About the Living Compendium

Beta Version

This page explains the purpose and structure of the Living Compendium and how its different parts work together.
 
The Living Compendium is a public learning space where people can share what they have learned, experienced, noticed, or questioned about housing and building systems. This can include:

• lived experience of housing
• practical and frontline  knowledge;
• technical or professional knowledge;
• policy and system perspectives; and
• questions that don’t yet have clear answers.

The Compendium is designed to keep learning available over time, so people can return to it as conditions, pressures, and understanding change.

The Compendium is a place for learning, not a decision-making process. Publishing a contribution does not require the project, its partners, or readers to respond or take action.

 

The Compendium currently holds four groups of threads:

Lived and relational threads

• Lived and Felt Experience — how housing is experienced in daily life
• Right Relations and Indigenous Contexts — responsibilities shaped by relationships, culture, place, and Indigenous contexts

Technical system threads

• Health and Lifestyle Systems
• Building Forms and Structures
• Energy and Thermal Systems
• Water and Waste Systems
• Building Exteriors and Grounds

Process threads

• Knowledge Mobilization — how learning moves into practice
• Roadmapping and Pathfinding — how people plan and adjust when the way forward is uncertain
• Platformed Knowledge and Public Fragments – information or observations that surface through LinkedIn, media, newsletters or similar sources but may not appear in formal reports. 
• Misalignment and Drift – where actions or outcomes move away from stated goals or committments
• Arrival Confusion – when completing a step is mistaken for achieving the intended result

Cross-cutting system threads

• The Integrity Gap — differences between stated values or goals and actual outcomes
• Capacity and Constraint, Timeframes and Tolerances — what limits action, how quickly change can happen, and what can be sustained
• Affordability and Local Resilience — cost, capacity, and the ability of communities to respond to change
• Governance, Roles, and Responsibility — who is responsible for what and when
• Transition, Not Arrival — how change continues after a milestone or decision
• Care, Maintenance, and Return — what is needed to maintain, revist, and adapt systems over time

The Integrity Gap is both a thread and a way of examining differences between stated values or goals and actual outcomes. It can help identify where actions are moving away from stated commitments, where standards are changing under pressure, or where partial progress is being treated as sufficient.

Enabling Structures

BPiBS, KIND, CIV, and the Living Compendium are not threads. They do not represent lines of inquiry or thematic questions. They support the work in different ways:

• BPiBS provides the program mandate and public accountability.
• KIND provides research, listening, and support for connecting and interpreting different forms of knowledge.
• CIV provides digital infrastructure for navigation, maintaining connections among materials, and identifying patterns.
• The Living Compendium provides the public-facing space where contributions and threads can be shared, explored, and revisited.

 Threads organize areas of inquiry. These enabling structures support the work and help maintain continuity over time.