Workshop on
New technologies for supporting creative decision making in precarious contexts
Workshop convenors: Patrick Humphreys (UK) and Osvaldo Garcia, (Chile)
Email p.humphreys@lse.ac.uk, osvaldogarcia.d@gmail.com
A 3-hour workshop at DSS2014on 5 June 2014 (2-5pm)
at the IFIP WG 8.3 and SIGDSS Open Conference
“DSS 2.0 – Supporting decision making with new technologies”
Motivation for the workshop
The current economic crises in Europe and the United States prompt new questions on how communities around the world could come together and explore new alternative possibilities for the design and application of new models for collaborative decision-making. It seems to us that our present models of decision that support economic and organisational activities are bankrupt. The global decision process is bereft of imaginative and creative ideas that can support communities at local and small level to explore their problems and address their issues in their own creative ways. That is, it is questionable that the axiomatic language, practices and applications of DSS models employed by most firms, governments and corporations can respond to the economic crisis at small local level. The solutions to problems are mostly guided by distance and exclusion of those who wish to help.
Above all, the DSS modelling language employed is now revealed as lacking the credibility to address the real situation as protests here in Europe, the United States and other countries demonstrate lack of appreciation of life as it experienced in the precariousness of those who have suffered under the globalised grand discourse of the master decision-making narrative. The challenge for us is how to embrace and embed the language of collaborative and participative decision-making bottom-up in way that is sensitive to the local context, society and culture. The focus is on local enterprises and communities struggling to find a collaborative route to survival in cities, towns and villages worldwide, and especially, according to the concerns of the present workshop, in Europe, Latin America and China.
What creative techniques can engage, construct and facilitate participative spaces upon which new solutions to problems can emerge? How can the enable us to break from the main paradigmatic thinking and language that simply imposes layers of meaning and design of decisional models that do not respond to local demands? What kinds of distinctions are required by individuals, groups or communities to act collaboratively on the context in which they operate? How conditions are generated to manage these collaborative processes in precarious contexts and become autonomous?
We need to open a learning space where we can articulate and intertwine different tools that enhance the capabilities of individuals, groups and communities both in their internal relational dynamics and in the creation of networks between them to change the self-referentiality, narratives and action in the particular context.
We also need to employ new audio-visual technologies for showing and telling that give a powerful voice to individuals, groups and small enterprises that are treated as marginal or excluded in the conventional grand discourse of decision making, with its top-down emphasis on commanding and controlling pathways to value. Instead we need new technologies that allow pathways to value to be generated collaboratively, bottom up, rather than implementing a decision control structure managed top–down. Such technologies are employed and managed bottom-up in building facilitating infrastructures, enabling and generating and flows of intellectual and social capital, ideas, and intangible resources for collaborative decision-making.
Workshop Schedule
Part 1 (2.00pm-3.30pm)
1. Introduction to the workshop and Task Group
Patrick Humphreys and Osvaldo García De la Cerda
2. Video Case Study: Using CADIC Technology to establish a climate of trust facilitating collaborative decision-making in SME clusters in Samos.
Authors: Eirini Skouta, Panagiotis Athanasopoulos, Margarita Ikariou and Patrick Humphreys (Email info@bioenersis.gr)
3. Invited presentations addressing precarious decision making contexts in Greece, China, Chile and the UK
3.1 Chile: Enactive management: a meta-soft technology to cope with conflict situations in precarious decision making contexts.
Authors: Osvaldo García De la Cerda and María Soledad Saavedra Ulloa (email osvaldogarcia.d@gmail.com)
3.2 India: Technology for creative decision support enabling alternative pathways to social inclusion.
Author: Mayeda Jamal (Email mayedajamal@yahoo.com )
3.3 China: Creative Cluster development informed by a technology founded in emergent Social Capital and Styles of organizing
Authors: Junxiang Zhang and Patrick Humphreys (email p.humphreys@lse.ac.uk)
Coffee Break
Part 2 (3.45 – 5.00pm ,)
Interactive multimedia presentation (15min) on Technologies for supporting creative decision making offed by SMECluster ; several contributed short presentations (max 10 min each) from WG8.3 members and friends; followed by general discussion; recruitment of new members to IFIP WG8.3 Task Group on Creative DSS in Precarious Decision Making Contexts ; planning of future activities in the period to DSS2016.
An invitation to participate in this workshop, and maybe contribute a short paper, is circulated to the full membership of IFIP WG.8.3.
