What is Warm Data?
Warm Data is information about the interrelationships that connect elements of a complex system. Put another way, Warm Data is transcontextual information. Warm Data captures the qualitative dynamics and offers another dimension of understanding to what is learned through quantitative data, (cold data). The implications for the uses of Warm Data are staggering, and may offer a whole new dimension to the tools of information science we have to work with at present.
Warm Data is a specific kind of information about the way parts of a complex system, such as members of a family, organisms in the oceans, institutions in society, or departments of organisation, come together to give vitality to that system. By contrast, other data will describe only the parts, while Warm Data describes their interplay in context. Warm Data illustrates vital relationships between many parts of a system. For example, to understand a family, one must understand not only the family members, but also the relationships between them, that is, the warm data. In such cases, warm data is used to better understand and improve responses to issues that are located in the relational dynamics. Examples include understanding the systemic risks in health, ecology, economic systems, education systems and many more. The typical approach to issues decontextualises specific information, which in turn can generate mistakes. On the other hand, warm data promotes coherent understanding of living systems.
The Warm Data Practice
The Warm Data Practice is designed to use with individuals, families, organizations, and communities who are interested in strengthening and further practicing their collective ability for mutual learning and to perceive, discuss, and understand complex issues. Because so many of the challenges we face now are complex, we need approaches to meeting that complexity.
The conversational process is designed to seamlessly engage multiple theoretical principals in a practical format. By shifting perspectives through a transcontextual conversational structure, Warm Data processes:
- addresses the fractures steeped into the way the many contexts of day-to-day life overlap,
- allows people with no previous exposure to complex systems theory to perceive the systemic relational patterns, interactions, and interdependencies in their communities generating a nuanced systemic understanding of their circumstances,
- strengthens the collective ability within families and communities to perceive, discuss, and articulate the complexity of the issues they face, and,
- inspires unimagined possibilities opening new ways of living and communing,
Warm Data Labs and People Need People online sessions are offered by trained hosts at no charge to the public, including individuals, families, and communities. Warm Data practice is expanding the ecology of relationships and communication and tending to an ecological way of relating and perceiving between individuals and communities over time through unpredictable and unfolding patterns and processes. Warm Data is a reflexive practice that supports a culture of care, rigor, and integrity.
Warm Data practice is bringing deeply rooted and enduring change in communities around the globe. Warm Data will not only reveal the complexity and interdependencies – it shifts entire lives – from ways of relating to one’s family, the economy, food, technology, and to life as a whole.
“Warm Data brings an entirely new approach to change tending to an unseen coalescence that is ungraspable - in a culture in which change is entangled into an eagerness to grasp, define, analyze and take action. When change is sought through adaptation to existing systems, that change is sourced from the system itself. In this case, perpetuation is more likely than change. However, when the existing structures are not present, organisms must “find a way” by sourcing from unhabituated living, shifting impressions that have been brewing over time. In a Warm Data lab, we tend to the “about” so that what is re-configured is in the “within.”
What matters is the way the participants are internally sewing together the different conversations and contexts. The gaps are where the hope of systemic transformation is waiting. In the Warm Data processes, participants are given a structure to re-stitch, to re-wild, to begin a new abductive process into these gaps. The changes I witness occurring in the Warm Data processes are completely unpredictable and profound. They suggest ever more vividly that there is a real, if unseen, mingling of the body, culture, education, family - and a whole batch of transcontextual experience that is guiding all other actions. It is to this change that I have devoted my efforts toward systemic transformation.”
~Nora Bateson
What do we do...
Three Streams of Activity
Education
Toward Warm Data provides seminars, workshops and curricula for specific contexts and for the general public.
Cultural Engagement
Toward Warm Data facilitates public engagement through film, exhibitions, publications, and web broadcasts of hot topic conversations. In addition, Warm Data Labs are offered to the public in locations around the world.
Transcontextual Research
Toward Warm Data supports experimental research modes whereby students, scholars and others are brought together in order to combine and contrast understandings of complex phenomena.