|
SID |
Owner |
Statement |
Comments? |
| 1 | Allenna Leonard | Values surrounding ICT's and the desired characteristics of their (co)evolution must be clarified before resources are committed toimplementing them. |  |
| 2 | Allenna Leonard | We need ways of talking about different kinds of networks to account for the variety in their forms, the numbers of people involved, and the intensity and longevity of their committment. | |
| 3 | Allenna Leonard | Means must be found to provide and maintain access to ICT's, not only for the ecomomically and educationally disadvantaged but for an aging population whose dexterity, eyesight, hearing and ability to master new technology has declined. | |
| 4 | Allenna Leonard | The distinction between private and commercial space and communication needs to be clarified and protected so that avoiding commercial incursion into one's private communications does not become a privilege of the wealthy. | |
| 5 | Allenna Leonard | ICT's will increasingly be used in ways that take advantage of and/or compensate for the neurological profiles of users. While there could be many benefits to these developments, potential conflicts and problems should also be considered. | |
| 6 | Allenna Leonard | Privacy and civil liberties concerns have been raised about the fact that digital communication is not protected in the same way as mail and wire phone communication. With cell phones, not only the content of the communication but the location of the phone user and which other phone users are nearby may be monitored by governments or by employers. | |
| 7 | Alfonso Reyes | E-commerce not only has triggered important changes in the structure of organisations that have joined the WWW trend but it also has enable the emergence of new ways of trading among people, new forms of social processes. | |
| 8 | Alfonso Reyes | E-government, as a way to deliver services to citizens, will reduce the chances of emergent corrupting practices derived from excessive buroucracy. | |
| 9 | Alfonso Reyes | E-government (a particuar ICT) allows transparency to emerge in the relationships between public agencies and private companies. | |
| 10 | Alfonso Reyes | ICT may allow a change in the way government relates to citizens but it also opens up a possibility for people to get more involved in governmental decisions. | |
| 11 | Alfonso Reyes | The massive use of some particular ICT may enable a more direct, participative and "real-time" democracy to emerge. | |
| 12 | Alfonso Reyes | E-government may enable the development of a stronger citizenship. | |
| 13 | Alfonso Reyes | The massive use of ICT may generate forms of social exclusion. | |
| 14 | Alfonso Reyes | E-learning is reshaping the way we use to conceive people's formal education (a linear chain from school to postgraduate studies). | |
| 15 | Alfonso Reyes | What are the enabling aspects that allows a sustainable co-evolution between a given social process and a chosen Information and communication Technology (ICT)? | |
| 16 | Alfonso Reyes | What sort of observation mechanisms we can think of to recognize that a particular form is emerging from the co-evolution of ICT and a social process? | |
| 17 | Bob Malcolm | There is no rational basis for business strategy | |
| 18 | Bob Malcolm | There is no rational way to integrate an evaluation of 'reliance' on others with other measures of systemic efficacy | |
| 19 | Bob Malcolm | There is no systems science | |
| 20 | Bob Malcolm | There can be no systems science | |
| 21 | Bob Malcolm | Systems thinking has not achieved significant impact (on the design of socio-technical systems /society /industry /business /...) | |
| 22 | Bob Malcolm | Systems thinking can not achieve significant impact because there is no systems science | |
| 23 | Bob Malcolm | Systems thinking cannot be defined sufficiently clearly to know whether it can be taught or not | |
| 24 | Bob Malcolm | Systems thinking cannot be defined sufficiently clearly to know whether it is being used or not | |
| 25 | Bob Malcolm | Until social science is purged of politics it can contribute no transferable knowledge to the design or operation of social-technical systems | |
| 26 | Bob Malcolm | There is no culturally acceptable alternative to positivism | |
| 27 | Bob Malcolm | There is no useful alternative to positivism | |
| 28 | Bob Malcolm | The university system is a relic of positivism | |
| 29 | Bob Malcolm | The nature of evolution is such that the resources we might use to effect (not affect!) desirable change must co-evolve with our socio-technical systems | |
| 30 | Bob Malcolm | In the face of rapid evolution, we do not know how to arrange our affairs so that our values (and/or resources) can co-evolve or be maintained appropriately | |
| 31 | Bob Malcolm | We do not know what we mean by 'desirable' | |
| 32 | Bob Malcolm | It does not matter what we mean by desirable as long as those within and immediately interacting with a system do | |
| 33 | Bob Malcolm | Unless we have a concept of desirability, and a notion of what is desirable, then we should keep out of it | |
| 34 | Costas Tsouvalis | ICTs are an outcome of advanced capitalism and perpetuate the inequalities inherent in this system of production. Who can effect changes through ICTs, for whose benefit are they and what are their purposes? | |
| 35 | Costas Tsouvalis | There is no 'co-evolution' of ICT and social processes but rather it is an 'invention-discovery' relationship. Invented technologies usually lead to the discovery of those social processes that will justify them and make them sell! | |
| 36 | Costas Tsouvalis | First were the dinosaurs, then the church, now the state. The future? Who will emancipate us from our monitors? | |
| 37 | Gerard de Zeeuw | Assuming that there are such forms, what do we have to do to identify them? | |
| 38 | Gerard de Zeeuw | What values do people bring in, and what values do people develop, to affect/effect changes of a desirable nature? | |
| 39 | Gerard de Zeeuw | What is meant by co-evolution: accidental correlations or integrated processes? | |
| 40 | Gerard de Zeeuw | To what extent are ICTs themselves social processes? | |
| 41 | Gerard de Zeeuw | What is the level of sustainability implied by 'desirable'? | |
| 42 | John Mingers | Virtual social interactions are inevitably less rich than face-to-face because of the intrinsically embodied nature of human communication and cognition. | |
| 43 | John Mingers | Such an exploration requires a better conceptualisation of the nature of society, social processes, and power than we currently have. | |
| 44 | John Mingers | We do not have an adequate conceptualisation of the nature of boundaries in social "systems" and thus cannot properly understand their interaction with ICTs. | |
| 45 | Keith Pheby | Is it possible to sustain autopoietic social systems in the light of what Paul Virilio has called the assault on the social world by the proliferating technologies of control and virtuality? | |
| 46 | Keith Pheby | Are political systems possible in a world where information travels at light speed? Do we need to reinvent politics. If so we need to politicize speed. | |
| 47 | Keith Pheby | Is it possible to find a politics of virtuality, a code of ethics of virtuality because virtuality virtualizes politics as well: there will be no politics of virtuality, because politics has become virtual; there will be no code of ethics of virtuality, because the code of ethics has become virtual, that is, there are no more references to a value system. Are Baudrillard´s fears warranted? | |
| 48 | Loet Leydesdorff | The social construction of new technologies reconstructs the natural world as an unintended outcome of the interaction. The new definition of "nature" then emerges as part of the interactive culture, while the old one denotes a previous state of the retention mechanism. | |
| 49 | Loet Leydesdorff | The introduction of a new technology can be turned into a celebration of community. | |
| 50 | Loet Leydesdorff | The ICT revolution provides us with a reflexive overlay of the cultural evolution, whereas the latter can be considered as a reflexive overlay of the biological evolution. | |
| 51 | Loet Leydesdorff | 'Nature' and 'natural selection' are theoretical constructs. Theories are part and parcel of the cultural evolution. | |
| 52 | Loet Leydesdorff | The reflexivity of the interactive discourse enables us to entertain a discourse about the desirability of effecting changes in a no-longer given nature; for example, by using biotechnologies as cultural constructs. | |
| 53 | Loet Leydesdorff | One may expect the ICT revolution to enable us (in the longer run) to use virtual technologies for affecting the relation of a discourse with its coevolving environments. Unintended effects can then be expected to prevail. | |
| 54 | Neil Stewart | Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are challenging national consciousness and identity and creating a new world order. | |
| 55 | Neil Stewart | Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are changing the nature of work with potentially drastic social consequencies. | |
| 56 | Neil Stewart | The development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is beyond any type of social control and may therefore be ultimately very destructive. | |
| 57 | Clas-Otto Wene | Modelling is the effort by the Here and Now to understand itself: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) immensely increase the scope and detail of formal modelling and provide the tools to widen the Here and Now. | |
| 58 | Pete Barnsley | The concept of "desirable" and how it is understood (criteria) needs to be clear. It depends on "whom" and the "whom" contains the values. | |
| 59 | Pete Barnsley | Without some framework to understand social processes no progress will be made. | |
| 60 | Pete Barnsley | No new forms will emerge as the core aspirations of the people involved are static. | |
| 61 | Pete Barnsley | The social processes are based on people values and this not the ICTs will shape the ICTs. | |
| 62 | Pete Barnsley | Values are only changed by ICTs through their evolution through history and the gradual dynamic to the demographics. | |
| 63 | Pete Barnsley | Trust is fundamental and ICTs can only affect or be affected by social processes when this is understood to be present | |
| 64 | Pete Barnsley | ICTs do not evolve. Items in this class have description and capability that change in time. The drivers for this change come from the aggregations of the situations of changed social processes. | |
| 65 | Pete Barnsley | Social processes are changed by the alignment of ICTs to support the exchanges between people. These exchanges are determined by people values. | |
| 66 | Pete Barnsley | Values create social processes. | |
| 67 | Pete Barnsley | Social processes affect other social processes through the resources and how they interact (P-ICT, ICT-ICT, P-P) | |
| 68 | Pete Barnsley | The use of ICTs change social process in time through core values such as reproduction (fashion). | |
| 69 | Pete Barnsley | ICTs create new forms of society through their aiding of "negative" action - eg to corrupt - because they have NO values. | |
| 70 | Pete Barnsley | Forms only appear/be understood within a construct created/understood by the observer these are based on the values held - separation in the question is invalid. | |
| 71 | Raul Espejo | Current changes in information flows and social communications are making organisations, and their roles, more transparent to stakeholders. | |
| 72 | Raul Espejo | Our personal identities are increasingly shaped by distant interactions, mediated by Internet. | |
| 73 | Raul Espejo | Concern for the future of the planet depends more fundamentally on making effective our social interactions today, than on producing better and more sophisticated models of the environment. | |
| 74 | Raul Espejo | An ethical imperative for commercial enterprises is to take responsibility for the ecological consequences of their actions, going beyond the market consequences. | |
| 75 | Raul Espejo | An ethical imperative for (national) governments is to take responsibility for the ecological consequences of their actions, going beyond the national consequences. | |
| 76 | Raul Espejo | The relevance of work will diminish in the knowledge society. | |
| 77 | Raul Espejo | Information and communication technologies are reshaping our communication spaces; eventually they will make hierarchical structures non viable. | |
| 78 | Raul Espejo | Current organisational forms will be replaced by enterprises emerging from the creative interaction of individuals sharing virtual spaces, enabled by increasingly sophisticated communication platforms. | |
| 79 | Raul Espejo | Our emotional needs will limit the growth of social virtuality; the molecules of emotion will drive future technological developments. | |
| 80 | Raul Espejo | The information society will allow us to design organisations able to produce desirable social meanings, like justice and fairness. | |
| 81 | Tony Gill | Who is to be the keeper of 'values' to decide on what are desirable changes? | |
| 82 | Tony Gill | The digital divide (have v have not access to digital technology) will increase the potential for a polarised society with prospects for an Orwellian 'techno-policed' world. | |
| 83 | Tony Gill | Co-evolving ICTs will undermine the culturally rich language traditions of nations as techno-speak fads eg, 'texting' emerge. (Video) Gaming / PlayStations will be the 'new literature'. | |
| 84 | Tony Gill | B2B portals operating globally could emerge as highly effective industry supply chains. Countries need to have legislation in place to regulate these potential global monopolies if they operate against the common good. | |
| 85 | Barnaby Sheppard | It is precisely because we do not know what to use ICTs for, that virtual interaction spaces of all kinds are notoriously difficult to maintain. | |
| 86 | Barnaby Sheppard | Talk of information and communication technology is a useful abbreviation for what is a bewildering mess of tools, but only at the level of abstraction that also has the effect of severance of the thinkers from the practitioners. | |
| 87 | Barnaby Sheppard | There is nothing inherent in the information and communication technologies themselves that effect changes of either a desirable or undesirable nature. | |
| 88 | Barnaby Sheppard | The misuse of information and communication technology is rampant and always will be if the speed of change does not allow for consolidation of thought, or thought in any form. | |
| 89 | Barnaby Sheppard | The people that matter to those who have immediate impact on the direction of ICTs are those for whom ICTs are a fad. Early adopters are fickle creatures. They have the technology built for them but like children they will throw the toy away for the next one. | |
| 90 | Barnaby Sheppard | There is no traditional supply and demand model for the Internet. The Internet is about creating needs where they didn’t exist before. | |
| 91 | Barnaby Sheppard | The stringing together of data into different forms has not dramatically changed with the advent of the Internet or other ICTs. | |
| 92 | Chris Atkinson | It is not possible to disentangle the human and the artefact (machine). They form humanchine actor- networks that constitute domain for future research and real-world praxis in the relationship between the social and the technological. | |
| 93 | Chris Atkinson | The term ‘socio-technical’ perpetuates the human and machine dualism and is no substitute for the humanchine duality | |
| 94 | Chris Atkinson | Organisations and interorganisational networks are constituted from ecologies of human and machine entanglements | |
| 95 | Chris Atkinson | Interventions in the real world that treat the human and the machine (ICT) as separate and do not focus on the humanchine are destined to produce poor results or quite probably failure | |
| 96 | Chris Atkinson | Methodologies and their tools/techniques are artefacts for intervening in the real-world, when mobilised and enacted by a real world humanchine they form problem-solving actor networks. Thus interventions in the world are the result of interventions by humanchine within humanchines | |
| 97 | Chris Atkinson | ICT practice, methodologies and tools reduce the human in all its Shakespearian glory, pain and complexity to the technocentric term ‘user’. | |
| 98 | Chris Atkinson | Humanistic approaches to interventions in the world, such as SSM, reduce the machine, if they acknowledge there their existence at all, to that of a slave. Machines are an adjunct to purposeful human action and an augmenter of their perception. | |
| 99 | Chris Atkinson | Actor networks are domains of power, politics and domination as well as emancipation. | |
| 100 | Chris Atkinson | As yet there are few if any methodologies to the underpin the formation or transformation of humanchine networks | |
| 101 | Chris Atkinson | The current situation in the organisation transformation/development market perpetuates the divide between the human and the machine. The organisations themselves and the ICT services and applications suppliers or developers along with management consultancies perpetuate this divide which leads to failures in achieving added value and often wasted investment. | |
| 102 | David Best | We need to develop methods which enable we as practitioners of ICT and designers of ICT systems to more fully capture the outlooks (Weltanschauungen) as well as the practical needs of those for whom we design such systems | |
| 103 | David Best | We need common language notations (languages) which more fully reflect the range and depth of our acquired understanding about the needs of our clients from such systems. | |
| 104 | Joyce Tait | Systems analysis is about connectedness and this discussion is missing some important connections | |
| 105 | Joyce Tait | We should be exploring the co-evolution of ICTs with genomics and nanotechnology; what are the social processes emerging in the scientific community, eg new forms of interdisciplinary organisation | |
| 106 | Joyce Tait | In genomics, strong regulation and intense public interest in the science means that this new joint technology (with ICT) is much more directly subject to social construction than was ICT | |
| 107 | Joyce Tait | In the context of GM crops, ICT has enabled the emergence of a new form of global governance, the consumer boycott organised via the Internet, that can be more powerful than national governments or multinational companies. Is this a good thing? | |
| 108 | Roger Harnden | The emergence of a new Œspace of expression¹. | |
| 109 | Roger Harnden | Authority will increasingly become transient and fleeting, while power(Foucault) becomes more visible. | |
| 110 | Roger Harnden | Personal identity as more project based. The psychological dimension. | |
| 111 | Roger Harnden | The global economy, and the shifting power-base from producer to consumer as the market becomes ubiquitous. | |
| 112 | Roger Harnden | The increasing importance of distributed communities as distinct from geographically localised ones. | |
| 113 | Roger Harnden | The inevitable demise of the nation. | |
| 114 | Roger Harnden | The shifting power-base from producer to consumer as the market becomes ubiquitous. | |
| 115 | Roger Harnden | Changing nature of the Brand(Œno logo¹). | |
| 116 | Rebecca Herron | Purposeful operational activity (&’Progress’) only makes sense where there is a shared understanding of the concept of ‘desirability’. For whom? For how long? | |
| 117 | Rebecca Herron | There is a “reduction of bureaucracy” paradox that governments and other social E-users need to address. The use of ICT to streamline existing information requirements almost inevitably leads to the emergence of new informational possibilities that authorities find hard to resist. The implications of this may be beneficial (or not) but must not be ignored if the initial aim is to be achieved. | |
| 118 | Rebecca Herron | There are new psychological strains (stresses) introduced into the workplace when informational demands exceed human capacity. In particular new skill-sets are emerging as a result. These include the ability to scan information sources, network information and select what information to ignore. | |
| 119 | Rebecca Herron | The constraints imposed by ICT communication may liberate as well as restrain relationships. | |
| 120 | Rebecca Herron | There are emergent changes in language and behavioural norms created by the informational restrictions and freedoms provided by ICT. These include: the impact of email/business usage on communally-used languages such as English; changing skills required from workforces/students; social behaviour, expectations and rituals; story-telling (e.g. through global media). | |
| 121 | Rebecca Herron | Simulation may yet prove a very useful tool to create models for understanding the ‘co-evolutionary dance’ (Jazz?) of mutually interacting virtual and physical networks. | |
| 122 | Rebecca Herron | What tools do we have for identifying and discussing when social systems are entering periods of change or stability? How could this be measured? When could small perturbations influence the course of development and how could one identify circumstances when this would be possible? What implications do this have for ‘Policy’? | |
| 123 | Rebecca Herron | What plans for future emergent stability can a society have that only seems able to imagine a continuation of the present status quo (i.e. rapid change and adaptation)? What is the role of consolidation (“annealing”?) in producing sustainable forms following innovation? | |
| 124 | Rebecca Herron | In any real operational study/activity we are not dealing with one network of complex adaptive agents, we are dealing with a rich tapestry of overlaying complex (& simple) social systems, each of which might interact and influence others. | |
| 125 | Rebecca Herron | How can we identify general patterns (Attractors) in the resulting behaviour of complex social/informational systems. How might identifying such patterns help us to understand (& influence) desirable ‘progress’? Would this reshape our understanding of sustainability, historical repetition or purposeful intervention? | |
| 126 | Rebecca Herron | Often it is essential to consider the interaction between structures and the processes that create these structures. Highlighting the importance of process increases the importance of issues previously frequently marginalised. From this perspective concepts such as fortune or personality (e.g. determination, humour, emotion) may be as critical for the success of a process as any other factor. | |
| 127 | Rebecca Herron | Monitoring affects the behaviour of the monitored when agents (e.g. humans) are adaptive to their environment and the behaviour of others around them. For example: Modifying behaviour to fit performance indicators; using email technology defensively/politically to cover oneself or take safe options rather that make constructive dialogue. | |
| 128 | Rebecca Herron | ‘Survival of the Fittest’ may have been replaced by ‘Survival of the Survivors’ (or survival of the adequate!) What frameworks/language have we got for exploring evolutionary adequacy in Social Systems? | |
| 129 | Rebecca Herron | ICT provides tools for communication and intelligence gathering; it is the human values behind the application of these tools that shapes their future use/misuse. | |
| 130 | Rebecca Herron | Viewing social structures and norms as emergent properties of current and past interactions might create some exciting insights into interventions in social or other organisations. In particular, a new dimension may be given to concepts such as ‘first impressions’, identity, ethics, networking, communication spaces, capacity-building, development etc. |