Monthly is great! It'd be great to have regular progress updates from all the people in this thread. I'm part of a group in London that has biweekly meetings to do just that, and I think it's a great way of motivating people.

About my PhD stuff, I can point you to papers, but I'm not sure that's what you have in mind. I do have a software prototype but it has not been released as of yet. So far, I have been demoing it to interested people over skype. (I should probably record a screencast. You know what, I'll take that as an action item for the next thread.)

The motivation initially was nothing particularly noble. As a web developer I got sick and tired of rewriting forms over and over so I went and made a kind of declarative model-driven solution. Then, instead of polluting it with processes and workflows, I built a constraint-based system on top of it. (6 years in 2 sentences!) It's grand mission, if it has one, is to break people out of the process-based way of designing systems.

The application I'm working on right now though, has been mentioned as a way to help decision-making by someone I was talking to. Particularly, applying these rules to real-time data streams (such as startup dashboards) and flagging situations that need decision maker attention.

Another similar theme I could imagine would be to gradually build a model around a datastream and have the system inform you if any of your assumptions are broken by the data. (in which case you'd need to revise your model).

Will give a bit more thought to this "evidence-based decision making" concept, thanks.