Systemic thinking has been made more portable through the use of different online tools. It is a great achievement for the community in general.
I have used KUMU to help me work with students. It was good to help us produce systems models of situations and also explore relationships between issues. The more we got into it, I was positively surprised to see how students made use of it.
The portability of tools seems to go in the way of enabling people generate lots of thoughts and ideas, play with scenarios, share what they know and what they see as appearing on their screens. One could said that a good repository of knowledge can be generated in less time than is the case without tools.
On attending a recent presentation in which another tool was used to facilitate collaboration, I could also notice that there was an elephant in the room...
Despite the potential for electronic data gathering, there did not seem to be a full consideration of a key group of stakeholders being included in the activities of discussion: citizens.
When it comes to citizen participation, we are still lacking good thinking about how they could be involved in this electronic dialogue.
Perhaps we need to review our assumptions that technology needs to be used for citizen participation and discussion.
How could that be done when often the systems problems we tackle as thinkers could involve thousands or millions of citizens?
Is it that we need powerful electronic engines to help us gather and sieve through citizens' contributions?
Or could we pay bit more of attention to how we are involving citizens with technologies in looking at situations that are pertinent to us all?
I have no answer to this 'problem'. Perhaps this is also a systems problem (how to get citizens involved in discussing citizens problems). All I can say for now is that we need to look at this elephant in the room if we are to continue making meaningful use of systems thinking and its available tools.
