Unification
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Unification is the foundation direction of all Platforms. It is the aspect of all systems in the network which every Platform in the whole network is aligned with.
The unifications play an important role in the structure of the solution necessary to solve the larger problems of organisation. It doesn't matter so much about the actual form of the core as long as its able to achieve these key areas of unification as the majority of the problems that the project is concerned with are a result of these things being fragmented. The theme of unification features so greatly within the spectrum of solution because the problem of fragmentation which is prevalent on our heavily centralised civilisation.
Unification is a core value of OrganicDesign and is a fundamental "default project" inherited by all trust groups that choose to align with the OrganicDesign charter because it's alignment process itself.
Specific OrganicDesign unification efforts
Organisation & Organism: One of the most fundamental and all-encompassing aspects of unification in this project is the push for the architecture of our system to look to nature and the biological system as an example and to mimic it's solutions in our own systems. Bruce Liptons book Spontaneous Evolution sums up our perspective on this aspect admirably and we consider it a must-read book for understanding this aspect.
East & West: Using western technology and systems-thinking to implement the eastern "physics" model of conceptual-space as described in Taoism, Advaita Vedanta and others.
Work & Life: Using the principles of Self Organisation, the personal goals and progress can make use of the same productivity methods and tools as business and project oriented organisations.
User & Developer: The application undergoes change from use and changing the way any aspect works is achieved from within the same content environment as the users of the application are operating in. This can also be seen as a unification of runtime into a single persistent space of objects. And also can be seen as a unification of application & content, by defining the application using the same generic components as all organisations, the application-development role merges with the content-management role. The collaborative network content ranges from passive information to active applicational content.
Software & Organisation: By defining the application in terms of generic organisation we unify the IT-world with the Human world, reducing dependency on specialisation.
Client & Server: Operating as a peer-to-peer network means having no distinction between a client computer and a server; all nodes in the network are running the same software which performs as either role dynamically in response to the changing network topology.
RAM/Disk/Network: The same tree (of instances) is unified across all mediums unifiying the runtime object environment with the filesystem structure and further to the network and Internet. This has the advantage of allowing peers to operate primarily from ram-based caches. Few applications support inherent memory-based operation due to complication of implementation within the fragmented environment (some vendors do like Panorama and OLAP). A similar solution is memcached which acts as a large shared hash table for caching database and function results in RAM, but this is still far less efficient than the nodal method because it requires serialise/deserialise operations on the data to preserve it across the fragmented run-time sessions.
Class & Instance: a.k.a Instance-based or prototype-based - instances are based on other instances, so class and instance become dynamic, relative relationships. This is also the unification of the is and has relations into only has.
Software architectural unifications
Inputs: All text input and output, and practically all widgets are based on the generic WYSIWYG-textarea which depending on its attributes can appear as textboxes, editboxes, listboxes, buttons, links and icons.
Lists: Another generic "widget" is the List which depending on its context can appear as inbox, spreadsheet, recentchanges, history, search/query and schedule.
