Foresight Synergy Network (FSN)

Update: Here are the slides – Cyber Security by David Harries

ROOM CHANGE: Please note the room change to DMS 7170.

Hello,

The next FSN meeting will be next Friday [Dec. 15 at 12 pm in DMS 4165 7170] by David Harries on Cyber security.

The presenter recommends everyone review following documents prior to the meeting to help get some context for the presentation:

Narrative mapping of cyberspace by David Harries

XLI CICA note for Pugwash website

If you will be outside Ottawa and would like to connect via Skype please contact me at: SValiyani@gmail.com; I may be able to arrange a connection.

Regards,
Sameer

Update 2: Article by Nicole Morgan – Back to the Future as a Futurist (link)

Update: Attached is the presentation, please note the slides were notes for a speech, and Nicole plans to write a long paper on the subject – Cybershock november 24

Also, here is a long paper on the topic which details some of the hypotheses used in presentation – Lose canons in cyberspace

Hello,

The next FSN meeting will be next Friday [Nov. 24] by Nicole Morgan.

Here is the link to Nicole’s bio and proposed topic of discussion: cybershock

If you will be outside Ottawa and would like to connect via Skype please contact me at: SValiyani@gmail.com; I may be able to arrange a connection.

Regards,
Sameer

Update: Slides of the presentation – Apprehension of Future Uncertainty – 4th Gen foresigh – FSN – Oct 2017

Abstract of the presentation:

Simple Actions – Complex Worlds​ – Unknowable Implications
Framing the Future of Conditions of S​ocial-Economic Identity
Anticipating a Fourth Generation ​of ​Foresight

​The presentation will outline a view of change as Changing Conditions of Change. A concept of ‘Attractor of Efficiency and Governance’ will be presented. Next we will examine the conditions of the Digital Environment​, the emergence of an ‘economy of abundance’ with a corresponding need for an appropriate economic theory. There will be a very brief history of Social-Economic Constraints Framing Identity.

The presentation will conclude with a brief account of emerging implications for a potential epistemology and sense-making for common meaning. This final discussion will argue for the emergence of a Fourth Generation​ for public​ ​policy ​Foresight.​

About the presenter: John Verdon Hon B.A Psych. MA Anthropology

John’s educational background includes a BA in psychology, MA in anthropology, and PhD course work in both sociology and philosophy (degrees not completed). His research and learning is a broad with mastery in a number of domains including foresight, complexity, economics, and technology. He is retired after 25 years as a public servant (15 years as a strategic foresight analyst for National Defence). Currently he is a consultant and writer. He has worked with start-up in Silicon Valley and he is a co-founder of a social enterprise establishing a social-studio for adults on the autism spectrum. He maintains a blog and writes for other organizations. His current project is a book ‘The Wealth of People” – exploring theory and philosophy for flourishing human capital in the 21^st Century.

Update: here are the slides Viable System Model

The next FSN meeting will be September 29 [12 – 2 pm, Room DMS 4165], on ‘Bureaucracy and the Viable Systems Model’ by John Coghlan.

About the topic: Bureaucracy and the Viable Systems Model

Many malign bureaucracy. When Weber wrote about bureaucracy in the early 1900s, it was a superior way of organizing labour. Today, it is not. Large bureaucracies face vastly more complex and fast changing environments than in Weber’s time. The very size of many bureaucracies means that they lack resilience and adaptability.

Peter Drucker, management guru, said that: we have modelled organizations on flows of energy but now, we are building them based upon flows of information. Old mechanistic command and control bureaucracy dwindles. New information based organizational architecture, based upon systems, and so biological models, is coming to the fore. These organizations show much more resilience and adaptability and often more productivity, than large bureaucracies.

What would the architecture of an information organization be?  British-Welsh Cybernetician Stafford Beer had one answer. He looked at the most complex information organizing organism in the world: the human nervous system. From there, he built a five system model, each level within the other like Russian dolls: a self-recursive system. Being a system, this organizational model deals with the amplification or attenuation of information according to its own needs and those of the environment, particularly the client.

Although empirical studies lack, some documented evidence points to how effective the VSM is to diagnose corporate problems and to create a more flexible, resilient enterprise.

About the presenter: John Coghlan

John Coghlan has degrees in Russian, French language and literature and communications. He has worked in government and in the private sector as public relations writer, editor, teacher, translator and technical writer.  He has worked in Canada, Italy and Haiti and is fluent in seven languages.

The technical writing brought him to an interest in process improvement through such techniques as the enterprise architecture, then the theory of constraints. He went to Haiti where he worked with a Canadian consultant to open up a non-government organization for improving the quality of life in Petionville, a borough of Port-au-Prince. The organization would use a software platform, based upon sociocracy, for proposing, describing, debating and deciding upon new projects to fund. The organizational architecture we chose was the Viable System Model.

If you will be outside Ottawa and would like to connect via Skype please contact me at:  SValiyani@gmail.com; I may be able to arrange a connection.

Regards,

Sameer Valiyani

613-265-7210

Update – TECHNOLOGY LEADS

Dr. Arthur Cordell

Arthur Cordell received a B.A. from McGill University and a Ph.D. (economics) from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He has worked for the US Government in Washington and as a business consultant in New York City.

Arthur was a Science Advisor with the Science Council of Canada for many years where he authored a number of studies ‘The Multinational Firm, Foreign Direct Investment, and Canadian Science Policy,’ ‘The Role and Function of Government Laboratories and the Transfer of Technology to the Manufacturing Sector’ ( with J.M. Gilmour) ‘The Uneasy Eighties: The Transition To An Information Society.’ Dr. Cordell was project officer for the study which led to Science Council report ‘Canada as a Conserver Society: Resource Uncertainties and the Need for New Technologies,’ he was also project officer for the Council report, ‘Planning Now For An Information Society: Tomorrow Is Too Late.’ He was closely associated with all Council studies on computers and communications. Arthur has also published widely in a number of academic and popular journals.

Arthur is co-author of such books as, Shifting Time: Social Policy and the Future of Work (1994); The New Wealth of Nations: Taxing Cyberspace (1997). Both deal, in different ways, with the impact of information technology on the quantity and quality of work (the future of work and working); the productivity of networks and how that productivity may be more widely accessed and distributed; the promise and potential of electronic commerce.

Arthur Cordell developed the idea of the ‘bit tax’, a way of getting at the productivity of a networked economy. The ‘bit tax’ also offers a way for different juridictions to apply a sales tax to electronic commerce. His current research is centred on the ‘unintended consequences of information technology.’

Currently, Arthur Cordell is Adjunct Professor, Communication Studies, Carleton University. His broad area of interest is the social, political and economic implications of information technology for Canadian society.