On Fri, 16 Jun 1995, Michael McMaster wrote:
> Replying to LO1654 --
>
> I would probably lose interest if the list was broken into sublists.
> I would rather peruse the various contributions and select my
> interests than be narrowed to one or have to select all lists.
>
> For me the great value in the dialogue is its richness.
>
> The only thing I can suggest to help my approach and facilitate what
> I hear in the suggestions is that more detailed "subject" lines be
> used and/or that subjects be split into sub-subjects more frequently.
I HATE IT when I completely agree with anybody, although it's less
painful when I completely agree with Mike.
A bit of history: In the mid 1950's a few very bright individuals
started a new society called the SOCIETY FOR GENERAL SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
and incorporated this in Michigan, functioning out of Ann Arbor.
Among them were Kenneth Boulding (one of the wonderful figures of this
century, in my opinion) and Anatol Rapaport. The society aimed to
discover things common to the disciplines, and to aggregate these things
in the general systems theory. One of the many benefits could be to make
education less repetitive, and to give people larger visions than they
could achieve by seeing things in very narrow perspectives.
Today, after being managed by people of somewhat more restricted
perspectives (envisioning-challenged individuals), the society has
undergone two name changes and now has about 30 SIGS, i.e., Special
Interest Groups. With this many SIGS, you might suppose that the society
(now called the International Society for the Systems Sciences) must have
a lot of members. Well, the paying membership has shrunk to about 200,
giving, let's see, about 7 people per SIG on average. Moreover, it's very
had to find any evidence that the SIGS are doing more than serving as
fashion accessories for faculty curriculum vitae at promotion and pay
increase time, and the vision of the founders seems to have disappeared
altogether.
I am not a nut for "learning organization", which I consider to be a
somewhat over-hyped term, but one of the great advantages of a metaphor
such as this is that it is more or less "open at scale", i.e., it lends
itself to the accumulation of many points of view on many subjects. At the
same time, it doesn't prevent anyone from starting a new list serve or new
society on any component topic that might be viewed as relevant or
highly-relevant to that one.
-- JOHN N. WARFIELD Jwarfiel@osf1.gmu.edu