Collaborative opportunities

Possible collaborative projects

This is a list of possible projects for further developing DoView Boards, DoView Planning and outcomes theory. Get in touch if you would like to collaborate on any of these, or, if you like, just let us know if you are working on some of these issues independently. Also, get in touch if you want to explore other possibilities.

Further developing the DoView Drawing Rules

• Further developing the existing DoView Drawing Rules. We already know that DoView Boards’ This-Then pages created with the DoView Drawing Rules effectively capture the logic of any strategy and can support better decision-making in many different settings. The aim is for DoView Boards to become a widely used visual language for working with any type of strategy. The current DoView Drawing Rules were developed to visualize on a This-Then page a DoView Board the key aspects of the strategic logic that decision-makers need to take into account. And to do this in a way that enables the DoView Board to act as a shared thinking tool against which decision-makers can deliberate about strategy. There may be ways in which the DoView Drawing Rules could be improved.

• Developing standard ways of representing the underlying evidence for ‘This-Then’ claims being made in a DoView. At the moment, the evidence for links between This-Then boxes in a DoView Board are captured in the This-Then box link popup. This provides the ability to traffic light links and to include information about the link in several fields. It may be that an additional element could be introduced into the DoView Board minimum standard relating to the nature and type of evidence or rationale for there being a link between two This-Then boxes.

A standard for storing and sharing DoView diagrams

• Developing a standard for storing and sharing DoViews. DoView Boards are HTML files and a minimum DoView Board standard specification is included in the DoView Boards open-source GitHub. The DoView Legacy App can save files in XML format. An XML schema, or other format, could be potentially be developed that contains all of the key elements that could be included in any DoView Board. This would enable portability of DoView diagrams between different apps, platforms and systems.

• Version‑control system that snapshots DoView diagrams over time, enabling before/after comparisons and archiving for institutional memory. This can be achieved by putting DoView Boards in a Github repository but there might be a case for developing DoView Board applications which include this feature in them.

Shareable Collections of DoViews

• Developing collections of DoView Boards that are expert or AI-verified and capture evidence-based best practice in different domains using the standard format of DoView Boards. This would speed up best practice sharing as others could ‘borrow’ evidence-based best practice to include in their own DoView Boards. Funders or oversight agencies might find this to be a good way of them ensuring that those agencies they are funding or have oversight of are doing evidence-based practice.

DoView’s effectiveness in communicating strategy

• Comparing standard strategic planning and strategy communication documentation with DoView Boards. A very small informal study showed that planners thought that DoViews were 40% more effective at communicating strategy than traditional strategic planning documentation. It would be interesting to conduct a proper study on this.

• Governments spend considerable resources on producing documentation about what they are doing. It would be interesting to see if stakeholders and members of the public find that DoView Boards, such as a Whole of Government DoView Board Collection, would be a better way of communicating with stakeholders and the public about what government is trying to achieve.

DoView-creating prompts

• Creating prompts that can be used with other AI systems to draw DoView Boards. The current DoView Board Prompt Package has been tested with ChatGPT and Claude. It could be tested and optimized for other AI systems.

• Building standalone apps that create DoView Boards. At the moment people use the DoView Board Prompt Package in their own AI system, and they can connect their DoView Board to their AI system using an API key. Standalone apps or platforms could be built which use AI within them to create and modify DoView Boards if this added value beyong people just building and using them with their own AI system.

Embedding the features of DoView Boards within other apps, platforms or systems

• Embedding DoView Planning and the features of DoView Boads in other apps, platforms and systems. Anyone is free to include the features of DoView Boards into other systems (with acknowledgment). Get in touch if you want us to help you do this.

Using DoView Boards to abstract ‘This-Then’ claims from any knowledge product or domain

• Exploring the use of DoView Boards to quickly summarise, abstract, and improve understanding of a wide range of knowledge products that are in any way relevant to taking action in the world. At the moment, DoView Boards can be used to describe a research domain and as the basis for discussion about the details of scientific hypotheses. This use case for DoView Boards could be explored further.

• Developing browser plug-ins that enable AI to immediately convert the content of any web page into a DoView Board, surfacing the ‘This-Then’ claims being made on that webpage or in a research report, or other similar types of articles.

• Comprehensively DoViewing current theory and knowledge in different scientific domains. Scientific domains can be regarded as a set of ‘This-Then’ claims. As such, they can be represented in the form of a DoView diagram. See the Research page for how DoView Planning can be used for research for examples of how a whole research domain can be captured in a DoView strategy diagram.

• Creating curated large-scale DoView Boards of scientific domains such that researchers could contribute to them, identify portions of the DoView that their current research projects are focusing on, and amend them in light of their research findings. These research domains DoView Boards could also be used by research funders and stakeholders interested in knowing about and applying research in the domain. This is currently explored in the page on using DoView Boards in research.

• Automatically grading the strength of each “This‑Then” link in a DoView using study metadata (effect sizes, quality scores), visualizing the strength of evidence within a DoView. This is already being done to some extent when using DoView Boards in regard to research domains. This could be explored further.

Real-time DoView generation

• Developing AI-generated real-time DoView Boards of presentations such that, as someone is presenting, a real-time DoView would be being produced showing the emerging ‘This-Then’ claims the presenter is making as they make them.

• Regarding the previous idea, having AI evaluate in real time the existing evidence for the ‘This-Then’ claims that are emerging from a presentation captured within a DoView Board.

Further developing outcomes theory

• Further developing outcomes theory as a generalizable theory that can be used to conceptualize any type of outcomes system. An outcomes system is any system for identifying, prioritizing, aligning, measuring outcomes, implementing action, attributing change, setting accountabilities or assessing impact in any setting. This makes outcomes theory a general meso-level theory that can apply to human and AI organizations, initiatives and agents. See the theory page.

• Exploring the use of category theory or other mathematical approaches to mathematize outcomes theory. This would enable formal specification of its principles, ensure internal consistency of the principles within it and possibly identify new principles that logically follow from the current outcomes theory principles.

DoViews in AI management, transparency, alignment and control

• Exploring the use of DoViews Boards in AI transparency, alignment and AI control as a way of specifying and quickly communicating the outcomes, lower-level steps and risk management strategies any AI agent or system is using. This is explored in the page on AI use of DoView Boards.

• Specifically, having AI systems and agents represent their interpretation of a user’s text prompts in the form DoView Board the user can interact with to communicate with the AI system or agent. The user could then confirm that the AI system understands their full intention. They could also use it to tweak what they want to the AI system to do. An AI agent could then report back on the progress it is making directly onto the DoView Board it initially developed.

• Developing methods by which watchdog AI systems could audit whether an AI system is conforming to its stated DoView Board which it has agreed to implement (as outlined in the point above).

• Specifically, using a watchdog AI agent to monitor a subject AI agent’s real-world action and map each of its real-world actions back onto the relevant box in its DoView Board. Automatically traffic-lighting each box in near-real time, raising alerts if the subject AI agent’s behavior drifts outside the approved pathway set out in the DoView Board, and storing an audit trail.

DoViews in grantmaking

• Developing a platform for grant-making organizations to publish DoView Boards of the outcomes they are seeking and have grant applicants specify what they are trying to do by offering to develop subparts of the funding organization’s overall DoView Board.

DoViews in regulatory contexts

• In regulatory contexts, using DoView Boards to specify the regulation-related outcomes that companies or others should be seeking and the lower-level steps and risk management strategies they should be employing. Auditing agencies auditing organizations for regulatory compliance against such DoView Boards.

New ways of communicating and collectively working with DoViews

• Storyboarding a DoView Board. Improving communication of what is believed should happen regarding a DoView Board, by storyboarding it and guiding people through its boxes with a brief multimedia overview of each step in the DoView Board.

• Experimenting with VR spaces for representing and collectively working with DoView Boards as user-friendly ‘shared thinking tools’ in richer immersive interactive environments.

Using DoView Boards as ‘strategy graphs’ or ‘action graphs’ to structure incoming and outgoing communications

• Automatically creating DoView Boards capturing all of the action an individual wants to take in the world in any area of their lives.

• Using DoView Boards created in the point above as the basis for organizing communication streams about any kind of project or action. Besides receiving separate texts, emails, social media updates, and Slack messages as usual, a user would be able to see their content mapped to boxes within the relevant DoView Board. This takes advantage of DoView Boards ability to capture a person or organization’s ‘strategy graph’ or ‘action graph’. As new messages come in, they would be divided into segments associated with different boxes within the relevant DoView Board. The user would then be able to view all their inward and outward communications via various channels within the context of the specific DoView Board section they are working on, and they could send replies directly from the relevant DoView Board box as the user decides on the next action they want to take.

Using DoView Boards for ‘What-If’ simulation

• Further developing the use of DoView Boards for simulating different possible strategic pathways as one moves through a DoView Board. Explore turning DoView Boards into executable models (Bayesian network, Markov chain or system-dynamics stock-and-flow). Letting planners run Monte-Carlo or What-If analyses, see probability distributions for downstream outcomes, and test which levers give the biggest impact before changing their real-world system. 

• Developing DoView Boards to specify branching chains of ‘This-Then’ strategic logic, allowing the system to ‘lock in’ certain sequences of ‘This-Then’ logic. This would assist with time-constrained strategic decision-making. In effect, the number of ‘degrees of freedom’ in the strategy space would be reduced as agreement could be obtained from decision-makers before the point when time-pressured decision-making has to be undertaken. Decision-makers would just immediately implement the subparts of the DoView Board that have been pre-agreed, freeing them up to use the limited time they have available to focus on arising strategic decisions that could not be preapproved.

Comparing DoView Boards from different companies or organizations.

• As a piece of business school research, one could take a set of DoView Boards for major companies and compare companies’ different strategies. This could enable patterns to be identified, best practice shared and the analysis could look at metrics of company success related to what they have in their DoView Boards.