Contexts and practices

A context can be seen as a situation in which several entities collaborate to achieve goals. An entity can be anything, ranging from organizations and communities, departments and social networks to humans. The entities within a situation usually share common goals, but this is not a prerequisite. A situation is characterized primarily by the fact that entities interact in order to achieve goals, whether these goals are shared or not.

A context is described as a situation and roles within that situation. Technically speaking, a situation forms a context and the roles form sub-contexts in that context. Note that a role can be performed by one or more entity, and vice versa, an entity can perform many roles. Thus, context and sub-contexts do not form a strict tree-like hierarchy, but rather a network.

Another way to look at a context is to regard it as a practice, that is, particular ways to achieve goals. Remember that a context is made up of PQR elements, and that Q-activities introduce degrees of freedom. By selecting particular Q-activities and either implicitly or explicitly deselecting others we reduce the degrees of freedom in a context. Thus, we make choices in how we collectively achieve some goals. Naturally, we strive to optimization in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. A best practice can therefore be defined as ways of doing particular activities within a context in an effective and efficient way. Of course, the effectiveness and efficiency of ways of doing depend on the situation at hand. We can make this precise by characterizing a situation by means of conditions. If the activities in a practice leads to desired states as defined in conditions, then we have a situation with strong cohesion. On the other hand, if choices are made in a practice leading to low cohesion, we can speak of a bad practice. Thus, in EM_ont, a practice is nothing more than a selection and deselection device of intentional elements. Practices can be nested, and each sub-practice further reduces the number of degrees of freedom.

As we have seen, contexts can be nested. The top-level context contains the whole system, which is decomposed in sub-contexts containing sub-systems. In any context, we strive towards strong cohesion. However, in reality, this is something that can hardly be achieved, except in very simple systems with only a few stakeholders an almost no constraints. Typically, a sub-context exhibiting strong cohesion may have a negative effect on other sibling and top-level contexts. To put it differently, in a complex system we make compromises to accommodate all stakeholders to a certain extent.

Contexts and practices

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