Kevin Michael Christopher Dye
Kevin Dye is the Agoras’ chief scholar on design science. He is probably the world’s premier scholar regarding the work of John Warfield. He discovered the “Erroneous Priorities Effect” (EPE) after extensive research at the Food and Drug Administration. This led to the recognition that even with good intentions for participative democracy, people cannot collectively walk the talk unless we change the paradigm for languaging and voting. Effective priorities for actions that are dependent on recognizing the influence patterns of global interdependencies, are defeated by the EPE, when priorities are chosen on the basis of aggregating individual stakeholder subjective voting that is largely blind to those interdependencies.
EPE states that groups acting upon what they initially consider important are almost always misplacing their effort. When groups do this they have not yet determined which factors are most influential in their situation. Only after finding those factors are they ready to take effective action. His work resulted in the 6th law of SDD, namely: “Learning occurs in a dialogue as the observers search for influence relationships among the members of a set of observations.”
Kevin is a gifted poet, dramatist, photographer, and conversationalist. He was also an outstanding gymnast as a young man. He received his undergraduate degree at Northeastern in Thermodynamics and was a Sloan Visiting Fellow at MIT.
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Gayle Underwood
During her 16 years of experience in Education, Gayle has focused on helping students with special needs to use technology to be able to communicate and to participate more fully in school. She is Technology Integration Consultant for the Allegan Area Education Service Agency (AAESA) in Allegan, Michigan. Gayle has consulted in schools all over Michigan and around the world including Kuwait where she worked with the staff at the Khalifa School in Kuwait City to help them implement Assistive Technology with their students.
In 2007 her work expanded in learning the theory and practice of the science of Structured Dialogic Design (SDD). She has teamed with Dr. Alexander N. Christakis, one of the founders of SDD, to create a Virtual Structured Dialogic Design Process that has been helping groups of stakeholders from different walks of life to come to consensus regarding complex issues. Gayle has designed and implemented over 10 virtual SDD platforms for such challenging issues as building peace and contributing to the reunification of the Turkish and Greek communities in the island of Cyprus, finding the Root Causes of the Drop-out Rate in Michigan schools and working toward aligning and sustaining Assistive Technology and Mathematics in Michigan schools. In 2008 she helped lead an international team of practioners of the science of Structured Dialogic Design (SDD). They worked together to discover the roadblocks facing President Barack Obama in realizing his vision of a bottom-up democracy for the people and with the people of the United States of America.
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Kenneth C. Bausch
In 2002, Ken Bausch and Aleco Christakis co-founded the Institute for 21st Century Agoras. Ken has served as Agoras’ Executive Director since that time. In the previous year, Aleco was elected President of the International Society for the System Sciences. He selected Ken to be his co-chair of the ISSS conference in Crete. While they were putting together the conference with the theme “Constructing Agoras of the Global Village,” they decided to put together a non-profit corporation that would pursue the goal of the conference and promote bottom-up democracy around the planet. Agoras has established its credibility. It is now nine years old.
Kenneth Bausch, Renaissance scholar; one-time Franciscan priest, high school teacher, inner city organizer, social service administrator, real estate agent, homebuilder, contractor, and university professor, Ken has a voracious appetite for complex challenges. For years, he has immersed himself in thorny questions of psychology, spirituality, philosophy, sociology, and systems theory. He is author of BodyWisdom – Interplay of Body and Ego, and is co-author with /Aleco Christakis of How People Harness their Collective Wisdom and Power to Construct the Future.