This was another very productive CIIC workshop, covering significant ground in relation to the following two topics:

1. The [apparent ir]relevance of expertise (picking up a problem statement submitted by Paul Szymkoviak in 2018 that had not yet been tackled)
2. Human[e] scale vs Anthropocentrism (building on results from earlier CIIC workshops in Auckland on these topics)

Many thanks to Paul Szymkoviak and  Jussi Pasanen for diligent and superb note taking, as well as for many of the links to further valuable knowledge included in the summary below!

The full scale original images of Paul’s notes are accessible here (unadjusted originals are in the sub folder), and Jussi’s original notes are available here.

Since Paul’s diagrams are very clear and say more than thousands of words, and since we have covered most of the “hub” topics in earlier CIIC workshops in Auckland, the results are best captured by a combination of Paul’s diagrams and links to earlier CIIC discussions.

The [apparent ir]relevance of expertise

“Hub” topics and related earlier discussions / links:

1. Definition of expertise and knowledge (see definitions below)
2. Devaluation of knowledge
3. Competitive gamification of innovation, resulting in spurious cultural complexity and social inequity
4. Status seeking pleasure monkeys
5. Milgram experiment (obedience)
6. Contrast with conscious competency networks

Human[e] scale vs Anthropocentrism

“Hub” topics and related earlier discussions / links:

1. The Anthropocene to date
2. The capital production system
3. The toxic ingredients of civilisation (cities, written language, and money)
4. Neurodiversity

“Hub” topics and related earlier discussions / links:

1. The future must be human[e] scale
2. Busyness as usual has no future (including a long list of relevant books)
3. Deep adaptation (Jem Bendell) and related ideas
4. Climate breakdown
5. Human scale
6. Limit group size to support trusted relationships
7. Diversity

Useful sources of related knowledge

Definitions

SECI knowledge creation spiral (Nonaka, 1980)

Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom (Nathan Shedroff, 1994)

Knowledge distillery (S23M, 2012)

Books

1. John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s bastards, 1993
2. John Ralston Saul, The doubters companion, 2002
3. John Ralston Saul, The Collapse Of Globalism: And The Reinvention Of The World, 2005, (sort of a follow up to Voltaire’s bastards)
4. Dietrich Dörner, The Logic of Failure: Why Things Go Wrong and What We Can Do, 2011
5. Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the wild, 1996, (studies distributed real-time cognition. A detailed study and perhaps little heavy, but enjoyable and useful in relation to understanding expertise and knowledge transmission between humans)
6. Darren Allen, 33 Myths of the System, 2018
7. Mark Hurst: Bit Literacy, 2007, (the discussion on ‘letting the bits go’ is interesting)
8. Steve Silberman, Neurotribes, 2015
9. Star Ford, A Field Guide to Earthlings: An autistic/Asperger view of neurotypical behavior, 2011
   

Other resources

1. A short blog post synopsis of the Enspiral patterns for decentralised organisation
2. THX (not the hollywood sound system) that uses a (blockchain like) digital currency system for recognising/ appreciating social behaviour of value
3. Stephen Wolfram, Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure (example of extreme hoarding)
4. The Autism Quotient Test
5. Stephanie Shirley, research related to autism
6. Autistic Collaboration, a hub for mutual support, and encourages neurodivergent individuals and ventures to connect and establish long-term collaborations, including a related knowledge repository
7. The story of a local currency with negative interest rates in Wörgl
8. Uncivilisation : The Dark Mountain Manifesto
9. CIIC workshop on nutrition in the Anthropocene (the intersection of agriculture and healthcare), including an index of knowledge resources on sustainable food production

Next steps

It would be great to establishing an ongoing collaboration around all the important topics of:

(a) creating and maintaining knowledge at human scale knowledge, and

(b) addressing the challenges of moving beyond Anthropocentrism.

The next CIIC workshop in Melbourne is scheduled for 9 June.
You can register online.