On other channels
Emergence/Systems/Complexity
Around 1986 I had reason and opportunity to discard all previous assumptions and start a fresh look at the question of how the world really works. That search quickly led me to what at that point of time it was fashionable to call complex systems, a field I have come to learn has had as many names as it has directions of entry over at least my life time (post WW2). More recently I have been happiest with emergence as the umbrella label for N N Taleb's black swans and Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns, in part because emergence allows proper celebration of Darwin's endless forms most beautiful across all the great domains that feed our curiosity.
The essence of emergence is that it is not strictly predictive but rather a way of dealing with the many surprises that are both consistent with natural laws and the outcome of some previously untested combination/history. You study emergence through analysis which may lead to a degree of statistical predictability over time, but which, like plate tectonics, biological evolution and much of astronomy is primarily a tool for making sense of observed patterns after the fact. Such analysis is neither strictly science nor anti-science. To it science is a toolset, in much the same way that math is a toolset to science.
Since the early 1990s when Liddy Nevile showed me a 1986 paper by Marcia Salner, I've been particularly motivated by the question of how we might get a critical mass of younger people to take onboard the generality of emergence short of waiting for them to accumulate a lifetime's experience or suffer the two crises of confidence that Salner identified as necessary to progress from the naive belief that right and wrong are knowable, via relativism, to a general systemic understanding; neither of which route comes with guarantees.
Participation in ISCE's 3rd International Workshop on Complexity and Philosophy in Stellenbosch in early 2007 and my subsequent analysis of the workshop papers for presentation at Complex '07 on the Gold Coast highlighted the great double focus of the field, a separation within a coming together that is equally pervasive within Melbourne Emergence Meetup Group. That separation can be most easily described as between the natural and social worlds, with very few of us truly seeing the consistent whole.
Following motions adopted at the monthly meeting of the Melbourne Emergence Meetup Group the Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters Association was incorporated on 15 April 2011 to provide a more formal platform to pursue opportunities that have developed through the Meetup Group, Bill Hall's TOMOK and, particularly, our Putting Community Knowledge in Place program discussed below. The Association is moving rapidly towards operating as a Pre Institute.
Putting Community Knowledge in Place
This was the theme of a Special Session some colleagues and I put together for the Melbourne 2010 Knowledge Cities World Summit in November. It remains a working description of a program we are fleshing out with origins in the Melbourne Emergence Meetup Group and Bill Hall's TOMOK. (There were and are several other people actively involved.)
For me this grows out of the struggle of the Moonee Ponds Creek Co-ordination Committee to have community knowledge efficiently brought into a prolonged strategic planning process. It also draws on involvements in the problems of the City of Brimbank inherited from my late mother's St Albans History Society and an extensive network on local interest organisations those connections lead to.
Right now, I'd like nothing more than to be able to make practical use of my unique combination of knowledge of Mount Defiance from hiking the trails across the summit to diving the bommies below the recent rockfalls and lookout to help facilitate the local member and transport minister get an outcome for the next 75 years of this issue which was never in The Plan, despite being a long obvious risk to our greatest tourist asset.
More broadly, the aim is to glue together human and technical systems to encourage the collection, curating, utilisation and recognition of information currently only residing "in the heads and bottom drawers of non-traditional owners" so we can get better supported planning and implementation outcomes.
The complementary benefit of our participation was to sharpen awareness of the conditions for successful establishment of knowledge precincts, the core mission of the Summit, an objective which allowed its judges to choose Melbourne as the world's leading knowledge city, albeit without competition from North America. The insight of Summit co-chair Klaus Kunzmann, who I first heard at GAMUT preconference, broadens the lessons from our continuing misadventures with Docklands Science Park.
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