Author-tag: Alexey Voinov

Five core competency areas for participatory modeling

By Sondoss Elsawah, Elena Bakhanova, Raimo P. Hämäläinen and Alexey Voinov

mosaic_authors_sondoss-elsawah_elena-bakhanova_raimo-hamalainen_alexey-voinov
1. Sondoss Elsawah (biography)
2. Elena Bakhanova (biography)
3. Raimo P. Hämäläinen (biography)
4. Alexey Voinov (biography)

What knowledge and skills do individuals and teams need to be effective at participatory modeling?

We suggest that five core competency areas are essential for participatory modeling:

  1. systems thinking
  2. modeling
  3. group facilitation
  4. project management and leadership
  5. operating in the virtual space.

These are illustrated in the figure below.

These competency areas have naturally overlapping elements and should therefore be seen as a holistic and interdependent set. Further, while certain competencies such as modeling skills can be addressed by individual members of a participatory modeling team, the entire process is a team effort and it is necessary to also consider the competencies as a group skill.

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Leadership in participatory modelling

By Raimo P. Hämäläinen, Iwona Miliszewska and Alexey Voinov

moasaic_authors_raimo-hamalainen_iwona-miliszewska_alexey-voinov
1. Raimo P. Hämäläinen (biography)
2. Iwona Miliszewska (biography)
3. Alexey Voinov (biography)

What can leadership discourse in the business literature tell us for leadership in participatory modelling?

Here we explore:

  • the difference between leadership and management in participatory modelling
  • different leadership styles and participatory modelling
  • three key leadership issues in participatory modelling: responsibility for best practices and ethics, competences, and who in the participatory modelling team should lead.

How does leadership differ from management in participatory modelling?

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Reinventing science? From open source to open science

By Alexey Voinov

alexey voinov
Alexey Voinov (biography)

Science is getting increasingly bureaucratized, more and more driven by metrics and indices, which have very little to do with the actual scientific content and recognition among peers. This is actively supported by the still dominant for-profit publication mechanism, which harvests products of scientific research for free, processes, reviews and edits them using voluntary work of scientists themselves and then sells the resulting papers back to the scientific community at obscene costs. The original ideals of scientific pursuit of truth for the sake of the betterment of humanity are diluted and forfeited in the exhausting race for grants, tenure, patents, citations and nominations. Something has to change, especially in the era of post-normal science when so much is at stake, and so little is actually done to address the mounting problems of the environment and society.

In computer programming open source emerged in the 1980s largely in opposition to attempts at licensing code and the growing dominance of Windows with the annoyingly secretive policies of Microsoft. It came as the idealistic philosophy of software development that stems from the so-called “gift culture” and “gift economy” based on this culture.

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