Increased competence as a process of surviving in shared information spaces

Connections between people and groups are growing more frequent and more intense. Cultural events, changes in laws, activities of organizations, and new ideas elsewhere affect one's own decisions and activities more and more. This development has strong implications for the way people can increase their competence and how they can affect what happens to their own community or geographical area. In this paper consequences are considered for a special type of tool, the so-called problem language, that appears to be intimately entwined with many other tools in operations research, cybernetics, and systems research. The language appears most adequate in situations where boundaries can be found such that external events have minimal impact on what happens inside those boundaries. The change in connectivity makes finding such boundaries less and less probable. This suggests looking for another language, to structure the processes necessary when one intends to overcome difficulties that cannot be represented and solved as problems. A language of access is proposed, derived partly from studies in areas where it has never been possible to find boundaries as indicated. Within the framework of this language one can derive methods of externalization that imply speeding up flows of information in a shared workspace or shared information space. Their implementation is greatly facilitated—or even made possible at all—by recent developments in information technology.