Sandra Dickinson
I'm captivated by the connection your project makes between common problems and common solutions. And creating a space for communities to collaboratively discover the PATTERN relationship between problems and solutions.

I think this is totally cool, of course, because my own project, SElearninggames, has the same underlying foundation. I am dedicated to the proposition that - collectively - we know the answers to our common questions. We just don't yet know that we know it. The tools of the social web offer a tremendous opportunity for us to harness our collective intelligence - on a massive scale not possible before.

And you are right on when you identify community participation as a key obstacle. In fact - for those of us who share this vision -- that is one of our own "patterns"! (many other projects have identified this same challenge). Our respective projects can't begin to identify "common" problems and "common" solutions -- unless/until our respective constituencies share their individual problems and solutions. The trick is "getting started."

So -- I bet we could do for each other what we aim to do for our respective constituencies. We can share OUR OWN problems and our own solutions! We can help each other evolve more effective strategies to engage community participation.

I've certainly learned a few things I think are useful, the hard way, from my own experience. I'm going to make a blog post about it in a minute. I'll come back and give you the link to the blog post, so you can join the conversation.

In the meantime, because our projects have such fundamental elements in common, I would appreciate it very much if you would take time to look at SElearninggames proposal and comment. Thank you so much.