During a tour of six weeks and visiting six cities, Angelika Schanda attended three major conferences on Systems Science and Cybernetics. As Program Manager at the BCSSS, Schanda made it her mission to connect the often dispersed communities and groups related to these fields. Toward that end, she traveled across North America from Vancouver, British Columbia on to Albuquerque, New Mexico, with some very different cultural experiences not only in the different states, but also at the conferences. A few attendees from each community traveled between the conferences as well. A special cooperation succeeded this year between the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) and the Conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS), which set their conference dates consecutively and promoted the collaboration between the communities.

Several members and friends of the BCSSS were strongly involved as well:

BCSSS Board member Ray Ison, BCSSS Scientific Council members Gerald Midgley, George Mobus, David Rousseau and Jennifer Wilby, as well as Helene Finidori, leader of the Research Group Systems Science and Pattern Literacy all contributed in major roles or with important presentations. Please find details in the individual reports.

The insights and connections made during this intensive journey are numerous. Since Angelika Schanda is engaged in many different roles in the fields of systems, and since this tour was very much an inter-organizational effort, she reports her personal impressions on her own blog Young Modeler, providing a more in-depth report. The reports for BCSSS are providing an overview and are listed below.

Reports for the other Systems Science societies are pending and will be added here once published.