Well, Iraj, you have reinforced the "6 degrees of separation" idea,
and very strongly. Sitting next to me is my son who is a graduate student
in Geography with whom I learn about spatiality, organizational learning,
and problems of distributed work organizations. And I have for a long
time been up to my ears in the problem of evaluating voluntary afterschool
activities.
I know this latter problem is one Eugene must struggle with too. I like your
ideas about how to do evaluation as collaboration, and work to do the same.
But I find that in the organization I know best, Boys and Girls Clubs,
the staff struggle simply to hold things together every day, almost no
one is paid a living wage, turn over is rapid and endemic.
In our activity system in the local club, we have found that even counting
the number of kids who participate is a challenge is there is not someone
other than the "person in charge" (we call him/her a site coordinator) to
be sure that the counting gets done. Why? Because kids come and go and the
site coordinator is sort of like a ring master who might be concentrating
on helping a couple of kids solve some sort of computer glitch while helping
another kid find a game while....... and it is really not possible to
know what is going on behind your back.
I don't recall if you posted a url for your org, but will check back and try
to take a look. We can be found at www.uclinks.org or http://lchc.ucsd.edu.
Have a nice holiday and by all means keep space in mind! After all, how
can one talk about distributed cognition properly without thinking about
space as well as time?
mike
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