Comments for The process diary...

Comment on Research into participatory processes: what happened? by pete cranston

pete cranston — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:09:44 +0000

I like the candour of this piece. The difficulty in genuinely co-creating a site using a wiki chimes with my own experience elsewhere and worries me about our Local Content project. My hope is that we can find a way to develop something that is useful to the organisations and people with whom we are conversing so that it becomes interesting to them to invest the time. Watch our space – when it happens. The URL above is a blog to record what we are doing

Comment on Digital storytelling in Sri Lanka – a preliminary discussion of evaluation by clodagh miskelly

clodagh miskelly — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:48:13 +0000

hi Michael

very interested to read about your DS work and interests..I’ve been working with various forms of digital storytelling in social change contexts for a few years and researched as phd and postdoc in that area, mainly in the UK (only s.asian experiecnce was recent workshop in delhi). I think we have some overlapping interests in regard to stories and mapping and also dst and action research and evaluation..

would be great to have a chat sometime about your work and some of the connections.. but i can’t see any contact details for you .

Comment on Wikis and visualisation tools by Dejan

Dejan — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:53:41 +0000

Just came across this visualisation tool: http://www.spicynodes.org. It seems similar to The Brain, but is perhaps geared more towards navigating ordinary websites than well-structured knowledge repositories (for example it keeps the Home node displayed as you dig deeper into the content)…

Comment on Complexity theory and the Steering Group Meeting in Amsterdam by Chris Mowles

Chris Mowles — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:42:19 +0000

Thanks for the comment.

I agree with you that mathematics doesn’t map over the social, and I think that’s why I refer to it an an analogy. Numbers stand still whereas people don’t.

In which case, I’m uncertain where that leaves us with your injunction to ‘develop(ing) rigorous ways of utilizing complexity theory in human organization.’ I’m not sure what that would mean in practice, since I don’t think complexity theory can be ‘utilized’ either rigorously or not.

What I think it offers us is a release from our fantasies of prediction and control, and an opportunity to reflect upon our contribution to the patterning of which we are part. That demands its own rigour, for sure. But the idea of utilizing complexity theory to bring about a desired change is too redolent for me of the kind of instrumentalism that I am trying to avoid.

Comment on Complexity theory and the Steering Group Meeting in Amsterdam by Milton

Milton — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:28:09 +0000

Thanks for the post. I appreciate your engagement with a critic of complexity theory and then the practical application space – your program – where self-similarity at various scales is observable.

One observation I would like to mention is that I think that the purity of mathematical fractals doesn’t map directly on a person/group/community/society/global community. Scale does matter, even in physical space – take a look at how forces that are nearly irrelevant at normal scale become almost insurmountable when working at a nano scale.

Exploration of the issues around scale, self-similarity, emergence, and reflexivity are important as we work on developing rigorous ways of utilizing complexity theory in human organization. If, in the end, we organize differently but aren’t any better off, then it will just have been an amusing diversion. But if we can deepen our organizational resilience at all scales, then we have something deeply worthwhile underway.

Comment on Back from Cambridge by Simon Hearn

Simon Hearn — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:54:59 +0000

It was a great meeting and a marvelous setting. Very inspirational. Thank you to all who contributed.

Comment on CIARIS by Simon Hearn

Simon Hearn — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:54:04 +0000

I’ve also heard great things about an approach to collaboration that a group in Geneva have developed for various UN agencies: http://edgeof.net

Comment on Joined up thinking on evaluation? by Three new contributors… « The giraffe

Three new contributors… « The giraffe — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:52:51 +0000

[...] For more on evaluation related to IKM Emergent, please see The process diary on Joined up thinking and evaluation. [...]

Comment on Calls for proposals by Sarah Cummings

Sarah Cummings — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:55:36 +0000

I’m please to be able to report that we received 10 proposals in total for all three calls. This is really good news as many of the proposals look great and there are not too many to process reasonably easily.

Comment on Boundary partners by Simon Hearn

Simon Hearn — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:17:38 +0000

See this recent post about networks and boundary partners: http://www.outcomemapping.ca/forum/viewtopic.php?p=725#725.

It relates to the article ‘Evaluating international social-change networks: a conceptual framework for a participatory approach’ : http://www.outcomemapping.ca/resource/resource.php?id=147