The 2025n1 Banathy Conversation is scheduled to convene at the Center for Corporate Rehabilitation near Fairfield, Iowa, beginning on Sunday, April 13, 2025, and ending on (Good) Friday, April 18.
Participants in the Conversation can plan for the event with more detailed descriptions under:
The Conversation centers on Gathering, Exploring and Reflecting, in-person, over six days. Activities preceding and following the residential event are conducted on Google Workspace.
2025n1 Banathy Conversation + CSRP Institute AGMThe 2025n1 Banathy Conversation is scheduled to convene at the Center for Corporate Rehabilitation near Fairfield, Iowa, beginning on Sunday, April 13, 2025, and ending on (Good) Friday, April 18.Participants in link:Conversation can plan for the event with more detailed descriptions under:Booking (including Lodging, Registering, Routing)Equipping (including Apple-Platform, Google-Platform, Alternative-Platforms)Engaging (including Connecting, Agreeing, Gathering, Exploring, Reflecting, Recollecting)The Conversation centers on Gathering, Exploring and Reflecting, in-person, over six days. Activities preceding and following the residential event are conducted on Google Workspace.
Over the past few years I’ve been working with a couple volunteers– PhD students who had found Robert Rosen’s work and then found me– to get all of my father’s papers and out of print books digitized with the goal of putting everything up on a new website so that it’s accessible to everyone who has been looking for it. One student in particular, Pedro Marquez-Zacarias, who has earned his PhD in the process of all this and is currently a post-doc at the Santa Fe Institute… who flew up to Rochester, stayed in our guest room and worked his a$$ off, opening boxes of Dad’s stuff that I’ve got stored in my basement, gathering and digitizing papers, photographs, notes, and more. In lieu of payment, I gave him total access and he has copies of everything including photographs of all of my father’s artwork. It has been a symbiotic partnership of the first order and the website is finally ready to launch publicly. I could not have done it without him. On this last trip up here he brought his friend, fellow PhD student from Atlanta, Emma Bingham, who has been doing a lot of the coding and indexing on the new website. The fact that they are delightful people is a bonus! I consider them extended family, by now, and friends for life.
The new website is www.rosenlife.org and is fully searchable. Most of the digitized files are free, the ones that aren’t free are inexpensive, and then there’s the burgeoning “store”… As I was getting feedback from a few friends, there were a lot of jokes about the coffee mugs. I wrote:
“The mugs! Yeah! I laughed so hard. That was Pedro and Emma’s idea. They were reading the free association notes Dad used to type first thing in the morning [over a pot of black coffee] in preparation for actual writing and they said “This would be hilarious on a coffee mug!” The more we noticed, after that, the more it seemed like a brilliant idea, particularly as a means for funding the site. If they take off, I suggested we find a different shape and size of mug. Dad and I both favor a curved, rounded cup that holds at least 16 oz, preferably 20. I think T-shirts would be good too. His quote from Life, Itself: “The Machine Metaphor of Descartes is not just a little bit wrong; it is entirely wrong– and must be discarded.” I want one of those! I’ll wear it to the ISSS conference in July.”
Every little bit helps. Websites are expensive. Any profit above the expenses will go to Pedro and Emma, helping them avoid Academic poverty if at all possible.
I intend to start a blog on the site. Pedro wants me to send him my Facebook posts about Dad’s work, of which there have been MANY. I’ve tagged most of them as important so I’m hoping they are searchable.
Any constructive criticisms and suggestions are welcome. This is just a beginning. It’s a lot different from the first website I created back when the internet was new (under the auspices of rosen-enterprises), which may still be on the Wayback Machine Internet Archive. That one was very personal and hand-crafted… This one is more goal-oriented and official. The main goal is to create access to the scientific work of Robert Rosen for people around the planet, wherever they are. And it already achieves that goal, thanks to Pedro.
The next big task is one that only I can finish: getting the book written that translates Robert Rosen’s scientific work to plain English. By this time next year I hope to be looking for a publisher for the finished manuscript.
By my late 60s, perhaps I will finally be able to get back to being a fiction writer. :~) A long detour but the time has not been wasted!
The first System Thinking Ontario for 2025 will be on January 8, online. https://lnkd.in/gwUs63AG . The topic will be “Generative AI and Inquiring Systems: Ways of Patterning and Ways of Knowing”.
For 2025, we’re moving to Wednesday evenings (ET, in Toronto), in a mix of online and in-person sessions. This January session will be recorded and shared online.
Planetary phase shift theory offers a new collective anticipatory intelligence framework for foresight study and practice, formalising the notion that humanity has arrived at an unprecedented historical and geological turning point. It is based on a transdisciplinary integration of C. S. Holling’s adaptive cycle with phase transition theory at societal and civilisational scales. This framework is used to assess empirical data across energy, transport, food and information, revealing that the proliferation of multiple global crises across earth and human systems is related to the last stages of the life-cycle of global industrial civilisation. The planetary phase shift implies that humanity has arrived at an evolutionary turning point that is either the precursor for collapse, or a new civilisational life-cycle representing the next stage in the material and cultural evolution of the human species. This life-cycle could comprise a networked ‘postmaterialist’ ecological civilisation unleashing an unprecedented possibility space for post-carbon prosperity within planetary boundaries. Yet its success requires a fundamental reorganisation of the governance, economy, politics, culture, worldview and value-system of our societies, guiding the design and acceleration of key technologies.
STPIS 2024 Socio-Technical Perspectives in Information Systems 2024
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Socio-Technical Perspectives in Information Systems (STPIS 2024)
Hybrid conference with a workshop at University of Jöngköping, Sweden, August 16-17, 2024.
Edited by STPIS’24 chairs:
Peter Bednar * Joakim Kävrestad ** Erik Bergström *** Mikko Rajanen **** Helena Vallo Hult ***** Alessio Maria Braccini ****** Anna Sigridur Islind ******* Fatema Zaghloul ********
Preface1-7 Summary: There were 26 papers submitted for peer-review to this conference. Out of these, 18 papers were accepted after a revision, a presentation and a second round of peer-reviews.
2024-10-31: submitted by Mikko Rajanen, metadata incl. bibliographic data published under Creative Commons CC0 2024-12-03: published on CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073) |valid HTML5|
Sandro Skansi ; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Croatian Studies, Borongajska cesta 83d, HR–10000 Zagreb Kristina Šekrst orcid.org/0000-0002-0467-7313 ; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Philosophy, Ivana Lučića 3, HR–10000 Zagreb
The purpose of this paper is to show the role of process ontology in cybernetics. The philosophical foundations of cybernetics were laid by Norbert Wiener, who used a language full of human-machine metaphors described in terms of information, feedback, and control. We will show that various fields of science still use essentially cybernetic definitions today, which will lead us to a reformulation of such a language from a philosophical point of view: the goal of cybernetics is the study of process analogies. Using the principle of compositionality, we will show how a cyberneticist can easily argue for the ontological sameness of two processes. Such a framework could lead to cybernetics being seen as a fully grounded philosophical theory. As a corollary, we point out that there is a growing need for cybernetics because, thanks to its specific process ontology, it provides a theoretical framework that ontologically bridges dualisms that occur throughout contemporary science.
This journal article reviews and describes the cybernetic epistemology set forth by the Pro Alto Group. 118 verbatim transcripts of the team meeting of Gregory Bateson and his Research Team (Psychiatrist Don D. Jackson, Cultural anthropologist John Weakland, Family Therapy pioneer Jay Haley and Psychiatrist William Fry) are analysed and discussed.
Billions of people around the world use Google’s products every day, and they count on those products to work reliably. Behind the scenes, Google’s services have increased dramatically in scale over the last 25 years — and failures have become rarer even as the scale has grown. Google’s SRE team has pioneered methods to keep failures rare by engineering reliability into every part of the stack. SREs have scaled up methods that have gotten us very far—Service Level Objectives (SLOs), error budgets, isolation strategies, thorough postmortems, progressive rollouts, and other techniques. In the face of increasing system complexity and emerging challenges, we at Google are always asking ourselves: what’s next? How can we continue to push the boundaries of reliability and safety?
To address these challenges, Google SRE has embraced systems theory and control theory. We have adopted the STAMP (System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes) framework, developed by Professor Nancy Leveson at MIT, which shifts the focus from preventing individual component failures to understanding and managing complex system interactions. STAMP incorporates tools like Causal Analysis based on Systems Theory (CAST) for post-incident investigations and System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) for hazard analysis.
In this article, we will explore the limitations of our traditional approaches and introduce you to STAMP. Through a real-world case study and lessons learned, we’ll show you why we believe STAMP represents the future of SRE not just at Google, but across the tech industry.
Purpose: The rise of Socio-Technical Systems (STS) and Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) perspectives originated in the industrialization of the 1950s and 1960s. With ubiquitous computing and globalization compressing time and space, interests in systems thinking by the 2020s have turned towards systems changes. This refocusing on changes has encouraged hypothesizing an alternative world theory of (con)texturalism-dyadicism with a root metaphor of yinyang dancing through [eight] seasons. Through post-colonial sciencing in constructionist philosophizing across Western and Classical Chinese traditions, SES alongside STS are recast as kairotic rhythms casting on and binding off weaves in time.
Approach: This inquiry began with behavioral histories of open-sourcing-while-private-sourcing, in an inductive approach to theory building. Curiosity on the origins of causal texture theory led to plunging into the history of pragmatism, and its associated metaphilosophy. An exploration of processual philosophies revealed a better appreciation through a non-Western approach, via yinyang at the foundation of Classical Chinese Medicine. Developing a (con)textural-dyadic world theory enables conjoining SES and STS as diachronic complements.
Findings: Changes in SES and STS based on Western philosophy presuppose functions and structures as primordial, evoking systems conceptions of rearranging objects. Clarifying root metaphors, changes in SES and STS that foreground processes and behaviors elevate the repacing of rhythms in systems concepts. Systems practice approaches involving action learning can be adapted for the altered foundations..
Originality: In organizational theory, SES and STS have been expressed as different perspectives on systems of interest. Tracing back to metaphilosophy from the 1940s, an alternative branch of pragmatism incorporating yinyang enlarges the scope of systems thinking from its Anglo-American traditions.
Keywords: Socio-Ecological Systems, Socio-Technical Systems, Systems Change, Systems Thinking
STPIS 2024 Proceedings: Reifying Socio-Technical and Socio-Ecological Perspectives for Systems Changes December 30, 2024 daviding
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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