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About the Action! Doing Things Now category

Many of us have a drive to get things done, now. We’ve been in too many groups that are just thinking and talking, but don’t get stuff done.

What can we do together, now?

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I feel the need to repeat my earlier comment (probably under a different heading somewhere) on the structure of this effort.

I see it as a well-intentioned effort to ‘get ready for the needed change’ in how humanity is running things. And a well-intentioned effort to collect ‘all’ helpful information available for that purpose.

My question is: How is the conceptual conceptually different from the encyclopedias, from Diderot to Wikipedia? It has to be done either according to some 'ontology – a classification – or without that, relying on the computing/ search power of the query system to find everything by ‘key word’ or equivalent. The inadequacy of that approach can be assessed by looking at the obvious perceived need to constantly develop yet another such collection – because the previous ones just became too clumsy to work with, just by beaming more all-inclusive. Some recent examples are the Systems Community of Inquiry blog / page by Benjamin Taylor (https://stream.syscoi.com/) compiling interesting work on systems, or Dmitry Sokolov’s amazing effort to compile all potentially helpful information for the same purpose: his LikeInMind project (https://www.facebook.com/groups/LikeInMind/ or http://confocal-manawatu.pbworks.com). Though intending to stimulate discourse, neither one is generation much in the way of comments or discussion. Any ‘new’ effort to actually achieve a more ‘action’-oriented outcome then feels the same need to start compiling documented work. (Debategraph and some other efforts tried to follow this advice, and there should be more discussion about how to do that better.)

Rittel’s still under-appreciated insight was that information systems aiming to support planning and policy-making should be organized to support the argumentative process of these activities – according to ISSUES (i.e. controversial questions) arising from the argumentative discussion of prelims to be remedied and proposals to do that.

To the extent the OGM effort actually hopes to achieve or influence real action on the problems humanity, it is my opinion and urgent advice to start discussions on actual, specific problems and proposals, aiming at producing recommendations for actual decision-makers to implement as ‘global agreements’. As for the ‘global’ ambition of this, would it be useful to start with an issue of interest to a ‘non-western’ community or culture with very different conceptual and philosophical perspectives about such issues – to overcome the likely objection of yet another ‘colonialist’ (this one overlaying the western outlook with the presumably more global ‘systems’ claim?) Just asking.

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@skreutzer mentioned this category in another thread: I didn’t know about it b/c it doesn’t sit on the front page. Can it be added there?