THEORETICAL AND TECHNICAL FOUNDATIONS
Collecting narratives is a practise for discovery of ?on the ground? qualitative information useful for decision making in our increasingly complex social environments. Narratives from a community’s contributors indicate their views of what is really going on, thereby revealing their values and concerns. Welsh Scholar Dave Snowden developed the theoretical foundation and methodology for exploring and analyzing a narrative collection for these purposes. The collecting of narratives provides a continually evolving map of the collective experience of a community.

Cynefin Framework
?The Cynefin Framework draws on research into complex adaptive systems theory, cognitive science, anthropology and narrative patterns to explore the relationship between man, experience and context and proposes new approaches to communication, decision-making, policy-making, and knowledge management in complex social environments.? Wikipedia The Cynefin Framework has been used by practitioners world wide for a very wide variety of purposes, including, the British National Health Service, the George W. Bush Administration, Social Service Organization and Crisis Management Bodies.

Semantic Computing Processes
Processes and methodology principally developed at the University of Sheffield and further developed for internet-based purposes by Structured Dynamics LLC have been integrated into StoryGarden for narrative processing. Mike Bergman, CEO, of Structured Dynamics is considered to be a thought leader in designing systems for these purposes, including for such organizations as Harvard University, National Science Foundation and BBC.

SenseMaker
Dave Snowden, through his company Cognitive Edge, has developed a software system designed for the analysis of narratives that has been integrated into StoryGarden’s processes under license. Link to CG: ?The software and linked methods allow the collection and tagging of multiple sense-making items which can be anecdotes, pictures, web sites, blogs and other forms of unstructured data. These items can be also linked to more traditional systems such as content management. The tagging provides sophisticated metadata which can be used to provide quantitative research material, as well as measurement systems and impact analysis. Visualisation tools, linked to methods and models, permit users to sense complex patterns and anomalies that would not be visible to conventional analysis. It is a pre-hypothesis based research tool, a knowledge repository and a decision support system in one coherent package.? (excerpted from Cognitive edge website).