Year: 2004

Russell Ackoff resources on systems thinking

Like Jerry Michalski I’ve long been a fan of Ackoff’s. Here are two posts of Jerry’s from October that provide access to some of Ackoff’s insight and wisdom about how to think about complex design problems. All of these items are worth your time.

Idealized redesign

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m a big fan of Russ Ackoff’s thinking. Frustrated because I couldn’t find a description of his methodologies for interactive planning and idealized redesign, I got permission to post a paper describing those processes (pdf format).

I began to write a summary, but it is so crisply written that I recommend you read it yourself. What I will say is that idealized redesign made me realize that if you never take the time to imagine what you really should be doing, as an individual or organization, you’ll never get there. It also brought home to me just how difficult a process redesign is, because we are so wedded to assumptions we don’t notice, historic business models and other, often dysfunctional baggage we take for granted.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 12:10 PM

Some seminal documents from Systems Theory

The discipline Operations Research (OR) has been highly influential. Robert McNamara and his Best and Brightest used OR techniques to plan and justify the way the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations ran the Vietnam… er, situation. (Eventually McNamara resigned, troubled by LBJ’s decisions.)

In 1979, Russ Ackoff wrote a paper that was a milestone in management thinking, though it is little known. Published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society at the height of OR’s influence, The Future of Ooperational Research is Past (pdf) indicted the ways that OR had come to be used by its many practitioners. Ackoff followed that paper with a more hopeful one, titled Resurrecting the Future of Operational Research (also pdf).

Shortly after he published these papers, Ackoff started the discipline of Social Systems Science and founded the Busch Center at Wharton, funded largely by Anheuser-Busch, one of Russ’s major clients over time. Russ now heads Interact Design in Philadelphia.

Like the idealized redesign paper I just posted, I have permission to post these two papers here. It’s not every day you can see history change just a bit as you read an article.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 12:25 PM

[Jerry Michalski’s Home on the Web]

How Many Social Nets Are Too Many?

How Many Social Nets Are Too Many?

Posted Jan 28, 2004, 8:33 PM ET by Judith Meskill

Today in Wired News, Leander Kahney has a story Social Nets Not Making Friends in which she talks about: an SNS backlash brewing; Jason Kottke s parody job listing on craiglist.org; and the fact that the social networking service field has ballooned to include about 20 different services.

Well Leander, by my count, there are more than 100 social networking services that I have been observing cruising past my virtual radar gun in the past few months. I have been tracking this burgeoning growth of services aspiring to help discover and connect my friends, potential partners, business cohorts, and various levels of acquaintances and I have this scary feeling that I am only carving shavings off of the tip of an iceberg with this list.

Here is a copy of my accounting replete with links of this daunting deluge of SNSs:

Affinity Engines, Amigos.com, AsiaFriendFinder, Backwash, Backwash for Pets, BuddyBridge, BuddyZoo, Chia Friend, Classmates.com, Community Zero, Company of Friends, The Conneck, Contact Network, Corporate Alumni, CraigsList, Delphi Forums, Dude Check This Out!, easeek, ecademy, eFriendsnet, 8minuteDating, Eliyon, enCentra, Eurekster!, everyonesconnected, Evite, First Tuesday, FriendFinder, Friendity, Friend Surfer, Friends Reunited, Friendster, Friendzy, GermanFriendFinder, Globe Alive, GoingProfessional, gradFinder, Growth Company, HeiYou, HelloWorld, hipster, Huminity, IndianFriendFinder, InterAction, ItsNotWhatYouKnow, KnowMates, LianQu, LinkedIn, Living Directory, Love.com, The Lunch Club NYC, Match.com, matcheroo, Mediabistro, MeetUp, Monster Networking, mrNeighborhood, MyEMatch, NetMiner, Netmodular Community, Netparty, Netplaya Burning Man Community, Networking For Professionals, Nerve, Online Business Networking Resource, The Opinion Exchange, orkut, PalJunction, Passion.com, peeps nation, PowerMingle, qpengyou, RateOrDate, RealContacts, ReferNet, RepCheck, Ringo, Ryze, Salesforce.com, SeniorFriendFinder, Shortcut, Silicon Valley Pipeline, Small World Project, Social Circles, Social Grid, SocialTree, Sona, The Spark, Spoke Software, StumbleUpon, Sullivan Executive Networking Community, Talk City, There, Tickle by Emode, Tribe.net, uDate.com, UUFriends, Visible Path, Wallop, WisdomBuilder, WorldShine, YeeYoo, YOYO, Zdarmanet, and Zerodegrees.

[The Social Software Weblog]

Judith was certainly busy compiling this post!

While I am inclined to agree with those who argue for weblogs as a more robust medium for active social networks (see, for example, Jon Husband’s, Scoble’s, Dina’s, and Lilia’s comments for starters) I don’t think this is just a matter of VCs with money burning a hole in their pockets. Nor is it simply a matter of too many programmers with free time on their hands and a copy of Linked nearby.

We’re social animals and were long before writing was invented. Connecting has always come before content. Failing to understand that was the downfall of many early online experiences. One way to think about what’s going on now is that we’re in the midst of making new and more intereting mistakes than we have in the past.

50 book challenge

50 book challenge. It seems that the “50 book challenge” has become all the rage on the net this past week. (One version of it here.) The idea is to read 50 books in a year and, in some versions, blog about them.

This is roughly what I did last year with my reading, primarily as a way to keep track of what I read but I slacked off from blogging toward the end of the year, as things got a little too crazy. It looks like I read about 80 books last year but forgot to blog about them for the last few months. (My list of reading for 2003.)

Despite this, I’ll try again and see if I can manage to keep a more complete record of my reading. I’ll review some here, or just add brief comments at least. At times, the complete reviews will appear at Bookslut, the premiere book review magazine on the web. (Some might say I’m a little biased…)

My other blogging is going to be a little spotty as I prepare to move across the country to a new job… more about that later.

[David Harris’ Science & Literature]

This was something I had hoped to do more successfully last year. I read plenty of books, but was less than diligent about recording my reactions and assessments. I’m posting this, in part, as a bit of a forcing function. David also offers some suggested rules for the challenge, although I can only promise that I will abide by Rule 6.

Word of the day. Misologist

Word of the day. Misologist. Hatred of reason, argument, or enlightenment. In clearer terms, a person who wants to win an argument more than learn the truth. I deal with these people regularly. [Paul Thurrott’s Internet Nexus]

I deal with too many of these people myself. All the more reason to appreciate AKMA and the quest for truth that drives his work. While misologists generate quite a bit of heat and noise, you can find those who seek truth if you look.

Happy blogiversary AKMA!

Come On In.

Today s my second blogiversary, and all day friends have been virtually wandering through, helping themselves to drinks at one of the bars (there s an ample supply of juices and sodas in one of the rooms, for friends who don t drink), making pizzas for themselves and eating other people s pizzas, gobbling up lots of fruit and vegetables, and especially having lots of chips with one of Margaret s spectacular dips (she makes superb pesto, luscious hummus, and excellent guacamole). Wireless all over the place. Interested employers in casual, but animated, conversation with opportunity-seeking blog-neighbors. A stealthy philanthropist and an alert VC listen intently to impassioned descriptions of projects, visions, plans, and ventures. Every now and then, raucous laughter erupts. Furious arguments flare with conflicting certainties, then dissipate in respectful acknowledgment of deeply-felt, well-thought-out divergent convictions. Children of all sorts of ages run among our legs,, and I look out for Si to make sure everyone s having a good time.

The party s so big that not everyone would get along well if they had to hang out in the same close quarters, but that s one of the beauties of digital media: no one has to cross anyone s path if they don t want to. There s plenty of invigorating conversation where you want to find it, and you can just not go where you don t want.

…

Thank you all so very much. Stay as long as you like. It s a privilege to have a chance to visit with you.

[AKMA s Random Thoughts]

Congratulations to AKMA on his second blogiversary.

A wonderful soul who makes the blogosphere a better place and the quintessential example of the wonderful serendipity that the net makes possible. AKMA and I crossed paths initially by way of one of my rude comments which he answered in his characteristically gracious way. Today I count among the many fascinating people I’ve come to know through the net.

The Oldest Weblog

The Oldest Weblog. A standard definition of a weblog is a series of posts in “reverse chronologic order”. I can’t give you a reference here because the standard online reference sites don’t have a definition for “weblog”

But, as a geologist, I understand “reverse chronologic order”. Reverse chronologic order is youngest on top and older as you go down. This is a stratigraphic order. Younger deposits bury older deposits, so you get progressively older as you dig down. So weblogs view the world in a stratigraphic order.

It would be nice if the weblog folks acknowledge those who have gone before them. The Earth has been recording events in reverse chronologic order for over 3.8 billion years. The oldest weblog is the Earth. [Fluid Flow]

Sometimes the earliest ideas are the best.

Math and physics visualizers

Math and physics visualizers. This is a great collection of Java applets for visualizing physics and math concepts. Link (via Oblomovka) [Boing Boing Blog]

I keep hoping that I’ll have time to learn where science has gone since I last had a chance to study it. And to relearn some of the math I’ve forgotten over the years. At the very least, this will come in handy as my boys continue to take harder courses in school and high school. Sure wish I’d had access to these kinds of tools when I was in school.

feedexplorer from Diego Doval

feedexplorer.

Over the weekend I released clevercactus feedexplorer, a simple free app to browse the data from the Share Your OPML commons (thanks Dave for making this resource available!) and choose feeds that you find interesting, then allowing you to save them into OPML files that can be imported into a news aggregator. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and other OSes.

Here is the page with installation instructions and a short user guide.

If you can, take a moment to read the user guide as it explains how to change the sorting, perform searches, etc (Btw, I think the UI is pretty self-explanatory, but reading the doc should leave little doubt as to how to do something :)).

Note: if you have any problems with the installation, please take a moment to read the installation page, as it answers common questions and problems.

[d2r]

More interesting bootstrapping going on around Dave’s most recent experiment