I have been watching and, to a limited extent, been engaged in the
exchange of thoughts concerning the history of SD. May I offer three
comments?
1) At the risk of volunteering someone else, I remember sitting in a
swimming pool in Cancun with, amongst others, Julia DiStefano when she
expressed interest in writing a history of the field. Has she taken this
any further?
2) Similarly (though no swimming pool), Dana Meadows was toying with the
idea of writing on this subject around 3 years ago. Any news on this front?
3) More generally, there are many good reasons why this might be an
excellent time to create a history of the field which contained much
experiential detail. Perhaps this is a project that the Society might
consider funding? I sit on the governing Council of the Operational
Research Society in the UK and we have funded a project to have a book
written on the history of our field by researchers at Warwick University.
This might be the way to trigger a similar enterprise in the SD field.
Dr. David C. Lane
Operational Research
London School of Economics and Political Science