As the Core Team has engaged in its research about all this, we’ve realized that there are three separate but possibly connected aspects to this “blueprint”conversation”:

(1) Options for a graphically appealing representation of the new early childhood development system in CT

(2) An interactive component that allows people to directly interface with the blueprint, access up-to-date data, and  contribute their own updates on progress

(3) Collaborative functionality that allows stakeholders in the system to communicate with one another in transparent ways, access pertinent news, etc.

As we prepare ourselves for further conversation this week about where to go from here, we will be looking at  some of the following tools and models to inform our thinking:

• This graphic from Reliable Prosperity that could provide a model of a blueprint (thank, Beth Tener!).

• The Insight Maker on-line tool for creating system simulations.

• This example of telling a story, graphically.

• The EASE Change Suite, for examples of a collaborative platform with scorecarding.

• Examples of different collaborative platforms, including this one from IDEO.

• A few other possible web 2.0 tools that might be integrated into an interactive website, that are listed in this post I wrote based on research for a few of our different collaborative multi-stakeholder change efforts.

Looking forward to hearing your reactions and additional ideas that will feed our thinking about what we can create!