Governance and Society
From Change
Rough Notes: by Stewart Gebbie 2008-12-13
Equating the trialogue model[1] to the change model
| system | = | society |
| model | = | government |
| process | = | science |
The difficulty being that each of these aspects are represented by the interactions of and abilities of people. Yet all these people form part of the society itself. That is, the people of science and people of government are part of the system that they are facilitating.
To mitigate this difficulty it is important to be totally transparent and consistent. This is enabled by externalising information using clearly documented mediums that are openly shared. Science achieves this via academic papers and peer review, together with objectives and values aligned with need for quality output (not to say that there are abuses and frauds). How does government externalise its behaviour?
I would argue that government does not sufficiently externalise its processes. Rather only some aspects are partially externalised via government gazettes an other legal documents. Most aspects of the governmental model are only ever implied via ambiguous complex laws or via the relationships woven into social deals and partnerships
Furthermore, it would seem that while it should be natural to view government as a model within the change triad, it is failing in this role since it does not necessarily model the society in a manner that is representative of the society with its actual behaviours and desires. i.e. there is a disconnect.
One way to address this is to place greater emphasis on explicit modelling of governmental processes via computational representations of complex systems. These can then apply to various sectors:
- civil infrastructure
- financial systems
- environmental systems
- education
- etc.
Eventually, we build more links between these models and model our society in a transparent and consistent manner.
