SEON: Social Ecological Open Network
An Open-Source Knowledge Platform for finding people, expertise, and sharing information
What is SEON?
SEON is a platform with a front end and a knowledge production database. The database is designed to both serve and be produced by the people, programs, and organizations that are engaged in Ecological Restoration and Earth Repair.
It has three main areas of engagement:
1) as a directory for finding people and organizations in areas of environmental concern particular to your individual and collective expertise and experience;
2) as a repository of knowledge including stories, project plans/reports, unpublished papers, concepts, and ‘how to’ guides and information; and
3) as a platform for sharing and finding data, models and workflows related to your ecosystem, geography, or project.
Why is SEON Needed
Ecological restoration and earth repair projects today require teams of people with diverse skills sets. Often new projects require finding people with specific expertise or experience on similar projects. Access to digital information resources such as maps, datasets, models, and workflows can slow or delay planning and design projects. Other helpful information may not be readily available including unpublished reports, case studies, project summaries and more. Local knowledge such as where to source materials, special conditions or things to consider in a given location or geography can be especially important, but hard to access.
SEON can help you find information about who to talk with, what did/do they do, what people and resources are needed to design/implement policies, plan, or projects, and what challenges, successes, and outcomes were achieved. Access to such knowledge can benefit project budgets and timelines, better meet recovery goals, increase innovation, help secure funding, and support greater goodwill.
What SEON Offers
SEON offers its community a way to build and share knowledge for ecological repair and adaption.
Communicating and Connecting
We know the challenges facing our environment are increasing in scale and complexity. What we don't know is where, how fast and with what frequency change will occur in our ecosystems and geographies. We need to increase our capacity to work together in broader communities, to collectively make sense of this time, and better share our knowledge and resources. We need to find people with expertise and experience to help us best make decisions about the direction and timeliness for effective action. Broad approaches, coordinated strategies, and local actions, are best supported by collaborative sense making and shared information. Time in the context of priority setting, policy development and funding needs better feedback for more agile response to new conditions. Actions need to be evaluated over both near- and long-term trajectories and trade-offs need to be digested and transparent.
Projects and Case Studies
We work together on projects that can directly chang the world, planning to change the world or creating policy to guide how we should change the world.
We deliver projects by finding collaborators, gathering information and resources, developing workflows and plans and implementing them. We document them on the fly, exchange communications, deliver presentations and submit reports. But often we are not funded nor have the time to publish in formal settings. So much of what we learned lives in the grey digital world and slowly becomes unfindable by others working on similar projects.
By offering a system where information on your project -- what is was, where it was, who worked on it - can be quickly noted and links to digital assets -- proposals, reports, case studies - added, the work becomes findable and helpful to others.
Data, models and workflows
To know how to change the world for better we need to be look at possible actions and then simulate their effects over time and space. So as well as helping record and share the physical actions we make in the real world to restore ecosystems, we use SEON to record simulation models, the workflows that run the models, the data they run and the data they produce. And to know if we are making progress towards our goals, we need to gather and share monitoring data and the values of indicators they support.
To understand which actions today will have the greatest benefit in 40 years time means we need decision support systems that simulate how the land and sea-scapes will fare with and without the actions we are proposing to implement. Since we are facing uncertainties that we don't control, we need to test these simulation under climate change, fire, and population growth and other scenarios. SEON helps organize and share all these pieces that we need and use in our everyday work.
Quote
Herbert Simon
“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”