Institute for 21st Century Agoras

The Chairman of the board of a municipality of 10.000 people in Cyprus, Mr. Spyros Elenodorou, has agreed to construct in his new municipality building a DEMOSOPHIA Observatorium, which has been a dream of Drs. Christakis and Warfield for over 30 years.  DEMOSOPHIA means “Wisdom of the People” and reinforces the idea that citizens will now have a place where they can visit and gather a view of the ideas that are taking shape in their community. 

AGORAS (Community) Observatorium

The Observatorium is a physical (or virtual) piece of real estate, whose building interior can be loosely compared with that of the Louvre, in that it contains a variety of rooms, and facilitates rapid familiarization with their contents by the persons who walk through that property. The displays in the Observatorium are tailored to help eradicate or minimize complexity in understanding, both broadly and in depth, the nature of the large organization, its problems, its vision, and its ongoing efforts to resolve its difficulties. Comparison with the planetarium for envisaging a broad swatch of the sky is self-evident.

The first step in resolving issues related to large, complex systems, is to provide a well- designed situation room, equipped to enable groups to work together effectively. The second step is to carry out whatever prolonged design work is required, using processes proven to be effective, yielding visual displays of the system patterns that hold understanding of the logic underlying the system. The third step is to embed the results of the second step in the corporate observatorium, where insight into the large, complex system comes both at overview and detailed levels, according to the efforts put forth to comprehend what is seen in the sequenced displays.