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Santa Fe Institute Working Papers: 2006

It's been a year since I spent time with the gold mine of powerful insights coming from the Sante Fe Institute. Their 2006 Working Papers are worth an afternoon or so of your time, if you want to really broaden your approaches to systems thinking. Some of my favorite ones from this year include: Information Flows in Causal Networks, Hierarchical Self-Organization in the Finitary Process Soup, and Social Segregation and the Dynamics of Group Inequality. Posted: 6/18/06; 10:42:33 PM #

Inclusion Through Innovation

The British Government has framed some of their core development and social justice work under the rubric of "social exclusion". I just finished a report on Inclusion Through Innovation: Tackling Social Exclusion Through New Technologies (83 page PDF). Some of the important ICT opportunities include: person-centred government services (rather than agency centred), building community connections, and strategic sharing of information. There is some well targeted thinking in here. I would love to know how the person-centred approach will go over with agencies. Posted: 6/18/06; 10:36:21 PM #

Collaborative Reference Work in the Blogsphere

Jeffrey Pomerantz and Fred Stutzman (of the iBiblio Lyceum project) have published a paper on Collaborative Reference Work in the Blogsphere (12 page PDF) to explore the use of blogs in library reference services. I have an ongoing interest in the powerful role of simple publishing tools that integrate into people's workflow, especially in a knowledge management context. Papers that look at very specific applications are of greater value, in many cases, than those than skim across the surface. Posted: 6/18/06; 10:28:02 PM #

Thoughtcrime #65: Call to Stillness

Like many of you, I am inundated with urgent appeals in my email. Indeed, some organizations seem to only know how to communicate in that particular tone. For once, I would enjoy seeing a message tell me to take a deep breath and reflect on my own relationship to urgency. Maybe I should send one of those out myself? In the mean time, I will point you to the back window of my friend's car in Thoughtcrime #65: Posted: 6/18/06; 10:23:10 PM #