Closing Message and Suggestion for the Future

It is time for final statements -- the closing of both the session
and the conference.

I am sure we all join in thanking the hosts, facilitators, session
monitors and of course all the contributors. My special thanks to
contributors of the final section, given the difficulties of holidays
and such.

As to my own thoughts, I think that we need to reform our next
iteration to support an evolved level of progress. What we have had
so far is the electronic equivalent of not so much a conference as an
unmediated workshop. What distinguishes a conference in my opinion is
that participants bring work in progress; that work forms the basis
for focused critiques and speculations.

I believe FIS is about inventing a new science, and this type of
expert, critical discussion on real work is required in order to
understand the limits and tradeoffs of different approaches. The
hosts of this e-conference envisioned a focused discussion on papers,
but a review of the past couple years shows that most of the
discussion drifted from these foci. Perhaps we should attempt this
and beyond, possibly in a different form.

We know enough about each other now to understand where we each come
from. Nearly all of us are professionally engaged in the creation of
this new science in our own ways. We may have gleaned as much as we
can from this kind of lightweight interaction.

I would vote for something like John H's second option: hosting
several special interest groups each of which are engaged in actual,
collaborative work, at least to the extent of creating a coherent
document of the goals, philosophies, relative merits and tools
involved. I think we can already imagine the few, naturally
aggregated affinity groups among us. Probably some of us would join
multiple groups.

The public discussion would focus in turn on these group documents,
commenting as much on the relative benefits of each compared to the
others. In other words, I suggest we move more toward the original
idea of focus on papers, and that those papers be growing statements
of progress from focused groups doing real work. It will be much
easier to arrange physical gatherings of focus groups than FIS as a
whole, both because of the greater incentive and the simpler
logistics.

This could give us the best of two worlds: focus groups who drill
deeper and faster, and FIS examinations that have more well formed
documents for group consideration.

An example: this week I considered posting a comment on Michael
Leyton's work, as it has been mentioned a couple times. I've spent a
good deal of time with his ideas; they exist both on an engineering
level (with some novel new mechanics), and a higher rather radical
level that he only mentions at the back of his books. In private
discussions with Michael, I have come to understand that these
radical views completely alter the relatively mundane engineering
mechanics and provide a promising fertile new conceptual territory
for FIS issues. These ideas are much like Koichiro's but deal with
"history" rather than "tense" and have a tight binding with
mathematical foundations. Along the way, the ambiguity of "within"
and "of" is shifted to the scientist (as in psychiatry). Good
opportunity for thirdness and semiosis consideration along the way
but certainly not naturally.

Difficult stuff. New. Not yet applied in an FIS context. But how to
pose this sort of thing to the group as currently constituted? Only
in a focus group could we wrangle with these notions in this form --
presenting some preliminary perspectives after time for a more
general FIS critique. Several private email exchanges with FISers in
past months have underscored in my mind the need for the bifurcation
of focus: deeper work among groups, more focused general review.

For this to happen, we need some few of us to volunteer as attractors
for focus groups, not so much as senior member, but sustaining energy.

Is this possible? Desirable?

Best, Ted
Received on Thu Jan 30 19:35:52 2003