Our approach revolves around a simple idea: building upon the organization's strengths - by providing skills and confidence to develop a framework for planning and implementing change and developing energy for that change. One of the fundamentals of our success is utilizing the existing talents and resources of the organization to enhance customer satisfaction, business goals, and full engagement.

Democracy made Athens a dynamic, creative force 2500 years ago. Even then, however, democracy was fragile, sometimes stupid, and short-lived. Plato held it in low esteem and Aristotle likened it to "mob rule." Why, then, do we want to create 21st Century Agoras. What we want to create are communities energized by vibrant participative democracy. In our Information Age as old hierarchies prove dysfunctional, it is imperative that human communities have flexible ways to tap their wisdom and power. We do not believe that unstructured discussion on the Athenian model is adequate for dealing with the complexities of the Information Age. It was not adequate even for the simpler (by an order of magnitude as determined by a metric called Situational Complexity Index) situations of that bygone age. The Information Age challenges us to make participative democracy a liberating force in the world today. Research and proven methodology, aided by networked computing, has resolved at least one basic dilemma of democracy:   How can we hear perspectives of all the stakeholders, make collective sense of them, and reach decisions and act on pressing issues? The approach that overcomes this dilemma and multiple other hindrances to dialogic democracy is called the Structured Dialogic Design (SDD). The Agoras Institute convenes these dialogues as Co-Laboratories of Democracy. This process is a fusion of the theory of Generic Design Science and the consultative practice of Interactive Management, both developed over the last 30 years by Dr. John Warfield and our founder, Aleco Christakis.

Mission, Goal, Vision and Values The Institute for Local Government promotes good government at the local level with practical, impartial and easy-to-use resources for California communities. Goal The Institute's goal is to be the leading provider of information that enables local officials and their communities to make good decisions. Vision The Institute envisions a future in California in which: People value their local public institutions. Local agencies effectively deliver public services. All segments of the community are appropriately engaged in key public decisions. Decision-makers make informed policy choices based on their best sense of the public's interest.

The Community Tool Box is a free, online resource for those working to build healthier communities and bring about social change. Our mission is to promote community health and development by connecting people, ideas, and resources.

The Institute for Applied Economics at LAEDC performs objective research for a wide range of clients, detailing economic impact of development, business operations, and regulation, as well as providing intelligence about specific industry clusters, labor force, and workforce development issues.  The Institute's reports provide decision makers with critical information from which to make informed decisions.  In addition to providing on-demand research per client requirements, the Institute also provides foundational research to ensure LAEDC's combined programs for economic development are on target, ranging from our collaboration with workforce investment boards to major initiatives such as the L.A. County Strategic Plan for Economic Development.

What does Transition Network do? Transition Network is a charitable organisation whose role is to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities as they self-organise around the Transition model, creating initiatives that rebuild resilience and reduce CO2 emissions. Ultimately it's about creating a healthy human culture, one that meets our needs for community, livelihoods and fun. We're here to support you.

Learn more about the system dynamics lab at Washington University in St. Louis. We are experts in developing simulation models of problems facing complex social systems. A resource for students, professionals, and researchers, we help build the capacity of those who want to learn and apply system dynamics in order to understand and address specific problems within an organization and community. Our Research Our research includes a focus on understanding the role of social determinants at the community level, identifying strategies for reducing disparities, and informing implementation, scale-up and sustainability of evidence based interventions. Application areas include community responses to intimate partner violence, mental health, natural resources, obesity, cancer, child and maternal health, financial inclusion, K-12 education, and juvenile/criminal justice. Community Engagement We are actively involved in advancing participatory group model building (GMB) methods in diverse communities including both international and domestic settings. Teaching We are invested in building capacity in system dynamics among the next generation of researchers, policy makers, and social innovators. The lab offers a sequence of graduate level courses that prepare students to tackle dynamic social problems with innovative, design-driven, transdisciplinary solutions.

OK, this post is already way too long, but one final thing. Physicists, I think, become even more drawn to economics when we look into economics and see broad resistance to research pursuing this "complexity" perspective. It seems instead that most of mainstream research tries to get around system complexity with mathematical tricks, rather than facing up to it. I'm thinking about ideas like representative agents, or rational expectations. The assumptions make it possible to build models without having to deal with the complexity of interactions and the emergent structures they create; but the resulting models, naturally, look very pale and questionable as models of anything real. When physicists see that a small minority of ("heterodox") economists also find the standard approach hugely limiting, they feel an urge to help out. And they believe that some of their ideas can help.

Innovation Excellence is the online home of the global innovation community, building upon a rapidly-growing network with thousands of members from over 175 countries - thought leaders, executives, practitioners, consultants, vendors, and academia representing all sectors and industries. Our mission is to broadly enhance innovation by providing a forum for connection and conversation across this community - assembling an ever-growing arsenal of resources, best practices and proven answers for achieving innovation excellence.

"About Donella Meadows founded our Institute in 1996 to apply systems thinking and organizational learning to economic, environmental and social challenges. Mission Shift mindsets - values, attitudes, and beliefs - when they are out of step with the realities of a finite planet and a globally powerful human race. Restructure systems when the rewards and incentives of the system are inconsistent with long term social, environmental, and economic goals. Build the capability to manage and learn in complex environmental, social, and economic systems."

"Our Mission: to bring economic, social and environmental systems into closer harmony with the realities of a finite planet and a globally powerful human race by using the disciplines of systems thinking, system dynamics, and collaborative learning that were pioneered by our founder, Donella Meadows."

"The classic example of that backward intuition was my own introduction to systems analysis, the world model. Asked by the Club of Rome to show how major global problems - poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment - are related and how they might be solved, Forrester made a computer model and came out with a clear leverage point1: Growth. Not only population growth, but economic growth. Growth has costs as well as benefits, and we typically don't count the costs - among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, etc. - the whole list of problems we are trying to solve with growth! What is needed is much slower growth, much different kinds of growth, and in some cases no growth or negative growth."

Picture Post is part of Digital Earth Watch (DEW). Digital Earth Watch, or DEW, was developed through a partnership of seven institutions with support from NASA. Picture Post was created for DEW as a tool for non-scientists to monitor their environment and share their observations and discoveries.

The GovLab Academy aims to apply the principles of innovation to education by "unbundling" knowledge -access to a la carte content, tools and instructors; "bundled' knowledge - content organized by expert-instructors to jumpstart learning; and providing mentorship, fellowship and feedback to enable mastery.

The failure of many of the systems that underpin modern life is increasingly difficult to avoid, so it's not surprising that interest in 'systems innovation' is growing fast. At the Point People, we've seen pioneers emerging in this field from different sectors, leading very different kinds of organisations and speaking very different professional languages. We had a hunch that these frontrunners could tell a compelling story about what systemic innovation looks and feels like in practice. So we put them in front of a camera and asked them a handful of questions.

DataDrivenJournalism.net is a hub for news and resources from the community of journalists, editors, designers and developers who use data to support journalism. The website is part of an European Journalism Centre initiative dedicated to accelerating the diffusion and improving the quality of data journalism around the world. We also run the online course Doing Journalism with Data as well as the School of Data Journalism, and are behind the acclaimed Data Journalism Handbook.

Description It is part of an initiative to expand and strengthen an international network of data journalists, designers, developers, and others to encourage collaboration and to exchange expertise and best practices.

Stockholm Resilience Centre advances research on the governance of social-ecological systems with a special emphasis on resilience - the ability to deal with change and continue to develop.

The purpose of sol is to discover, integrate and implement theories and practices for the interdependent development of people and their institutions.

The focus was on creating "cities for life" - that is, on promoting equitable development in the urban environments in which a majority of the world's citizens already live, and in which two thirds will reside by the year 2050.