Technology and Environmental Conflict Resolution

"We are social beings," writes Etienne Wenger in the 1998 book Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. "Far from being trivially true, this fact is a central aspect of learning."

Technologies can play a role in fostering social learning, for example, when used to enable dialog among diverse participants.

This year, the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution (ECR) will recognize the role of technology with a track at their upcoming conference.

From last year's USIECR report on Technology and ECR:

Technology enhances communication by:
a. Getting more information to more people in the same amount of time
b. Improving analysis, understanding, and vision
c. Enhancing collaborative decision making and implementation
d. Supporting monitoring and management
e. Helping participants discover their assumptions and objectives
f. Increasing participation in ECR
g. Enabling more timely decisions
h. Allowing more people to become more informed on complex issues
i. Shifting power structures – leveling the playing field

Technology improves decision making by:
a. More efficiently collecting, synthesizing, and disseminating information
b. Visualizing change
c. Crossing fragmented organizational boundaries
d. Enabling us to see broader dimensions of problems (global interactions and dependencies)
e. Making it easier for managers to learn more about their resources and consider complex
problems that require significant amounts of data
f. Empowering the public through user-available information
g. Allowing barriers of time and space to be reduced
h. Providing opportunities to test assumptions and see results
i. Moving way from producing a static plan towards more adaptive management
j. Expanding the number of variables that can be monitored
k. Increasing transparency, putting more pressure on the decision-makers to make supportable decisions

[Update May 30: MarineMap has been honored with the award for "Innovation in Technology and ECR." Here is the Bridging Knowledge Systems video we made for presentation at the conference.]

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