Welcome to the Pattern Language Project is the home page for a “Public Sphere Project” by the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility that is attempting to develop knowledge of patterns that make for communication and living according to deep core values.
An ambitious project that seems both a naive application of trendy theory in computing (patterns) to (just about all) social problems, and a remarkably promising form of social dialogue. The participatory nature of the project, the use of ideas from architecture and computing, could provide a way into social responsibility for engineering culture.
I am not sure what I feel about this. It seems we are a generation bereft of deep social values and ideas as to how to implement them. With the “defeat” of communism we are left not with a victorious ideology, because capatalism is really a lack of ideology – a lack of end goals beyond efficiency of means. A project like this might be an example of the autogenesis of “deep” virtue ideas and discussion of their implementation. It could be that we have to scupper the aparatus of political theory and start with metaphors that work for the specialists and knowledge engineers we have become.