Because of the mission of your discussion group, I thought you might be
interested in the work of the Idaho Systems Institute. Founded in 1996, our
small non-profit organization works to promote systems thinking - focusing
on the wholes and relationships of issues rather than treating them
separately or in a static manner - and "design culture", which is the
philosophy and practice of participatory idealized social systems design.
A relatively new area of inquiry, social systems design is inseparable from
issues of participatory democracy and is, we feel, a critical capacity for
today's communities and societies. It is very different from strategic
planning, and involves bringing together a community in dialogue to
articulate a very rich, idealized image of the kind of society and community
they seek, then those stakeholders (and ONLY the stakeholders) designing
specific human activity systems - be they education, health, government,
justice, etc. - which represent a REACHING for that ideal. This "spiral" is
continuous, a never-ending, living connection between idealization, design,
actual system, and back to evolving ideal.
We are introducing this to the Boise community in two contexts at the
moment. The first is through a project called Designing Communities of
Learning, which is geared towards encouraging and enabling the redesign of
our systems of learning and human development, essentially "from scratch."
It is a serious and, we feel, necessary alternative to the incremental
improvement, restructuring, and reform approaches taken across Idaho and
across the country. We hope to initiate and facilitate a large scale design
exercise in Boise, focused on a mythical school district, within the year.
The second project, which is not an exercise, is the design from scratch of
an institution of communication and community-building for the North End
neighborhood of Boise. We call it an "Agora" after the open space in ancient
Athens where people would gather to trade and deliberate about public
affairs. The initial idealized design work and implementation is being
carried out by a group of neighbors, facilitated by myself (also a
neighbor), and the first concrete product will be a newspaper in the near
future, accompanied by conversation activities and a complex of services. I
believe (and being part of a network of pioneers in the field of social
systems design, am probably correct) that this represents the first
application of the inquiry of idealized social systems design on a large
scale (in our case, a neighborhood of 12,000 people); the true test will be
whether the ownership of the design spiral can pass on to all of the
residents of the neighborhood. Then it's on to inspire more "agoras" and
integrating them as a new democratic framework is built from the ground-up.
If anyone in Moscow is interested, we'd be glad to send additional
information about our mission and work. Most people here are still unaware
of ISI, the little jewel that calls Boise, Idaho its home. We have a
website, but it is currently being redone. You can find it at
www.netchaos.com/isi/
You have an interesting model in Vision 2020, something we might emulate as
part of our Agora.
Take care,
Matthew Shapiro
President, Idaho Systems Institute
idahomat@micron.net
isi@netchaos.com