DROPS💦

DROPS is an approach to development built up of actual occasions.

Inspired by the turn to eventing in software development, and encouraged both by the modern, event-oriented, process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, and by Christopher Alexander's pattern language technique for describing patterns of events, exampled most brilliantly in Ward Cunningham's EPISODES, the DROPS approach is a post-agile approach to development (of software and other things) which takes more care to avoid the ancient substance-quality categories that "agile" and OOAD tend to evoke, and instead attends directly to the creative becoming of fully determined actual occasions of experience (the actual entities) in the society of events we call a world.

In 1929, Whitehead wrote: "'Actual entities' — also termed 'actual occasions' — are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves... But, though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies, all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent."

"Thus the actual world is built up of actual occasions; and by the ontological principle whatever things there are in any sense of 'existence' are derived by abstraction from actual occasions. I shall use the term 'event' in the more general sense of a nexus of actual occasions, inter-related in some determinate fashion in one extensive quantum. An actual occasion is the limiting type of an event with only one member."

"It is sufficient to say that a molecule in the sense of a moving body, with a history of local change, is not an actual occasion; it must therefore be some kind of nexus of actual occasions. In this sense it is an event, but not an actual occasion. The fundamental meaning of the notion of 'change' is 'the difference between actual occasions comprised in some determinate event.'"

Plan

• Drops of experience: the concept of actual occasions of experience

  • Actual occasions, the actual entities of which the actual world is built up (one subjective aim, two poles, four stages, many feelings, one settlement)
  • Facts of relatedness, or prehensions (feelings, of feelings already felt)
  • Nexus of actual occasions, or public matters of fact (events)
    • Social nexus
      • Social order (fact of togetherness)
      • Personal order (occasions ordered serially)
      • Corpuscular society (strands of personal order)
    • Non-social nexus (chaos)
  • Subjective forms, or private matters of fact
  • Eternal objects, pure potentials for the specific determination of fact (forms of definiteness)
  • Propositions, matters of fact in potential determination, impure potentials for the specific determination of fact (theory)
  • Multiplicities (pure disjunctions of diverse entities)
  • Contrasts, or modes of synthesis of entities in one prehension (patterned entities)

• Drops of human activity

  • Drops of describing
  • Drops of reading
  • Drops of listening
  • Drops of practicing
  • Drops of objecting
  • Drops of resolving or rejecting objections
  • Drops of proposing agreements and responsibilities
  • Drops of considering agreements
  • Drops of agreement
  • Drops of undertaking responsibilities
  • Drops of training
  • Drops of coaching
  • Drops of assessment or examination
  • Drops of taking care of oneself
  • Drops of helping and taking care of others, sharing, being together (meetings, conferences, movements)
  • Drops of groups and associations (relationships, families, clubs, organisations)
  • Drops of resting and sleep

• Drops of software development

  • Drops of discovering
  • Drops of designing
  • Drops of adding
  • Drops of refactoring
  • Drops of testing
  • Drops of releasing
  • Drops of deploying
  • Drops of monitoring

• Drops of software systems

  • Drops of user experience
  • Drops of command processing
  • Drops of event processing
  • Drops of query proccessing

• Drops of human society

  • Drops of water and sanitation
  • Drops of food and agriculture
  • Drops of housing and shelter
  • Drops of energy
  • Drops of transportation
  • Drops of health care
  • Drops of education
  • Drops of finance
  • Drops of governance
  • Drops of democracy
  • Drops of justice
  • Drops of journalism
  • Drops of art
  • Drops of science
  • Drops of philosophy
  • Drops of technology
  • Drops of abuse (power, corruption and lies)
  • Drops of development

• Drops of historical development

  • Drops of biological evolution
  • Drops of primitive society
  • Drops of feudal or agrarian society
  • Drops of capitalism and privatisation (industrial societies, disciplinary societies)
  • Drops of economic, military, climatic and biodiversity crises (information societies, societies of control)
  • Drops of sustainable human society and universal approaches to social development (DROPS)