Table of Contents
RegenCHOICE index
The RegenCHOICE question system
Introduction
A RegenCHOICE system could easily be run with a fixed set of questions, centrally authored and managed. Even like this, it would have many advantages over other matching systems. However, several years ago two things altered my vision of how what I was calling “CHOICE” could achieve its full potential.
First, I noted that there is no standard set of human values, and it seems to me that there never will be or even could be. Many attempts have been made, of which perhaps the longest list is the Hall-Tonna Values Inventory. Someone posted a pdf of the Hall-Tonna Value Map which gives an overall view of the 125 values, and several consultancy businesses have taken it up as the basis for their work, among whom the Australian-based Minessence group is an old example. Their AVI inventory added three more values, to make 128. There have been several attempts to list human values, with smaller numbers. But is there in reality an adequate list of human values? Marshall Rosenberg's NVC talks more of human needs rather than values, though the CNVC's Feelings and Needs Inventory which could be taken as values as well as needs, warns that “The following list of needs is neither exhaustive nor definitive.”
Second, and partly as a consequence, I see there being an unlimited number of questions that can be asked that are relevant to people's values, and even more that are relevant to the fruitfulness of a correspondence between two people, or between a person and a position, be that a job, membership of a community, a role in a project or anything similar. So, many years ago I started to think through how an unlimited number of questions could be created and maintained, and continue to be useful to a system like RegenCHOICE.
Question dependency
More recently, I became more fully aware of the possibility of dependency between questions. I'll write more about this soon.
Inviting networks to curate parts
Crafting a good set of answers to a significant question can be hard. Who better to do this than network organisations that specialise in particular areas? So, for instance, member organisations promoting organic agriculture could together decide what are the most significant questions to ask about people's knowledge, skills and interests in the area of organic food production. This would also have a useful self-limiting function, as the only areas of questions would be ones where there exist organisations bringing together people who share related interests.
The challenge right now is to find organisations that might be interested in this kind of facility, and whose members would enjoy the opportunity of discovering new connections with people outside of that particular organisation. This means that people could both have the advantage of a small organisation where everyone potentially knows everyone else (under the “Dunbar number”) and also the advantage of a much larger pool of people of similar values who they could potentially relate to. This is particularly important at a time when many new organisations are spread across the world. If 150 people are spread across the world, closest neighbours could be separated by hours of travel, and the closest person of real interest could be in a different continent.