The Journey Toward The STVIC Website
The origins of the STVIC website began as quarterly online meetings that took place for two years during which a small core of Canadian System Dynamics Society (SDS) members shared presentations of our modelling work in diverse fields.
Eventually talk arose about forming a Canadian Chapter of the SDS so we reached out to Canadian SDS members to consider building a website platform for a future chapter. Despite individual expressions of enthusiasm and an acknowledged need for collective action, the overall momentum was insufficient to create a sustainable chapter in website format. Nevertheless, a seed had been planted to create some form of online presence that would translate the desire for community engagement into concrete reality.
I asked Ivan Taylor and George Coppus about possibly meeting this desire more widely across the full Canadian context systems thinking community and we discussed how to match this desire with the significant personal time constraints systems thinkers experience. During a webinar hosted by the Waters Center for Systems Thinking I met Allen Gunderson, a teacher in Victoria (B.C.) trying to integrate systems thinking skills into his secondary school classes and expressed his desire to connect with other Canadian educators having similar aims. This further prompted me to come up with an easy-to-engage, time efficient and rewarding way to break down communication barriers between systems thinkers with as little interruption possible to their daily lives.
The result is the Systems Thinking Voices In Canada website, an online directory-building project designed to bring together people who use formal systems thinking skills to improve their quality of life in any way that has meaning to themselves and their communities. And provide all people who self-identify as Canadian context systems thinkers with a platform that appreciates their unique and valued place in Canada’s progress toward community systems thinking literacy.
May the Systems Thinking Voices In Canada website become our home for then, now and for as long as we sense its value and feel it is worthy of our care.
Sincerely,
Martha Toy