View source for Damian Winters

Hi everyone.  I'm excited to meet you all shortly and I am happy to be part of this group.  I became interested in the subject through undergraduate and graduate research on environmental change and the implications for social systems.  I recently graduated from the University for Peace (in Costa Rica) where I did my MA in Environmental Security and Peace.  My thesis used complex systems theories to explore the types of management structures used for measurement and evaluation of environmental peacemaking programs.  I generally found that the organizational structures were too rigid to sustain long-term programs.  I think I really became interested in the topic when I picked up ''Panarchy'' by Gunderson and Holling.  This book influenced the way I thought about organization and change in the environment (excluding humans) and the similarities that can be drawn to social systems.  Also, the ''Complex Forest'' by Carol Colfer, was a great example of trying to apply the theories through participatory action research.  I am now finishing up work with an international development organization where I was helping to build robust, multi-stakeholder development programs that could withstand perturbations in the economic, political, and social arenas.

There are several things that I would like to look at during this summer program:
*How complex adaptive systems modeling can better inform environmental peacemaking initiatives;
*Social system hierarchies and points where change can occur; 
*The differences between systems that move towards optimization and those that move towards improvement;
*Creating Boolean functions that reflect an adaptive approach to environmental management and the constraints in doing so;
*and a larger interest of mine is how does spirituality fit into all of this?

My expertise will come mostly from my background in real-world applications of complex adaptive systems theories.  I hope that by the end of the summer I will have a better sense of how CS could provide alternative management systems for environmental peacemaking projects.  I am also eager to learn about how people in other fields will view and use this knowledge.  I do not have a concrete idea for a project just yet but I am looking forward to coming up with projects in such an interdisciplinary group.

See you soon!

Damian