Winfried writes in LO26439, on reading Alexander's "A Pattern Language":
> Hopefully there are many more pattern
> languages to come. What about: A Pattern Language: Industries, Companies,
> Work. Leaving the elements behind and dive into the wholes...
There are some works in progress in this area; see for example:
http://www.bell-labs.com/cgi-user/OrgPatterns/OrgPatterns:
a WikiWeb for collaborative work on the intended "common organization
pattern language"
http://www.bell-labs.com/user/cope/Patterns/Process/:
Jim Coplien's original "Development Process Generative Pattern Language"
derived from observation of many Bell Labs software development projects.
An interesting feature of the latter is the use of a couple of diagram
types used to characterize communication among roles in an organization.
>From the introduction:
"There are two kinds of pictures used in the Pasteur studies. The first is
a social network diagram, also called an adjacency diagram. Each diagram
is a network of roles and the communication paths between them. The roles
are placed according to their coupling relationships: closely coupling
roles are close together, and de-coupled roles are far apart. Roles at the
center of these pictures tend to be the most active roles in these
organizations, while those nearer the edges have a more distant
relationship with the organization as a whole.
The second kind of picture is an interaction grid. The axes of the
interaction grid span the roles in the organization, ordered according to
their coupling to the organization as a whole. If a role at ordinate
position p initiates an interaction with a role at coordinate position q, we
put a point at the position (p,q). The point is shaded according to the
strength of the interaction."
--Don Dwiggins "All models are false, but some are useful" d.l.dwiggins@computer.org -- George Box, "Statistics for Experimenters"
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