Values - National, European; conflicting and complementary
Policy - The constituent parts of the treaty
Events - The vote
Content - The treaty, which no one understands
Trust - Complete lack of, as the populace doesn’t trust the EU bureaucrats or understands the treaty

Could VPEC-T thinking have helped the EUcrats to a “Yes” vote by revealing the weakness - lack of trust - and identifying the causes and addressing. Or is this too obvious?

I think this supports the lifting of the concepts of VPEC-T in to other spheres, especially when we look at the forces that influence the clustering of resources in to communities.

Adrian mentions REA, which I have been paying a lot of attention to recently. REA is very closely related to VPEC-T as an architectural style, especially in that it tells us what kind of events we should allow for (non-economic, financial and resource). I think REA also justifies the front, middle and back office view of the value chain. For example, if I order a book from Amazon, that is a non-economic event. If Amazon passes that to the marketplace, the order is then verified for payment (financial) and stock (resource). Finally the order is passed to the warehouse and the book is shipped (resource).

The VPEC-T events, then, are the events of REA. So Adrian asks, where are the REA resources, and suggests that Content models resources. The answer is yes, for instance the Amazon catalogue is a list of such resources and is clearly content. However, there are more resources in VPEC-T than just material ones. These are well described in the book REST Web Services which describes a resource oriented architecture that covers REA type resources and others such as queries (pure content) and transactions among others. This goes beyond VPEC-T in using hypermedia to drive application state but mirrors VPEC-T in constraining interaction to events and content (POST and GET).

I would use VPEC-T to model the enterprise. I would use REA to model the value chain and I would use ROA to model a specific record keeping domain. VPEC-T excels at working out the enterprise changes that are caused by changes in values within the enterprise. This is often the starting point for change. All this goes to show the importance of choosing the right style for the right problem (going back to York’s comments).

John

May be VPEC-T can help us here. The elements certainly seem to add up to the definition of an interface and its ‘contract’…and picking up on York’s post(s) one that is not constrained to information systems. However, I feel that (as John identifies) certain elements are only implicitly identified, that is the parties and/or resources involved.

Yes I guess content could equate to resource, but wouldn’t resource be a more general concept (I am also reminded of the REA framework )? This would allow us to talk about the end points or nodes; John refers to these as domains.

I wonder what VPEC-T can offer us in shaping these domains. For example, by applying the well established systems engineering principles of coupling and cohesion to the elements of VPEC-T can this help us shape system modularity? Domains of trust, domains of shared values etc? This seems to lend itself to a more general model of organisation. Something to explore further?

Chris. Re the Content and framework. As Nigel suggested all dimensions of VPEC-T are Content. However also Events are pro generators of Content. Events spawn Content as well as providing points in a process in which Content is moving along a process thread might be touched (modified, extracted, enriched, etc ). I would say in relation to conflict resolution that use of VPEC-T provides Event in which memes of opposing parties are modified. So that internal meme meaning to individuals are realigned in some way and therefore memes expression in group is modified as a result of collective changes in parts of group whole. The upper parent holons change as a result of changes in the holiarcy of child holons that make up it’s constituent parts. In the case the groups (parent holon) changes as result of changes in individuals (child holons) within the group.

Carl. The above also therefore along lines you were talking about re autonomous meaning making machines (AMMM). The group is an AMMM – a holarchic whole - as are the individuals – the holiarchic whole parts - within it, (the group is also a part of larger societal groups.)

Nigel suggested at end of meeting that we start up a VPEC-T wiki and that I read a couple of papers from Roger Sessions site re Simple Iterative Partitions (SIP).

Q. What are next steps in your minds?
Q. How shall we start to organise wiki? Capgemini infrastructure?