[p2p-research] present and future

[Ryan Lanham]

Thanks, Michel.  David Gurteen, Dave Snowden and others who run in that pack
are old acquaintances of mine.  Jon Husband's Wirearchy is an excellent blog
in that space...

Snowden is sort of a British Clay Shirky.  Very smart, but smart in the
peculiar way of saying very elemental things that are surprisingly
insightful over long periods--like Shirky.  Not many people have such
wisdom.  It is almost a naive legitimacy founded in simply mulling things
over deeply again and again.

Billing I have known of but do not follow.  I have not heard of Patricia
Benner.

Certainly there is nothing here I disagree with.  I still wonder whether the
only real theory worth a damn doesn't come from tinkering with real
problems.  Even someone as theoretical as Einstein supposedly worked almost
exclusively with mental models of reality (thought experiments).

I read today where the E. F. Shumacher Foundation gets 43,000 hits a day on
Berkshire Bucks or BerkBucks.  Do those guys have a theory of their
success?  Or a theory about money?  I suppose success in application
doesn't guarantee theoretical insight.

I do find myself most on the side of those who address real problems of real
people today.  If those problems are intractable, all the better.  The older
I get the less stock I put in large pools of theory--perhaps one reason why
economics and political philosophy are so dull to me now when once I found
them so very essential.

Ryan


On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 11:49 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Ryan,
>
> this should appeal to you, from david gurteen:
>
>
>
> *On idealistic solutions<http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/L004371/>
> *    (top <http:///?ui=2&view=bsp&ver=1qygpcgurkovy#122087154d3613d4_top>|
> next <http:///?ui=2&view=bsp&ver=1qygpcgurkovy#122087154d3613d4_L004388> |
> prev <http:///?ui=2&view=bsp&ver=1qygpcgurkovy#122087154d3613d4_L004377>)
>
> Dave Snowden said something recently that typified my approach to
> everything that I have done in life over the last 10 years or more.
>
> Knowledge Management should be focused on real, tangible intractable
> problems not aspirational goals. It should deal pragmatically with the
> evolutionary possibilities of the present rather then seeking idealistic
> solutions.
>
> *Credit: *Dave Snowden
>
> And then I saw these two posts A Deficit View of the World<http://www.changingorganisations.com/2009/05/a-deficit-view-of-the-wor%0Ald/>and Three
> Questions for Opening Up Possibility<http://www.changingorganisations.com/2009/05/three-questions-for-openi%0Ang-up-possibility/>from Stephen Billing where he makes a similar point and draws from Patricia
> Benner?s The Primacy of Caring<http://www.amazon.com/Primacy-Caring-Stress-Coping-Illness/dp/02011200%0A2X>.
>
>
> Stephen concludes his post thus
>
> Benner suggests that decreasing your reliance on a preconceived end or
> means of getting there can offer a new point of departure for new
> possibilities that were not previously available. To me, this applies as
> much to individuals in their personal lives as much as it does to people in
> organisations.
>
> *Credit: *Three Questions for Opening Up Possibility<http://www.changingorganisations.com/2009/05/three-questions-for-openi%0Ang-up-possibility>,
> Stephen Billing
>
> And then yet again I got to build on Snowden's original statement with this
> quote from John Deway <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey> that I
> found in the comments to the above post. The ideal of using the present
> simply to get ready for the future contradicts itself. It omits, and even
> shuts out, the very conditions by which a person can be prepared for his
> future. We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and
> only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present
> experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is
> the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything.
>
> --
> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
> http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
>
> Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
>
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> http://www.shiftn.com/
>
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