Criteria for inclusion/exclusion of CONTENT in AMBIT

19th December 2014
The AMBIT manual is best thought of as being created in layers:

1. At the top is "Local material":
This is predominantly Practice-based evidence that is added by a local team (a member of the AMBIT Community of Practice) that is specific to their social, cultural, service and political ecology. This is where a team writes about itself - what we do, and why we do it this way. Manualizing itself, the team is in a sense encouraged to Mentalize itself.
2. Local additions sit above a layer of "Core content":
This core content is an attempt to offer an innovative way of presenting a rich array of Evidence-based practices and theory so that it can be integrated with the practice based evidence from real life deployments, in layer 1. above. This content is hosted ("curated") by the AMBIT Editorial Group. The content is constantly growing/adapting to changing evidence and feedback from scientific trials as well as from the many real-world deployments represented in layer 1., above.
3. At the bottom is the "Machinery":
There are a number of layers of technical material that allow the wiki behave and present itself in the ways it does, including its visual interface, and its Comparing and Sharing functions, etc. This material is more stable and constant now, having been created by a large community of open source programmers gathered around the unique open source TiddlyWiki software. The serverside platform that supports the manuals, TiddlySpace, is hosted by BT via its open source arm, BT Osmosoft, and the AMBIT project acknowledges the great debt that it owes BT for supporting us in this practical way.

Criteria for inclusion are as follows:

1. Local additions

  • These are the responsibility of the local team (local team's edits are held in a wiki that is under the editorial control of that local team alone - which just happens to "inherit" all content from the lower layers, any part of which can be overwritten. Key advice about what to include:
    • Nothing that would breach confidentiality of clients or others (this is a place to record learning about practice, not individual case studies, etc.)
    • Material that relates to the HOW of this work: how we are applying these ideas and techniques in this setting, with these people, in this local culture...
    • "Recycled" material generated in other parts of the AMBIT Community of Practice that has relevance to the work of this team (see the Comparing and Sharing functions)
  • This is where emerging innovations in practice start the journey from Practice-based Evidence to Evidence-based Practice
    • Material describing/showcasing workers' behaviours/techniques/tools that have been found locally to be more useful, safer, more effective than alternatives.
    • Outcomes or service user feedback (anonymised) that support the use of these practices in this setting
    • Areas for future learning: how does this team understand its failures, challenges, prompts for better ways of working?

2. Core Content

  • The Core content is not an attempt to define a "once and for all" or a "one-size-fits-all" representation of truth/the state of evidence.
    • It does strive to be Evidence-based where possible, and Evidence-oriented where necessary.
    • It is continually up-graded and adjusted in relation to feedback from:
  • New material that is added to the Core Content layer is subject to review:
    • Changes are divided into:
  • Criteria for acceptance in core content:
    • DOES THIS MATERIAL ADD NEW UNDERSTANDING ABOUT A MENTALIZING FRAMEWORK?
    • ABOUT AMBIT?
    • Does this new material respond to FEEDBACK from the Community of Practice or experiences from the AMBIT training team, and trainings?
    • Does this new material address the strategic priorities for AMBIT (to develop and disseminate the most effective ways of helping the most excluded, complex young people, as cheaply as possible.)


3. Machinery

  • The basic software architecture that supports these TiddlyManuals is developed by an international open source community
    • See http://www.tiddlywiki.com and the Google discussion group for TiddlyWiki - the simple, furiously ingenious, single HTML file that holds the whole wiki that you are reading now.
    • See http://www.tiddlyspace.com and the Google discussion group for TiddlySpace - the clever serverside environment that hosts single pages (or "tiddlers") and allows them to to be recombined in different ways to create seamless wikis
  • The AMBIT project has employed programmers for short bursts of activity to build adaptations that create the unique "AMBIT theme" and a range of highly specific functions and behaviours that collectively create the experience you get as you open a TiddlyManual.
    • These different functions are all held in separate wikis ("Spaces") that are all "included" in the local wiki (Layer 1., above) to build the working wiki that the worker sees when they open their local team's manual.
      • see @ambit-theme-v3 or @ambit-plugins which provide the adjustments to basic tiddlywiki programming to style the pages, and make certain specific functions work properly (if you really want to, that is... they are not very interesting unless you are a programmer!)
      • see @ambit-help which provides all the help pages, explaining how to Edit, etc, etc
      • see @ambit-howto which provides all the explanations for how AMBIT teams use these wikis to develop a community of practice and drive forwards learning
      • see @ambit-aim which creates the AIM form functions

A video that summarises this: