Category Archives: Complexity

Participatory Democracy Software download

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Sounds interesting, from Ken Bausch, who has links to the International Society for the Systems Sciences:

“To honor the life of Hasan Ozbekhan, his role in establishing the Club of Rome, and his influence upon a generation of peace and sustainability professionals, the Institute for 21st Century Agoras is launching a Participatory Democracy Software program offering a sociotechnological tool that enables the practice of democracy.

“The Institute has received a gift of 1000 end-user licenses for CogniScope 1, the commercial grade collaborative planning software used worldwide by the CWA ltd consulting group. The use of this tool has been extensively documented in the recent book: How People Harness their Collective Wisdom and Power to Construct the Future (Information Age press) www.harnessingcollectivewisdom.com.

“The Participatory Democracy software along with a user manual can be downloaded from the Agora’s wiki, http://blogora.net by clicking the URLs on the blogora homepage. The Institute will support communities of practice through a users’ discussion page on this same site, and through various other methods.”

DELL support

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My experience of DELL support on Bank Holiday Monday was generally good in that I got through to tech support (an outsourced solution) pretty quickly each time. That said there were a few interesting glitches for those who like reading about this kind of thing:

1. First tech support person said they’d get back to me in an hour after installing XP; they didn’t.

2. Second person got me to the drivers’ installation, but I couldn’t connect to the Internet. They suggested I contacted my ISP and after I said I was with NTL they put me through to Telewest.

3. After talking to NTL they reported the issue was simple, I had not been sent the correct Ethernet driver. So I contacted tech support at DELL once again (pointed out the Telewest error) and said I needed the correct driver. The new support guy sent me an email and said when I replied by email he would ring me back. He didn’t ring back.

4. A (second) helpful tech support guy sent me the correct driver and luckily as I had a IBM Thinkpad (old but just about functioning) with wireless connectivity I was able to download it and save it to my Sony PSP (no memory stick in sight!) and then installed on to the PC, which did the trick. Fantastic.

5. The last guy took over remote control of my PC and also set up the video display set up which was great. Finally he said he would send over a customer satisfaction email. He didn’t do that:-)

6. Finished the re-installation, successfully.

PS: Now fast forward to 2012 and I am working (Temp) for Sony and about to install a new wifi router from Sky. Finger’s crossed it won’t involve using my PSP as a jump station for data again!