Wystem 3: Recipes
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In Praise of Computational Thinking
It's worth repeating once again: computational thinking is a great idea for the social sector. It's not a tool just for programmers and geeks, but for anybody who is trying to do something good with scarce resources. And one computational idea which is of great importance is the recipe. A recipe is a way to organize resources so that you can produce something reliably and then hand it over to the next institution or organization to do as they will. Recipes bring together ingredients, instructions to cook, and a serving guide. This is the kind of thing that we are used to all the time. We do it at home. We are already computational thinkers. It's not as if computational thinking is something new.
The computer is just an extension of our minds.
Think about all the good intentions out there -- the desire to feed the hungry, house the homeless, educate the underprivileged. These goals are noble, but good intentions alone pave a very bumpy road. Social problems are wicked; can we break down these complex problems like we do a kitchen task? Can we map the "ingredients" of money, manpower, and materials? Where are the clear instructions, not just for the hands-on work, but for how one group's efforts smoothly transition into the next? This is where computational concepts become lifelines. A recipe isn't about robots replacing volunteers; it's about recognizing the patterns that make, or break, a successful project.
Maybe a food bank's donations dry up right when a shelter sees a surge in need -- that kind of misalignment screams for a better recipe. Or, imagine if a program training orphans has no "serving guide" -- no way to connect graduates to actual jobs. That's like baking a cake and never taking it out of the oven! The computer isn't inventing this way of thinking, it's amplifying it. It helps us spot where our civil society efforts get tangled, where handoffs are fumbled, and ultimately, where our impact falls short of what it could be.
Cooking the Earth
And we can cook almost anything. We can make recipes for almost anything. Unfortunately, some of those things aren't great. We're very good at taking petroleum and other fossil fuels and cooking the earth. Not something we really want to do. Almost all of us go about our lives cooking the earth; we're chefs without a care for the ingredients. We dump in those fossil fuels, stir in unchecked consumption, and watch the planet "cook" in a way that's disastrous. This isn't the intention, of course. Most of us don't wake up thinking, "How can I harm the planet today?" Yet, collectively, the recipe we follow by default leads to just that.
Not good.
What if that same recipe mindset, that instinct to combine and create, was harnessed for healing rather than destruction? Imagine recipes designed for collaboration on a massive scale. We can use recipes to bring together people from different parts of the earth to make something new. We can also use recipes to fall in love - the way to someone's heart is through their stomach. We're not talking about individual love affairs, but a community-wide passion sparked by a shared project. Think of that recipe for planting trees--not some cookie-cutter monoculture, but a burst of biodiversity that revitalizes the land. Imagine the pride, the sense of ownership that spreads as neighbors witness their work taking root.
The Rotichain
One great thing about recipes is that they can be exchanged. We can share our recipes with others. Suppose we have learned how to cultivate a mangrove to counteract sea level rise. Why not share that recipe with others? Why not take that adjacent piece of land and put a mangrove forest there as well? Computational thinking compresses our problems and their solutions in a format that others can also use. Recipes are a vehicle for that. They don't have to do it exactly the way you do - it's not mechanically. computational. It's not like our solution has to be the same as yours. You are borrowing our recipe, but you’re going to cook it the way you want.
And so there can be so many different types of recipes. There can be recipes for mangroves. There can be recipes for enriching our soil. There can be recipes for starting a new kind of social organization. There can be recipes for climate. There can be recipes for how to exchange information. Once you start thinking about the world in terms of recipes, you never know what you're going to turn into a recipe.
Imagine an organization as a bustling kitchen, its procedures like carefully followed recipes. But just like a recipe assumes you have the basics on hand, organizations often take their underlying support systems for granted. A cookbook won't teach you how to grow wheat for flour, and likewise, a company manual won't explain the power grid. Yet, during a crisis, this hidden infrastructure becomes vital. What was once taken for granted suddenly needs urgent attention.
The concept of 'Coupled Recipes', or the 'Rotichain', aims to reveal the whole system behind the scenes. Think of making rotis: it relies on someone milling flour, which in turn relies on a farmer's grain harvest. By mapping these interconnected stages, we turn typically invisible infrastructure into something we can consciously manage and improve.
Now, add a dash of technology. Imagine a smart pantry automatically ordering flour when you're running low, with drones perhaps even delivering it to your doorstep. This sounds fantastic, but it introduces risk. What if that drone is hacked and your flour ends up in the wrong hands?
Both the potential benefits and the new dangers highlight the usefulness of computational thinking. Once we break down the world into chained recipes, we realize the vast, intricate organization required to make things run smoothly. The Rotichain offers a way to visualize this complexity. It's a tool for understanding the social systems we depend on, potentially offering a framework for organizing how our society functions.
Our Recipe
The messenger is our cookbook. It's how we are sharing the way we address wicked problems with you. Maybe we could do a better job of compressing the messenger into a recipe - do let us know how we can improve our cooking and our serving.