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Rob Young (ISSS member) is creating a record of Systems under the framework of a new entity called the Systems Community Alliance.

He has been working with the records on this ISSS website under the Library tab to index all the Yearbooks. https://www.isss.org/yearbooks/

 

Here is his email to the ISSS working group on education and knowledge engineering:

 

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Please find attached, the promised second ISSS spreadsheet from the SCA. 
This second spreadsheet lists all of the articles in the thirty-two General System Yearbooks, giving: 
- Yearbook, Volume, Year 
- Article Title 
- Author/s 
- Pages: from-to (number of pages) 
- Article permissions 
- Errata 
  
588 Articles, in 32 volumes. File is in Read-only mode. 
  
As per my first email (copied below), these SCA Collections are snapshots of living repositories, with a process for continuous improvement. I would welcome any feedback on this deliverable, and the ISSS and SCA working together. 
I very much appreciate the discussions we have been having so far, and look forward to collaborating further in the forthcoming ISSS Knowledge Engineering Thursday meetings.

 

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The spreadsheet was taken by Daniel Ari Friedman and put on CODA as part of our work on ISSS Systems Knowledge Engineering and Management, Here is Daniel's work on CODA with respect to these archives. 

Some "Journeys" that people might want to take through the Archives. 
-- Visual summaries and word clouds of the data.
-- Views sorted by year, or detail view for zooming in.

 

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If you have ideas or contributions please be in contact with Daniel, Rob or myself.

I have just been made aware of the record of the Governing the Anthropocene Workshop organized in conjunction with the ISSS 2015 conference in Berlin. I post the link here as it contains a number of important presentations and outcomes.  Some of the slides are on this slideshare site

 

 

Systems: Transition to a Sustainable World 
  
System – A set of interconnected parts named and embodied within a boundary that, for us, forms a meaningful whole: something which, taken together has meaning for us
 
Transition – The action or process of passing or passage from one condition, action, or (occas.) place, to another (shorter Oxford dictionary)
 
Sustainable  – causing, or made in a way that causes, little or no damage to the environment and therefore able to continue for a long time (Cambridge dictionary)
 
World – Natural environment – a place of settlement
The need for a transition to a more sustainable world is widely accepted but it cannot be assumed that understanding what sustainability is, is a given. Isolated efforts to tackle what are perceived to be key issues do not always yield anticipated outcomes, they may even be counter-productive. What we should recognize is that what we have is a network of interconnected problems, described by Ackoff as systems of problems or ‘messes’. To make sense of these messes we need to adopt a holistic perspective. Systems thinking provides the intellectual framework and systems practice the lessons which enrich the theory. The conference is designed to promote and capitalise upon such thinking and will provide examples of how these ideas might contribute to sustainability.
 
Keynote Speakers 

Rodney Irwin, Chief Operating Officer (COO) and a member of the Senior Management Team (SMT) at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Ray Ison is a Professor of Systems at the Open University and President of the International Federation of Systems Research.

 

 

I gave a talk via Zoom for a conference in Bangalore about consciousness last month. It was presented as a pre-recorded video. I thought I would share it here because it gives examples of the holon theory. I decided that the best way to understand cyclical causality is by example. That was what the Vedic masters also decided when they produced the Vedas and Upanishads. The reason is that the elements of the holon are archetypes that can apply to any system. Thus they will take on different labels depending on what it is describing. That can be confusing for a lot of people, it seems undefined. But it is self-defining - that is one of the most intriguing aspects of it. Basically, it describes causal order - how events and their contextual meanings relate to each other as a whole. 

 

In this talk I focus on “Post-truth” and challenge the popular view that truth is only relative. Holon relations reach throughout nature, so “truth” can have an ultimate meaning while also being locally relative to different contexts. The immanent harmony with nature is the gauge for truth. I proposed in this talk that truthfulness can be evaluated by the degree of harmony any system has with other systems, with itself, and with the cosmos (as a reflection of the holon causal order).

 

Comments welcome.

 

John

 

 

Yesterday, Friday 30 September 2022, I was in Portland and met with Professor Wayne Wakeland, Chair of the Systems Science program at Portland State University. He told me the program began in 1969 and has been going ever since. The program offers PhD's, Masters and also a Systems Minor at the Undergraduate level. We discussed how we might work together to do more to promote the value of a systems science education. Read about the program here https://www.pdx.edu/systems-science/

 

 

 

 

 

I have known Alexander Christakis since the late 80's when he was a professor at George Mason University Virginia working with another former ISSS President John Warfield. His life's work is seeking ways to emancipate people to be their best and work to address the world's problematique and to seek peace in areas of conflict. His life's commitment continues at 85. I joined him, Maria Kakoulaki and Jeff Dietrich as they delivered a training on Structured Dialogic Design and the supporting software Logosophia. Along with 6 other participants we gathered in Arhanes, Crete for the past week. Although I have known and read about SDD for all these years I finally, I think. get the Science behind the Systems Mapping outcomes of this human systems process. We were all being trained as facilitators. I look forward to doing more "CoLabs" using the SD process and the Logosophia software.

 

More information on SDD here https://www.coexplorer.org/structured-dialogic-design/.  and here https://www.isss.org/structured-deliberations/

and a presentation to ISSS by Aleco and Maria here https://vimeo.com/502853832

 

Interesting to see this "promotion" of systems thinking from the United Kingdom Government in a You Tube video dated April 2022.

 

Tamara Finkelstein, Permanent Secretary for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Sir Patrick Vallance, Government Chief Scientific Adviser, set out what Systems Thinking is and the advantages it offers for good policy making. They also offer advice to those getting started with a systems thinking approach.

 

 

And you can get copies of the documents here https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/systems-thinking-for-civil-servants

 

The British Government published a previous reference to Systems Thinking in 2012 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/285442/12-1043-introduction-to-systems-thinking-gse-seminar.pdf

 

Systems Thinking was the title of a book by F.E. Emery published in 1970

Dennis Finlayson, ISSS member, sent this to me to share with members and readers of ISSS. A blog post "Definition as a Coffin” – Cybernetics to Systems Thinking"

 

http://www.psybertron.org/archives/15807.   It is worth reading....