(Placeholder to develop the report on BMDE and the importance of actual engagement in the territory.)
From here to there marks a linear progress from one determined point to another, and expresses the undetermined path that will develop into a roadmap to reach a specific goal, set in advance as a desirable objective. This expression is often used to engage in a road towards a quantifiable output, and tries to predict a set of discrete steps to follow in order to reach expectations. The resulting roadmap is brought forward to teams and funding institutions as a rational, comprehensive depiction of a deterministic bet on a future engineered to become the future.
Although roadmaps from here to there are very satisfying to the mind, reducing risk to a bearable minimum, they have to deal with many imponderables. Inherited from engineering approaches, roadmaps tend to work well in that context where machines must abide by the laws of physics. Our universe tends to favor ‘good enough’ assumptions, that with time and effort can help propel rockets to the stars in a pretty accurate and effective way. Strong of its success, technoscience amplifies its power over domains beyond its scope, by the virtue of its effective predictive power. But engineered solutions often lack insight into complexity, and roadmaps tend to hit unforeseen limits that, from an engineering perspective, amount to errors.
From (t)here to here tries to account for this complexity, and also for the fact that how predictable things might be, complex systems are not only things, they involve many trans-individual relations affecting each other in unexpected ways. Here, the (t) reminds us to consider the present situation as a hit-or-miss goal inherited from a past that didn’t play well along the lines of prediction. In retrospect, the oracle was wrong. The expression, turned around from its deterministic perspective, also insists on the importance of focusing not only on the expected goal, but more importantly on the actual path taken, of which the goal is but one step that will hopefully be taken.
Mapping the Commons is the stated goal of Dewey Maps, by a non-profit association in Belgium that nurtures a support network to local Press initiatives. If the original intent was to provide the local Press with yet unavailable information about the Commons, the cartography project of Dewey largely broke beyond a technical endeavor to venture into the network’s core competence : small-scale participatory democracy.
Because local Press is about informing the neighborhood, it’s a powerful tool to engage inhabitants and develop community ties. Following this lead, Dewey Maps creates an inventory of common resources that people can tap into and nurture themselves: the map is not the territory, but Dewey Maps proceeds from investing the territory and gathering inhabitants to explore, promote, defend, and organize the commons around them.
