Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation

Three types of approaches to planning:
1)rational - figure out options, calculate costs, benefits.
2)evolutionist - strategy emerges, is not decided upon, is only recognized after the fact. - 'emergent'
3)processual - is found through the strategic conversation.
Decision makes evaluate alternatives, the various structurally different possibilities,
not decisions, but conditions, and devise 'scenarios' as the basis of conversation.
The point of making scenarios is to make the organization more flexible, and open to change, and to reacting to a changing environment, to recognize signs of a particular scenario coming into play, and being able to deal with it.

Institute of Network Cultures

Poets have descended from the peaks, which they believed
themselves to be established. They have gone out into the
streets, they have insulted their masters, they have no gods any
longer and dared to kiss beauty and love on the mouth.

Paul Eluard

quoted in The Principle of Notworking
Concepts in Critical Internet Culture,Geert Lovink.

and another quote, from geert lovink,
So far, the educational sector has been slow in terms of adapting network technolo
gies. Institutional infighting between existing disciplines has prevented
higher education to become truly innovative. Universities worldwide are in
the iron grip of Microsoft. The use of free and open source software is mar-
ginal, if not straight-out forbidden. ...
Speaking of 2005, the study of mobile devices is still in a premature phase.
...
Networks constantly undermine the
stable boundaries between inside and outside. While networks provoke a
sense of liberation they install themselves into everyday life as ideal
machines for control.

Personal Semantic Webs

Following up on my last post, I can see that much topic map work has shifted in emphasis from explicitly using that term to using some other term. The work discussed here points to the growth of local tools that can extract metadata from local or remote files, and create various kinds of compound entities from those files. Similar to the scholar's work bench.

Introducing Social Networks

Introducing Social Networks, Degenne, and Forse - is an introduction to
social networks. An important point is that simply analyzing people by their characteristics age, sex, occupation is not adequate. I think this was always obvious to other people in the social networks arena - but you have to see, not just the individual characteristics of people - but their connections to each other, and this will not be visible in a purely demographic analysis.