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SummaryWhat kind of data model would we need to model watersheds, ecosystems and communities?

Description *Overview¶ What are some of the goals in building a simulations based foundation for discussion of issues affecting watersheds, communities and planetary populations? Goals¶ An educational tool¶ As a starting point it is important for people to even see that there are local systems! To see: 1. natural geographic features; canyons, mountains, beaches. 2. the watersheds and how they course through those features. 3. impacts of climate and weather. 4. impacts of land use zoning laws and regulation. 5. wildlife areas, forest, natural spaces. 6. road and transport networks. 7. farms and agricultural systems. 8. presence of churches and other social agencies. 9. areas of manufacturing and industry. 10. urban development. 11. garbage dumps and recycling. 12. pollution emitters including industry and superfund sites. And to have a way to see how these systems interact, 1. see how individuals are impacting these systems 2. see how groups can change how they interact with these systems 3. try out actions and speculatively predict what might happen A 'third participant'.¶ In the conflict between opposing vested interests it helps when the debate is over a "chess board" rather than head to head. The goals are to: 1. build consensus; not just vote. 2. frame the debate with rigor 3. forcing arguments to be internally consistent; independent of opponents 4. to actually test arguments by simulating them forward in time 5. a way of raising the quality of the rhetoric; making all participants smarter To re-assume responsibility.¶ We all need to start shifting responsibility back to us instead of trying to blame other parties such as Big Oil or Big Business. If we were a 'simulnation' instead of a 'voter nation' or a 'consumer nation' we'd at least stop trying to pass the blame while contributing most of the damage. 1. playing on the hawken's idea of a 'million small organizations' 2. give us a sense of investment and involvement in solutions 3. help supercede media and political propaganda that would have us blame others 4. help us act in concert 5. help us avoid misguided efforts that cause more harm than good 6. stop us from being so passive Examples and Use Cases¶ To simulate the Watershed of the Pacific North West.¶ 1. let you look at the pacific northwest 2. see the watershed run-off from the columbia cascades to the ocean 3. see all live current data on health of key indicator species such as salmon 4. see all live current data on pollution, plastic and other wastes flowing to ocean 5. see the electricity yield from dams and other energy sources in the pacific nw 6. see the electricity needs of local populations 7. see the food production of farms in the watershed 8. see the food consumption requirements 9. see the natural spaces, animal habitat and continuity thereof 10. see natural space requirements and health, mental stability and crime relationships 11. try explore variations of energy sources; solar, wind and cost/benefits 12. try explore variations of reward systems to encourage people to shift behavior 13. speculate forward computationally up to 10 years into the future based on models 14. get triple bottom line scores on overall health and resilience of economy,environment,growth To model Big Oil¶ Modelling the oil system in all its parts from 1. vehicles to gas stations 2. to suppliers 3. to refineries 4. to ocean going shipping 5. to reservoirs 6. wildcatting 7. market speculators 8. environmental impacts 9. carbon pollution 10. social 11. environmental and political effects And as well to let participants play with parameters ranging from: 1. oil supply chains 2. effects of disruption 3. pricing 4. volatility 5. and doing long term speculation about oil reserves and the like Modelling a single houses total impact on the environment, mitigation and the like.¶ Visualize Watersheds¶ Let ordinary folks in small communities easily fly over and examine local watersheds to simply visualize: 1. water flow 2. food networks 3. social, political and legal networks 4. to see superfund sites 5. pollution 6. current costs of maintaining the status quo 7. as well as get quick estimations of longer term costs To let the more ambitious segue into changing parameters of the predictive model: 1. try out alternative energy sources (and see possibly unexpected repercussions) 2. allow people with domain specific expertise to submit new relationships between things 3. where they can express that say a wind-farm has a specific unexpected side-effect 4. that say for example noise levels affect bird populations in unexpected ways 5. to express side-effects coarsely as some kind of algorithm To let people slice and dice the model to get different vantage points; to understand the view of the world through the lens of another persons point of view: 1. allow people to cherry pick what expertise they trust by using an extended peer network as a filter 2. and to then run simulations forward on that data only 3. perform very coarse grained planetary level simulations of long term outcomes User Interface¶ A key goal is a many participant space. Some of the key aspects are: 1. a many participant shared online digital space 2. accessible over the web 3. allows you to describe individual phenomena and the relationships between them 4. allows you to share your facts with other persons in a wikipedia like manner 5. has geographical and watershed data 6. lets you play out game scenarios with available data Engineering goals¶ Implementation has a number of key goals as well, 1. open source 2. distributed computation using a framework like 'folding at home' 3. open participant submission of models and relationships 4. simulates behavior of a series of objects forwards in time 5. may use a cellular automata 6. may use linear equations for a more formal constraint based solver 7. at the user level is based on describing individual 'objects' like wikipedia 8. facts are represented each as a 'data sheet' each with a unique URL 9. online and offline operation