Welcome to the Cybernetics Conversation
The Cybernetics Society has developed a process for the in-person meeting called The Cybernetics Conversation. It is built around provocation, participation, debate and reflection.It is designed and intended as a place in which ideas can be exposed, explored and challenged so that we can all learn together.
It is worth knowing from the outset that this is a different kind of gathering, it is not built on the model of an academic conference rather it is an anti-conference! There are no papers to be presented and no proceedings to be published. There is no litany of 'approved' speakers giving twenty-minute talks followed by ten minutes of questions, no audience seated in rows facing a podium, no chair keeping score of time and queueing up the next contributor.
The Cybernetics Conversation is a three-day, in-person event built around a small number of themes, and each session is opened by someone who volunteers a brief provocation — a question, a proposition, an unfinished idea — which the people in the room then explore together. The aim is not to win an argument, defend a thesis, or persuade an audience; it is to think with others about something difficult, and to leave with better questions than you arrived with. What develops in each session is collective and emergent.
