ISA RC51 on Sociocybernetics

By Manuel Meza Cuervo

2020 will be remembered as the year of the pandemic; 2020 will be remembered as the year that challenged the social systems, the economic systems, and governments around the world. But most importantly, it will be remembered as the year that reminded this generation that one of the essential values of humankind is its resiliency.

This has been a year of many firsts. And for the first time, the RC51 decided to have an online conference.

The RC51 Annual Conference, set to take place in Porto Alegre 2020 World Forum, was put off due to the pandemic. In the two months after the postponement announcement, the RC51 board organized it virtually instead, taking advantage of modern communication technology. Two committees were formed: a scientific one, in charge of choosing the papers, and an organising one, responsible for promoting the conference and handling all the technical and administrative arrangements.

Some of us had some experience managing communication technologies such as Zoom and Google Hangouts; they are easy to handle, and almost all of the global academic community is familiarized with them. The real challenge was to design the conference so that we could feel close to each other despite the technological barrier. To achieve this connection, we prioritized the discussion over the exposition time in three sessions for three days.

We asked our participants to send us a five-minute video where they presented their work in addition to their papers. That allowed us to spread their contributions through our social media. We had never done this before. This idea came to life to overcome the pandemic challenges, and I hope this practice continues in the following conferences.

For the organizing committee, holding an annual conference was not enough. We wanted to tap the full potential of technology, so we decided to have the two first sessions in the usual format (splitting time between the presentation and Q&A) while having a third one as an experimental and collaborative open session. In the last session, we discussed the core concepts and methodologies of Sociocybernetics using a collaborative tool called IdeaBoardz.

With over thirty people in each session and 15 papers presented from 11 countries, the first RC51 Virtual Conference was a success. We also had a great experience connecting, collaborating, and working on a virtual board with stickers.

The pandemic gave us a challenge as a research committee and showed us a new way to stay in touch. Of course, nothing is comparable to the live experience, but with the XXI century technology, we now have a powerful tool to find new ways to connect despite the challenges that may arise.

By Luciano Gallón

It was around last May that Patricia, our RC51 president, ask the RC51 board for ideas on a RC51 2020 conference after the postponement of the ISA Forum because of the pandemic. It was a provocative and interesting challenge because of the restrictions but also an opportunity for creating new ways for participation for member and non-members.

After some really key experiences working with documents about a “credo” or a “manifesto” of a field of knowledge, I shared with the board a proposal for carrying out an experiment on collaborative writing of a very simple but relevant document for our sociocybernetics field. It should be a very simple experiment, easy, and take little time. In the end we would have a two to three pages document with a set of ideas about the present, practice, future of, and vision for, sociocybernetics.

After a couple of board meetings, we as a team came out with the decision of holding a collaborative experiment with the purpose of writing a “Sociocybernetics Manifesto”. The other possibility was writing a “credo for sociocybernetics” but this was well discarded with solid arguments.

So, during June and July, detailed planning began with the challenge of setting up an experimental and collaborative session, two hours maximum, open to all participants, both members and non-members. Through an online collaborative debate process, the goal was to produce a short reference document about sociocybernetics as a paradigmatic framework: a Sociocybernetics Manifesto.

We held the experimental session on the third day of the online RC51 2020 Conference, July 16^th. The core ideas the participants shared came from these three aspects of sociocybernetics:

• Intentions: What one has in mind as a purpose or goal to do or bring about with sociocybernetics (what for?)
• Motives: Something (such as a need or desire) that causes you to act based on sociocybernetics: (why?)
• Views: A mode or manner of looking at or regarding sociocybernetics (what?)

For me, as the experiment moderator, this was a wonderful experience. Seeing the way everybody was following the instructions, well, almost everybody, and how the flow of ideas started to increase with a lot of insights on sociocybernetics, was evidence of a useful way of creating value for RC51.

In the end we got 86 points about the three aspects: 34 Intentions, 30 Motives and 22 Views. So, at first, it looks like answering What for? is easier than What? We also got 294 votes for the different points.

What is next? The experiment has not ended yet. We have the following plan ahead: September: document what was done and the result as it is; October: debugging work; November: a new on-line session with guests to do a second round of review and consolidation; and, finally, December: publication of the manifesto.

I will conclude this report by remembering Felix Geyer. I had the opportunity to meet him in person during the RC51 2007 Conference in Murcia. I learned from him some key answers to the question What is sociocybernetics? Following Felix’s insights, I invite all the participants in the manifesto session to share your ideas about the evidence, or not, of the presence of these concepts during the “intriguing experimental session: Self-reference, Self-steering, Self-organization, Auto-catalysis and Cross-catalysis and Autopoiesis.

Please feel free to share with me your ideas over luciano.gallon@hotmail.com. Thank you again for your support and participation.

By Mark Belitsky

On July 14-16, 2020 I attended the International Conference of Sociocybernetics for the first time.  In reflecting upon the RC51 conference, which was dedicated to the Pandemic Era, I was very impressed at how well the participants from varying cultural and institutional backgrounds managed to work together to offer new perspectives and innovative ideas to address the ongoing global health crisis. But what impressed me the most as a newcomer was the way in which the participants were able to balance the humanistic and systems perspectives in their search for answers.

Systems perspective in sociology is sometimes criticized for not being humanistic enough but what the critics overlook, or perhaps do not want to admit, is that the humanistic perspective is also an evolutionary product. Evolution has given humanity incredible abilities to build but also to destroy, both of which giving rise to almost unlimited ambitions. A developed society cannot exist without high regard for humanistic values which promote social stability and human development. The participants in the conference have demonstrated a deep understanding of both seemingly conflicting perspectives and managed to offer views reflecting a balanced approach to the pandemic crisis.  

I would also like to use this opportunity to reiterate some of the points made at the conference when I presented an example illustrating key concepts of the Functional Theory of Social Systems to highlight some important conclusions.

I used a hypothetical situation in which a person buys a house and several weeks later discovers that there is a chemical factory nearby occasionally producing an unpleasant and potentially harmful odor. The intent here is to analyze the Soft Forces (SFs) involved in the decision of whether to stay in the house or sell it. A social system is formed here between the person and the house with multiple positive (attracting) and negative (repelling) SFs. This example demonstrates how SFs of different origins interact on a level playing field and shows that the SF functions as a common denominator in the decision-making process.

The positive SFs here are:

1. Architectural beauty of the house, origin – sensory perception (visual).
2. Low interest rate bank loan, origin – Functional Idea.
3. Low property taxes, origin – Functional Idea.

The negative SFs here are:

1. Factory odor, origin – sensory perception (sense of smell).
2. Fear that the odor is harmful to health, origin – instinct of self-preservation.
3. Not enough bedrooms for all children in the family, origin – physical reality.

Dynamic psychological forces (SFs) are formed in the subconscious based on the above factors, which are being constantly reevaluated producing an “oscillating” effect not unlike atoms in a molecule. Resulting positive and negative SF vectors are also formed which are the sums of individual SFs. The final decision is made based on the magnitude or “pull” of the resulting SF vectors. 

It is worth noting that there exists a phenomenon of SF “hardening” with time, which is to say that the longer a SF exists, the stronger its corresponding vector becomes. It is what we call in cultural terms, “forming a habit” or “getting used to” something.

This seemingly simple mechanism can explain the formation and disappearance of social systems and constitutes the basis for decision-making.