I last joined back in 2004 through Susan Turnbull (Ret. GSA) and Brand Niemann's (EPA) Collaboration Expedition Working Group held at NSF each month. This was my introduction to the spectrum of semantic technologies. (441G)
Since then, I consulted with a small number of clients, mostly around the DC area, generally around knowledge management and IT. (441H)
In November 2011, I returned to a writing project, a book called Partnership 2.0. It is about partnerships of any scale, from two people to seven countries. The main "lens" I use to view partnerships is gender (though clearly other dimensions of culture, or inequality, like race and class, are also possible). I got to the project using that lens after a career in elementary particle physics where the question "Why are there so few women in science?" was persistently in the background. I never saw a way to model the problem from that place. However, gradually, since 1999, by moving to the larger frame of partnership, the question has shifted from an intractable problem, to a signal, when compared to relatively more progress in, say, medicine and law, since 1970. What is that signal trying to say? I model that in the first third of the book. The model lays bare several classes of invisible psychosocial processes related to entitlement, privilege and advantage. I have written an analog simulation for the model using MacSPICE intended to render these advantages visible to those who hold them in a plain, nonthreatening and objective way. The middle third of the book collects approximately 150 awareness building and acculturation modalities for applying the model to shift cultures - these are useful to establish the testability of the model, and, if proven, its applicability. This will take at least a generation. The last third of the book contains a number of scenarios set in a wide variety of cultures, each with a different expression of gender equity as no longer new, imperfect, and set perhaps a further generation into the future. These scenarios are intended to answer the question, 'When we 'get there', what will it look like, concretely?" (441I)
Sure sounds far afield from physics and ontologies. (441J)
Mark Frautschi +1 202-425-4012 mark dot frautschi at verizon dot net (4423)