Elin Whitney-Smith

Mail me here elin@whitney-smith.net or here elin@netalyst.com


People looking for me from Strategy + Business Click Here http://whitney-smith.net for my blog or Click Here http://information-revolutions.com for the book in progress.

How I got here - Narrative and Resume

My interests have centered around how cultures and other systems evolve and change.To see how those interests have developed over time I have writtena narrative that supports my resume. It is a "clickable"; time line that gives a sense of how my ideas and career developed. Click on the dates to get the more traditional presentation for that time period.


Electronic Conferencing Projects to check out.

I am excited about the possibilities for changing government using electronic conferencing.

For Vice President Gore's Electronic Open Meeting, I organized, moderated, and participated in the Guest Advisors' Group and designed, facilitated and ran focus groups after the meeting.

I was the "people person" on the RuleNet design team. It is the first electronic discussion group that has used consensus tools and has been devoted to getting real work done.

The best discussion in The Electronic Open Meeting on Acquisition Reform is at the water cooler. The design innovation in this meeting is the ability to look at things in the "abstract view" since it lets people get an idea of the discussion without having to read through all the postings.

I am especially proud of the design work I did with Mountain Forum. It brought people together from all over the world. Their task was to contribute to a report on how mountains can be made sustainable.

The electronic conference is archived on the web, but people participate by e-mail. This is especially important since many of the participants are from third world countries and don't have access to web technology.

The Mountain Forum folks were able to create an exciting electronic event on a shoe string because they did their design and background work early.

You can order their report - Investing in Mountains and join their forum from their web page or from:


Bugs by Elin

Bug IconIf you visited the Electronic Open Meeting above you know that it was a complex project. The various programmers involved with it soon had an impressive list of "bugs", nasty things that can go wrong with programs. As the list accumulated, I thought it would be fun to create a program that was entirely devoted to the "bugs" the programmers talked about. Click on the bug to see the program and pictures of the "bugs".


Papers Published Electronically

Information Technology Impacts

Beginning with my dissertation "Information Technology and Wealth: Cybernetics, History, and Economics," most of my publications revolve around information technology because it is the strongest driver in cultural change.

War, Information and History: Changing Paradigms is a chapter I contributed to Cyberwar: Security, Strategy and Conflict in the Information Age edited by Campen, Dearth and Goodden and published by AFCEA in 1996. A version of it is reproduced here.

Note: If you clicked on any of these papers when reading the resume you should skip to the Graphical Language for Change and Learning.


Organizational Language Icon

A Graphical Language for Change and Learning is both a paper and a graphical presentation.

The presentation was designed for organizations who are in the process of changing their organizational structure to take advantage of the latest information technology. But they are tired of the "Flavorof the Month" approach, and want to evolve a structure that suits their own unique needs.


Teaching is one of the ways to change the world.

I approach it from a cybernetic and constructivist view in, Conversation, Education, Constructivism, and Cybernetics originally published in the Netherlands, by Thesis Press, in "Collective Support Systems and their Users" edited by Gerard de Zeeuw and Ranulph Glanville. It was selected for publication as a result of a competition held by the Universiteit van Amsterdam, Onderzoeksprogramma(OOC).

Extinctions of the Last Ice Age

Thinking about change in complex systems led to asking what motivated the invention of agriculture. I think it was the extinctions at the end of the last ice age. This has been one of the mysteries of science for a long time. Follow the clews along with the famous Scientific Investigators, Skylark Holmes and her friend Dr. Janet Watson.

Our two sleuths continue their investigation into the Extinctions at the End of the Pleistocene with a computer model.