Systems Thinking interest on the Open Learning Commons

I’m glad to see a Systems Thinking interest here. I was relating to @Robert_Best a longer history of a community looking for an online presence.

Circa 2003, I became webmaster of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. From the early static web pages in 1998, we moved up to Drupal, on which the main site today is still based. http://isss.org/world . (I was president of the ISSS 2011-2012, and led the ISSS San Jose 2012 meeting http://isss.org/world/sanjose-2012 ) and have be less active, because there should only be one president of an organization at a time)!

There was a lot of traction on LinkedIn with System Thinking World, but in October 2015, the community of 19,000 members was faced with a shutdown. This led to a splinter group moving to “The Ecology of Systems Thinking” https://www.facebook.com/groups/774241602654986/ . I preferred the openness of Google+ with a Systems Sciences community at https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/117647110273892799778 . I tried to get some traction on Diaspora, but my plea to “Towards a federated social web” http://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/towards-a-federated-social-web/ went unheeded.

Benjamin Taylor was having success with a site called model.report (using the lobste.rs platform), but by January 2018, the software author was getting too busy to continue support. With that, we partnered to encourage that group to move to a wordpress.com supported site, i.e. https://stream.syscoi.com/2018/01/19/moving-to-stream-syscoi-com/ . With that move, I archived a static site version of the model.report content to http://syscoi.com/model.report/ .

Now, with Google+ going away, I’m happy to see this Open Learning space welcome members from the Systems Thinking (and especially the Systems Sciences) community. I’ll be trying out the technology platforms for a while, and then will probably welcome a larger group to coalesce over here.

:speech_balloon: Originally posted on https://chat.diglife.coop/openlearning/channels/systems-thinking on a thread around Feb. 15, 2019