Access space and digital outreach trainers case study

This paper evaluates a situation where two organisations, in the field of encouraging digital inclusion, targeted the same population with the same intent, but with different modes of engagement. This entailed reaching outward, making contacts with those to whom the benefits of the digital realm could make a significant difference to their lives. It was the aim of the Digital Outreach Trainers to enable the articulation of the tacit knowledge of that part of the population that was considered 'hard to reach'. Success would be deemed to be the number of challenged individuals who became learned as a consequence. The two ways in which this process was conducted is the subject of this paper

The obligatory passage point : abstracting the meaning in tacit knowledge

The lived experience of individuals in the workplace results in an accumulation of dispositions to act. Such dispositions have been termed knowledge [Boisot 1998]. Further, this knowledge is considered to be tacit or explicit [Baumard 1999]. Therefore tacit knowledge is one of the precursors of new knowledge. There have been a number of hypotheses as to how such knowledge is transformed into explicit knowledge [Nonaka et al 2000], and then subsequently diffused [Boisot 1998]. Moreover it is impossible to know the magnitude of tacit knowledge that is not articulated, however insightful, original or crucial it may be. The transformation to the explicit rendition can and will act as a filter in an attempt to eliminate meaningless utterances. Therefore some tacit knowledge will be lost in this process. This is an Obligatory Passage Point (OPP) a concept normally associated with Actor Network Theory [Latour 2005]. This is where the decision is made as to ‘what counts’ as legitimate knowledge and it is irreversible. This obligatory passage point is for all tacit knowledge in a community, an organization or even a nation. The case study presented comprises a small number of individuals working in a third sector environment. Although there is agreement as to what is to be achieved, the how question remains open. Despite the common concrete experiences, the tacit appreciation of the perceived action world varies significantly. A process by which an inventory of tacit knowledge can be established, abstracted and combined to act as a base to affect dispositions and expectations is described. The path to the subsequent generation of actionable knowledge is plotted which can subsequently form the basis for an intervention. The delineation between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge in this context is explored by the application of the obligatory passage point. Utilizing the principles of language by Karl Buller the notion of legitimation is discussed. The OPP is significant because when tacit knowledge is shared, there is a process of gaining inter-subjective agreement which legitimizes the explicit representation of the tacit knowledge. The eye can see and interpret the world, but it cannot see itself. All tacit knowledge is gained through the mind’s eye. The collective minds are seeing the collective tacit knowledge of the group and agreeing

Polytope Expansion of Lie Characters and Applications

The weight systems of finite-dimensional representations of complex, simple Lie algebras exhibit patterns beyond Weyl-group symmetry. These patterns occur because weight systems can be decomposed into lattice polytopes in a natural way. Since lattice polytopes are relatively simple, this decomposition is useful, in addition to being more economical than the decomposition into single weights. An expansion of characters into polytope sums follows from the polytope decomposition of weight systems. We study this polytope expansion here. A new, general formula is given for the polytope sums involved. The combinatorics of the polytope expansion are analyzed; we point out that they are reduced from those of the Weyl character formula (described by the Kostant partition function) in an optimal way. We also show that the weight multiplicities can be found easily from the polytope multiplicities, indicating explicitly the equivalence of the two descriptions. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of the polytope expansion by showing how polytope multiplicities can be used in the calculation of tensor product decompositions, and subalgebra branching rules.Comment: 16 pages incl. 3 figures, to appear in J. Math. Phy