System

This page describes a concept which is part of our glossary

	There exist models, principles, and laws that apply to generalized systems or their subclasses, irrespective of their particular kind, the nature of their component elements, and the relationships or "forces" between them. It seems legitimate to ask for a theory, not of systems of a more or less special kind, but of universal principles applying to systems in general.
	— Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, General System theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, New York: George Braziller, 1976, p.32

A system is a working description of entities and their interactions; i.e. an abstraction of people and the things they interact with). When a group of people work together in alignment toward a common vision, they become an organisation.

An important aspect of systems which is all too often forgotten is that it must be designed to account for the forces at play in its operating environment. In the same way that a physical machine must account in its design for forces such as gravity and momentum, so must an organisation or social mechanism account for the forces such as the conflicting goals of existing centralised systems, or peoples habits that are based on wide-spread false conceptions.

The most fundamental and dominant force is fragmentation which benefits the centralised, materialistic, self-oriented systems that emerge generally in our social mechanism in the form of the economic bottom line. So in our deployment of the common vision, we must ensure that our organisational infrastructure is properly designed to be deployed into a heavily fragmented and centralised environment which is in many cases overtly hostile to systems aligned towards unification.

The most common means that these opposed systems use to hinder alignment is through the use of legally binding contracts which in turn occur through the acceptance of benefits (i.e. there doesn't necessarily need to be a piece of paper with a signature involved for a legally binding contract to exist between parties). So independence is the key to being able to freely pursue the common vision.

In the context of OrganicDesign the group of people are a trust group and the fundamental kind of organisation they can choose to become is a Platform by implementing together the system defined by the Platform specification.

Aspects

• Roles, procedures and best practices
• Schedule
• Bookable and consumable resources
• Governance
• Ontology

See also

• Trust group
• Organisation
• Platform specification
• The social mechanism