DSS2012 Panel 2
Creative Precarious Decision-Making in the Crises of Our Time: A Visual/Narrative Collaborative Panel
Panel organisers
Dr. J. Miguel Imas, Kingston University, UK
Professor Patrick Humphreys, LSE, UK
Panel co-sponsor
EU FP7 project CADIC: Cross-organisational Assessment and Development of Intellectual Capital
www.cadic-europe.org
Motivation
The current economic crises in Europe and the United States prompt new questions on how communities around Europe and (by extent) the world would 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 in the space and place that respond to small local issues. For instance, the little village in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy or Spain; the inner city and unemployed people who dwell from the margins of our land. How can our language engage and construct participative spaces upon which new solutions to problems can emerge?
The challenge, hence, is how we 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. We need a new audiovisual language for showing and telling. Upon which we can construct spaces for collaborative authoring of outcomes. A language that reflects the marginal and excluded: the ones whose decision-making processes are not part of the grand decision-making discourse.
Format for the Panel
We propose, in this ‘dss’ (emphasising the small) panel to address this important and complex issue of our time.
Motivating/contextualising presentations from three invited panellists will open the procedures followed by an open discussion with the audience on issues that will cover the following topics:
Schedule
The total time scheduled for the panel is 90 minutes. Miguel Imas will act as the chair and will open the procedures. An invited speaker from Greece (Maria Daskalaki has been invited –not yet confirmed) will open the session with a 20 minutes presentation on the Greek situation and its significance for addressing decision-making. Patrick Humphreys (20 minutes presentation) will discuss with visual examples how collaborative spaces for decision making on joint and cluster-development initiatives by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Greek areas are emerging, bottom-up, with support from CADIC in response to the crisis and the problems faced by the community. The chair, Miguel Imas, will contextualise the crisis at the international level with examples from Argentina and Chile (20 minutes presentation). This will be followed by an open discussion with the audience.
Their presentations will include audio-visual material to illustrate the situation experienced by decision-makers whose lives have become even more marginal after the crisis, and the initiatives they are now taking as a result of Decision Support facilitating collaborative authoring of outcomes.
After the three presentations the floor will be open to everybody for an open debate (50 minutes).
The idea and motivation of the workshop is that in this way a collaborative and participative framework for decision-making will emerge from the discussion. A framework that can stimulate the creation of more plurivocal decision support systems that respond to the necessities of communities and SMEs which are suffering as a consequence of the financial crisis of our time.
Publication
After the DSS 2012 conference CADIC will sponsor the production of a DVD describing the panel, with chapters for the three invited presentations and highlights of the panel discussion, together with audio-visual annotations supplied by contributors to the panel discussion.
The Editors of the DVD will be Miguel Imas and Patrick Humphreys; it will be a publication of DSS press/Ludic publishing, with an ISBN. Participants in DSS2012 will be offered a copy of this DVD free of charge.