Dictionary: Entity

Human actors and Inclusion

The target actors at the Pico level are all persons that might use and produce externalized knowledge during their life, education and work. The community of person-actors is very heterogeneous, with age, gender, resource endowment, education, health, kinship and family-relationships, employment and livelihood as some of the typical determinants.

During the tests of the knowledge commons and the Collective Regulative Bundle (CRB) methodology it must be ascertained that even the poorest actors (smallholders) can interactively influence the joint generation of options, joint decision making and joint actions.

This is the inclusion requirement.

The Person's Capacities and Needs

Humans are self-conscious, anticipatory, imaginative, creative beings. This means that they are not restricted to act in narrowly confined ways according to fixed rules of behaviour. They can invent new solutions—or they may not even see the obvious ones. (Bossel, 1999, page 5 [1])

Maslow's hierarchy of needs gives a holistic perspective on a person's needs. These needs must be taken into consideration in change, education and training initiatives [2].

• Physiological Needs consist of needs for oxygen, food, water, and a relatively constant body temperature. They are the strongest needs because if a person were deprived of all needs, these would come first in the person's search for satisfaction.
• Safety Needs. When all physiological needs are satisfied and are no longer controlling thoughts and behaviours, the needs for security can become active. Adults have little awareness of their security needs except in times of emergency or periods of disorganization in the social structure (such as widespread rioting). Children often display the signs of insecurity and the need to be safe.
• Needs of Love, Affection and Belongingness can emerge next. Maslow states that people seek to overcome feelings of loneliness and alienation. This involves both giving and receiving love, affection and the sense of belonging.
• Needs for Esteem can become dominant next. These involve needs for both self-esteem and for the esteem a person gets from others. When these needs are satisfied, the person feels self-confident and valuable as a person in the world. When these needs are frustrated, the person feels inferior, weak, helpless and worthless.
• Needs for Self-Actualization are activated if and only if all of the foregoing needs are satisfied. Maslow describes self-actualization as a person's need to be and do that which the person was "born to do." "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write." These needs make themselves felt in signs of restlessness that cannot be attributed to the non-satisfaction of the foregoing needs

The Person's Context

The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework offers a comprehensive view of the assets and capacities a person needs to escape poverty on a sustainable basis, and of the interactions between the vulnerability context and the poverty of persons and households. Any person needs a critical mass of assets to cope with stresses and shocks, and to maintain and enhance capabilities. Concise descriptions of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework are at The Sustainable Livelihood Framework (powerpoint, 428KB) or DFID Key Sheet (pdf, 43KB).

For the person in a high-tech facility, Yamada [3]) explains the issues.