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The Union of Intelligible Associations was a strategic initiative engendered
by, and implicit in, the collaboration agreement dating from 1972 between
Mankind 2000 and the Union
of International Associations (UIA). This initiative gave rise to a succession
of editions of the Encyclopedia
of World Problems and Human Potential (1976,
1986, 1990, 1995, 2000). The last of these was developed as an online service
with funding from the European Union and was successfully evaluated for further
funding from the World Bank. The initiative sought to broaden the UIA's traditional
focus on international organizations (their meetings, executive officers,
and reports). This extension included profiling networks of entities (such
as problems, strategies, values, understandings of human development and
integrative methodologies) that provide a context and rationale for organizational
initiatives.
A Projects Overview provides
details of these and other integrated knowledge management initiatives.
Final
presentations of this initiative were made to the World
Academy of Art and Science (Union
of Intelligible Associations: integrative design metaphors enabling
strategic comprehension of the global brain, Zagreb,
November 2005) and to the German
Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Exploring
Intelligible Associations: ontological issues, integrative metaphors
and knowledge organization, Saarbrucken,
2005).
This initiative had however effectively ceased in January 2005 with the
repudiation by UIA of the long-term soft-loans, and associated shared copyright
arrangements, that had been originally agreed on behalf of Mankind 2000
from 1973. The databases of the Union of Intelligible Associations continue
to be hosted as an archival service by the Union of International Associations
-- in reverting to its historical role as a documentation centre on international
organization.
As a strategic initiative, the Union of Intelligible Associations is succeeded
from 2007 by a four-fold
set of complex adaptive systems, notably including
the Union
of Imaginable Associations, which it effectively
engendered. As an initiative focused on knowledge management, in the light
of second order cybernetics, it may therefore be understood as having been
a strategic precursor to the third
order initiatives required for the 21st century. The purpose of this
website is to highlight challenges associated with the possibilities and
inadequacies of such a second order perspective.
The web address of this site (www.un-intelligible.org)
is designed to challenge overly hasty assumptions about this initiative
-- as discussed separately. |
