Architected Futures™

Tools and strategies ... for boiling the ocean

Blogs

USAFacts

Submitted by joe.vansteen on Tue, 04/18/2017 - 17:42

I totally like what Steve Ballmer has done in creating USAFacts.org. It is the perfect civics book for the internet age.The average intelligence demonstrated by a lot of native Americans indicates that either a whole lot of them were never taught Civics, or they didn't pay much attention in school. Naturalized citizens have to take tests on government before they can be given citizenship, but native Americans appear to not really know how their country works.

Mason's World

Submitted by joe.vansteen on Fri, 12/16/2016 - 20:29

For Mason - "You are a fun guy to watch grow up, and I wanted to pass along a few insights, ideas, and opinions." - from GPA

​Started January 1, 2017 - to be updated dynamically

This is the first, in what I hope will be a series of posts, helping (some) new comers to understand Architected Futures, that takes a particular track, along a particular train of thought and story line. From a functional specification basis, it's a form of Use Case. It also defines some persona specification. These are things that are meaningful, and very, very important to software geeks. Like me. But Use Case stories also need to be important to users. It's their Use Case. What I try to do, as I envision and architect (design) systems, is to put myself in the position of the "User" of the system, and I ask, what would I want it to work like, be like, look like, feel like, etc if I were the one doing, living in, dealing with ... whatever. You get the point. There is a balance to that. And a lot of times it isn't appreciated. And, its tough to maintain, but it's easier with practice, like riding a bicycle. I have my own viewpoints as a "User" too, because it's a shared environment.

Application to The World as a System

Submitted by joe.vansteen on Sun, 12/11/2016 - 23:42

The following is an outline for a potential deeper discussion using the Architected Futures methodology to help refine the EATS tool suite toward an architecture and facility set which helps better address a selected issue set. If you would like to read more, tell me. Also, it would help to know:

  1. Special interest content using one or more references to subject matter categories used on this site.
  2. The context level you are interested in (conceptual, logical, technical, operational, etc.)
  3. The who/what/why/when/where/how variables you want exposed

For example: How would this work or be applied in a community (farming, city, resort?) facing rising water levels (as in Florida, or as in Maine?) driven by the rise in sea levels currently occurring due to climate change?

Note, the outline used below is arbitrary, the groups were my own invention when I originally conceived the idea of the post. Feel free to expand. This is usually the situation for most posts to discuss applications to specific problem sets. The "focus" of the current outline was derived from a discussion concerning the current state of the global civilization given such problems as climate change, population explosion, political discourse, terrorism, economics, etc. Fundamentally, there is a common architecture process to work through the problem set and discuss design alternatives and options.

The high level view of what's happening here is that someone is coming in with a problem specification, and we are adapting and tailoring the EATS tool suite to help arrive at a solution. It's not magic. There's a lot of work involved. If nothing else, sometimes your head might hurt. (Actually, that may happen a lot at first.) But what comes out is a control plan to create a maintainable solution that has a high likelihood of being achievable and functional for the duration expressed in your specifications. In this case (i.e., when dealing with global issues and concerns), duration is defaulted to "the indefinite future," as in, forever.

Open Source / Open Architecture / Open Notebook

Submitted by joe.vansteen on Wed, 12/07/2016 - 22:51

Announcement of policy change regarding management of content on this web site.

The purpose of this blog post is to announce a shift in strategy in the development of materials relative to EATS and Architected Futures. EATS has, of late, been developed to be an open source, open architecture software development effort. However, the totality of what I have wanted to do with Architected Futures has not been approached as fully public material. I now think that, while that may, or may not, have been appropriate when I started this web site, it is not sufficient going forward.

EATS Infrastructure Prototype Code Published

Submitted by joe.vansteen on Tue, 10/16/2012 - 16:44

My previous blog post, titled EATS Development Journal, provided a forward view of EATS development based on the Eclipse framework. This post announces the publication of the baseline code for that development effort. It provides the first in a series of posts which examine the code as a model for the infrastructure layer of the tool suite architecture.

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - blogs