Capacity
Relates to the ability, facility or capability to do something, to perform an activity, to produce, perform or deploy. We can also see it as a "cross cutting modality of network-wide and inter-network intervention" that often overlaps or is part of interventions in governance, organizational structure, and processes, education, etc.
Capacity relates to "abilities", "attributes" and a "process". It is an attribute of agents, is shaped by, adapting to and reacting to external factors and actors, but it is not something external — it is internal to agents.
The concept must be considered at all levels (types of agents or actors): individual, open venture, OVN, or an entire ecosystem.
Capacity can be seen as a form of wealth and as an attribute of an agent.
Capacity development
A set of activities designed to unleash, strengthen, create, adapt and maintain capacity. A change process internal to agents, since capacity is an attribute of agents.
People also use capacity building which is less desirable term since it implies a structured approach based on a blueprint.
At the first level, people talking about capacity development in the context of an organization (project, venture, network) often refer to growing the numbers of affiliated agents (onboarding), acquisition of resources, including currency (crowdsourcing). In traditional terms, this is equivalent to HR and Finance.
Diving deeper, capacity of an organization is built from a clear
- policy framework and governance
- institutional development and legal framework
- infrastructure, methodologies, processes
- participation, including onboarding processes and incentives
- feedback mechanisms
- available resources, affiliates and their skills
- role in the larger ecosystem, niche, relations
- sustainability and regeneration
Threshold capacity
Certain organizations can only exist above a given capacity threshold. Open organizations / networks exhibit this minimum capacity threshold, unlike transnational organizations, which often exhibit a maximum capacity. That is because open systems often rely on competition to exclude malicious agents or action. This competitive defensive processes is based on overpowering malicious agents through a mix of incentives, methods and infrastructure architecture. In other words, capacity requires to be above a given threshold to sustain attacks or malicious activities. Ex. Wikipedia (competition in editing / reverting a page, ability to follow a page and be notified when it is changed) and Bitcoin (proof of work).
Monitoring
About tools and measures for assessing capacity development, setting goals / targets and evaluate performance of capacity development activities.
Factors can be organization's clarity of vision, mission and objectives, organization's level of coherence and mobilization, purpose, motivation and incentive system, the organization's learning, an organization's productivity, an organization's monitoring processes.
Other dimensions of monitoring are: the links between projects and activities of an organization and its objectives, a program or organization's measurable indicators, data collection, and progress reports.
Two types of indicators for progress (from USAID): "output indicators" and "outcome indicators." Output indicators measure immediate changes or results such as the number of people trained. Outcome indicators measure the impact. Both the "numbers of people trained" and "impact" are, however, just inputs or intermediate inputs and do not measure actual improvements in "performance" in terms of measurable outcomes of capacity development.
Specific elements / indicators that apply: law, administrative principles, social science concepts, and education concepts.
Regenerative capacity
It is the ability to continue to occupy a niche, to perform long-term within an environment, by balancing extraction (from the environment) with replenishment (giving back to the environment), or by adjusting the rate of extraction to the natural rate of regeneration of the environment.
It relates to the nature and the quality of links, bonds between the agent and the environment. In other words, the flows between the agent and the environment must sustain a symbiotic relationship among the agent and other agents and a sustainable use of natural resources.
Relations to infrastructure
Infrastructure should be designed with accumulation mechanisms in mind, to increase individual and organizational capacity. For example, documentation (as a process) encouraged by the work culture and by the methods in place, supported by collaborative documentation tools is an example of mechanism of accumulation of information and knowledge, which improves the ability of the organization to act, produce stuff.
Tools can also be used to capture data and feed it to capacity monitoring systems.