What must a regulator distinguish?
Ashby’s variety, Conant and Ashby’s model theorem, and Beer’s channels and transducers.
Sources and their connections
Follow an idea into the material
Find a piece of writing, a teaching deck, a method, or a recording. See which concepts it names, inspect the source, and follow the connection into the atlas.
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SysPrac26 collection
Six conference accounts and Benjamin P Taylor’s follow-up workshops on systemic consulting and relational public services.
New reading from SysCoI
Public posts, original sources, and attributed descriptions, with existing resource records brought together.
Heinz von Foerster’s maxims, stories, talks, and writing — a guide to the sources, recollections, and recordings, with a confessed invention.
What the connections mean
An argument or distinction records a claim made in a cited passage, rather than an established consensus. An author or presenter credit records a named title-page credit, including co-authorship. A teaching account identifies a method presented at a cited page. An identity link points to the same named method in the atlas. A text mention locates a phrase in a source. A title match is a discovery aid based on the catalogue title.
Text and title matches do not establish agreement, influence, authorship, or logical dependence. A source may discuss a concept to criticise it. The relationship needs reading in context before a stronger claim is made.
Prepared with AI assistance. Independent specialist review is not recorded. Original works retain their own rights; this register does not republish the private research files.
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Primary reading · Release 0.35
Regulation, learning, and what crosses a boundary
Follow Ashby, Conant, Beer, Bateson, Simondon, Maturana, and Varela through precise passages and connections whose limits remain visible.
What changes when we learn?
Bateson’s logical levels, changes to governing variables, and why two familiar accounts are not interchangeable.
Does a boundary separate things already formed?
Beer’s conversion across boundaries, Simondon’s individuation, and autopoiesis as the production of a living unity.
Sayings, regulation and conversation
Read Ashby, von Foerster, Richard S O’Rourke and Paul Pangaro through attributed sources, precise questions and explicit limits.
Reading the ISSS wiki
Seven questions through systems theories, intervention, dialogue and cybernetic practice, with a complete dated wiki page index and explicit reading limits.
Primary reading · Release 0.36
Observation, boundaries, and the authority to act
Follow situated accounts through boundary judgement, practical inquiry, and the conditions for action.
What does an observer select?
Distinguish a situated account from a claim that every account is equally defensible.
Whose account can change the decision?
Keep affected people, boundary judgements, and unresolved disagreement visible.
Who can act, and on what terms?
Follow structure, agency, method transitions, and the difference between self-production and operational discretion.
Primary reading · Release 0.37
What can a model show?
Explore four models, their conditions, and questions about transferring their results.
Primary reading · Release 0.38
How can knowledge be organised?
Explore a hypertext project and its evolutionary philosophy.
Source reading · Release 0.39
What makes action possible?
Six attributed accounts, compared through questions for action.
Which distinctions change the decision?
Explore variety, classification, and a finite model.
Feedback and regulation: trace the mechanism
Compare sources and explore a discrete response.
Complexity in Eight Days
Read Fred Amonya’s lecture notes on complexity and the adequacy of descriptions.
Making things change
A free systems change guide for young people. Read the revised draft or compare both 32-page editions.