Configurative mapping of Global Challenges Prize submissions

Global Challenge of the Global Challenge (Part #8)

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If the response to the Global Challenge Prize is as successful as hoped, many creative proposals will be elaborated. Unfortunately, "many will be called, but few will be chosen". The pattern is familiar with many other calls for proposals. It is also evident in the multiplicity of reports variously produced under the aegis of international bodies -- especially including the United Nations and its agencies. A particularly interesting example is provided by the set of reports engendered by the Club of Rome over decades (Club of Rome Reports and Bifurcations: a 40-year overview, 2012).

The key question is why the content of such reports is not integrated into an appropriate data set enabling the relationships among its insights to be mapped as a framework for integrative overview -- rather than decaying into "lost knowledge" as at present. The appropriate text analysis and mapping software has existed for a number of years, exemplified by the Leximancer application -- under the slogan: text in, insight out. One indication of possibilities is offered separately (Complementary Knowledge Analysis / Mapping Process, 2006). The argument also applies to serial (or parallel) presentations in a conference environment (Concept Analysis of Climate Change Agreements, 2009). One aspect of the concern is a focus of the Global Sensemaking network.

Reasons for avoiding such possibilities seem to include:

• concerns about intellectual copyright and the tedious nature of negotiations with copyright holders -- an issue creatively overcome by Google Books
• achieving access to electronic versions of the texts -- primarily the costs of scanning hardcopy versions (increasingly a trivial matter, given the scanning technology and the number of pages of concern)
• perceived lack of relevance of disparate insights to currently fashionable preoccupations -- especially when alternative insights are critical of one another
• overriding commitment to the identity of the instigating body (and its legacy) -- perceived as undermined by any indication of the relevance of similar or complementary initiatives (and especially where these are implicitly critical of those promoted)
• reluctance to be exposed to any mapping of past inanities because it would imply the need for due diligence in exploring the "ecosystem" of extant strategic proposals before formulating a new one
• basic lack of interest in any more integrative perspective and its systemic implications -- especially those enabled by the potential of other representational modalities (visualization, sontification, mapping, etc)

It is extraordinary to note that those producing bound compilations of integrative insights and remedial proposals see no need to interrelate more fruitfully what is assembled in this way -- nor are their contributors especially motivated to articulate any emergent perspective. The pattern is reinforced by the constraints of conventional journal publishing with its focus on text and avoidance of colour. The resulting "synthesis" can be described by the ironical German term: Buchbindersynthese.

Despite a most insightful editorial, a recent example is provided by the remarkable compilation for the Spanda Foundation by Helene Finidori (Systemic Change, Spanda Journal, 6, 2015). Appropriate to this argument, the same could be said of an earlier compilation, edited by the founder of the Spanda Foundation, Sahlan Momo (Collective Intelligence, Spanda Journal, 2, 2014). Contrary to most journals, however, Spanda offers a multiplicity of colourful aesthetic images -- but only of allusively symbolic relevance to the text, in contrast to any requirement for systemic insights. One can but fantasize about the insights to be drawn from a collective mapping of the texts assembled in the many special issues of that journal, and in others of relevance to this theme.

The fundamental commitment would seem to be a belief in the emergence of a singular, readily comprehensible, remedy to a complex crisis of civilization -- accompanied by assumptions about how widely acceptable it can be made to be. This of course ignores the warning of Mencken cited above: For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

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