Repository of Transformation

The Repository of Transformation (RoT) is a continuously evolving learning platform to research, understand, develop and drive societal transformation processes and impact. It builds and enables international communities of practice and learning, e.g., the EIT Culture & Creativity and the Imagining Climate Justice in the Minor Key movement, to study and address complex societal challenges.

RoT is being developed for doing transformation work in the "minor key", a term coined by Tim Ingold (2019), inspired by minor science (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004) and minor gesture (Manning, 2016), advocating an attitude of open-endedness, unpredictability and experimentation to open up experience through variation (Ingold, 2018), in contrast to "major key" thinking, which emphasises control and fixed outcomes. The minor key perspective seeks transformation through the continual flux of unsettling, re- making and exploring unknown paths together based on mutual trust to sustain life in climate-just ways (Ingold, 2019). Through shared experience, everyone can find their own voice and transform from within (Ingold, 2013), while the pluriversal ecosystem attains a balance precisely through variation and the different experiences of life (Ingold, 2013, 2019).

The software infrastructure and related (physical) tools of RoT are specially designed for open-ended minor key ways of sense-making and knowing within pluriversal ecosystems, by allowing for continuous (re-)connecting and repositioning of data, and multilateral refocusing of perspectives, depending on its (pluriversal) contexts and users. Unlike current content management systems that typically use predetermined meta data and relationships, RoT makes use of dynamic relationships between particles, i.e. small data ‘points’ with content, such as a participant, an event, a reflection or a short story. The particles are considered “agnostic” (uncommitted) allowing for the creation of meaning in interaction between participants, contexts and RoT, rather than being predefined and fixed.

Participants can choose their own entry points, perspectives and ways of working within RoT, according to what suits them and their context best. Particles can be continuously added, relabelled, rearranged and reviewed through different lenses and points of view making use of a variety of interwoven digital Apps and (physical) tools, including Apps for adding particles (Contribute), editing them (Edit), creatively reflecting on them (Reflect), finding different relations between them (Lenses), making sense of them with help from AI (AInalyse), and curating the content of RoT together through Quadratic Voting (Curate). Moreover, there are Apps for contributing and exploring specific constellations of particles according to categories such as graphical overviews of all particles (Datagraph), transformation cases (Stories), (non-)human participants and their relations (Participants), events (Agenda), methods and tools for transformation (Methods&Tools), situated films about aspirations and output (Documentaries), interactive embodied interviews (Engaging Encounters) as well as keeping track of project progress (Dashboard). Finally, there are background Apps such as setting participants reading and writing permissions (Access) and connecting to other Apps through Application Programming Interfaces (API).

In addition, participants can develop their own applications, interfaces and physical tools to further personalise their interaction with the content if preferred.

The Repository is being developed since January 2020 by Wesley Hartogs, Caroline Hummels, together with many students and colleagues, which we like to thank for their contribution: Rosa van der Veen, Jorrit van der Heide, Femke Coops, Renate Voss, Anne Jenster, Kiki Meiland, Femke Schaap, Serra van Santen, Danielle Ramp, Sam van der Horst, Pierre Lévy, Gabriele Ferri, Daisy Yoo, Maarten Smith, Sander van de Zwan, Ludger van Dijk and Jeroen Peeters.