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The starting point of this phase was the organisation of the Spring Seminar Series 2002 in the Faculty of Business and Management of the University of Lincoln under the title: “Systems and the Information Society”. The purpose of these seminars being to allow the members of the SISN, working in small groups, to explore in more detail each of the twelve topics of Syntegration phase. Each group appointed a coordinator who was in charged of facilitating the corresponding seminar. In advance of each seminar, a set of relevant questions and papers were published on the SISN Web-site. Attendance at the seminars was free and was open to doctoral students from the Faculty, members of staff and a few external participants interested in particular topics. About fifteen people, on average, attended each of the seminars. After an initial exposition by the coordinator of each group, a discussion followed for about two and a half hours. Sometimes the debate continued long after that in a nearby Pub. Each meeting was assigned a rapporteur who was in charged of producing a report. These reports, once distributed and commented upon by other members of the groups, were published on the SISN Web-site. Finally, a one day meeting took place at the Marriott Hotel in Lincoln during the 5th of July 2002. About 20 members of the network met there to review the progress of the SISN and reflect upon possible interlinks among the twelve topics. Three papers were produced afterwards. Two of them cutting across the content of all the topics, and one exploring the future relationship between ICTs and modelling in policy making. |