Union of Intelligible Associations

The documents archived on this site may be accessed via the menus (above).
Of particular relevance are the Overview, the Projects Overview, and the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential
As the main outcome of this initiative, the Encyclopedia is succinctly described on Wikipedia.
The many project commentary documents are also accessible, with search facilities, in the separate Kairos database.
The search facility below also provides access to more recent documents on 6 related sites (see map).

The Union of Intelligible Associations was a strategic initiative engendered by, and implicit in, the collaboration agreement dating from 1972 between Mankind 2000 and the Union of International Associations (UIA). This initiative gave rise to a succession of editions of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential (1976, 1986, 1990, 1995, 2000), as noted separately. The last of these was developed as an online service with funding from the European Union and was successfully evaluated for further funding from the World Bank. The initiative sought to broaden the UIA's traditional focus on international organizations (their meetings, executive officers, and reports). This extension included profiling networks of entities (such as problems, strategies, values, understandings of human development and integrative methodologies) that provide a context and rationale for organizational initiatives. A Projects Overview provides details of these and other integrated knowledge management initiatives.

Final presentations of this initiative were made to the World Academy of Art and Science (Union of Intelligible Associations: integrative design metaphors enabling strategic comprehension of the global brain, Zagreb, November 2005) and to the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Exploring Intelligible Associations: ontological issues, integrative metaphors and knowledge organization, Saarbrucken, 2005).

This initiative had however effectively ceased in January 2005 with the repudiation by UIA of the long-term soft-loans, and associated shared copyright arrangements, that had been originally agreed on behalf of Mankind 2000 from 1973. The databases of the Union of Intelligible Associations continue to be hosted as an archival service by the Union of International Associations -- in reverting to its historical role as a documentation centre on international organization.

As a strategic initiative, the Union of Intelligible Associations is succeeded from 2007 by a four-fold set of complex adaptive systems, notably including the Union of Imaginable Associations, which it effectively engendered. As an initiative focused on knowledge management, in the light of second order cybernetics, it may therefore be understood as having been a strategic precursor to the third order initiatives required for the 21st century. The purpose of this website is to highlight challenges associated with the possibilities and inadequacies of such a second order perspective.

The web address of this site (www.un-intelligible.org) is designed to challenge overly hasty assumptions about this initiative -- as discussed separately.

In its final phase the initiative enabled the creation of a "living library" (Enabling a Living Library: reconciling "free voices" and "intellectual propriety", 2006) by Dropping Knowledge through the association with the German Reserarch Center for Artificial Intelligence -- which had appropriated its ontology and significant portions of its online data in the period 2005-6. A final form of integrative closure was thereafter achieved by the generation of a questions database to demonstrate its potential (Generating a Million Questions from UIA Databases: Problems, Strategies, Values, 2006; Preliminary NetMap Studies of Databases on Questions, World Problems, Global Strategies, and Values, 2006).