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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the role of academia in broader society. What is academia’s role beyond being a business and providing qualified professionals to other businesses? What kind of organization and ethos is consistent with academia’s proper role in society, considered as a higher-order cognitive system?

Society as a whole is modeled as a viable system, with subsystems dedicated to self-production in the here and now (systems 1-3) and subsystems engaged in exploring the outside and future of the system and in consolidating an identity and an ethos (systems 4 and 5). The role, ethos and proper organization of academia are derived from this model and from cybernetic considerations on the proper architecture of system 4 and system 5 cognitive systems.

To fulfill its role as part of society’s system 4 and system 5, academia must include areas that are sometimes considered redundant or an expensive luxury, such as the humanities or basic research. The humanities must strive to catalyze broad community participation as part of their contribution to system 5 and must strive to produce bridge languages between communities and disciplines to increase the connectivity of the World Brain. The publish-or-perish ethos of academia must be replaced by an erotic spirituality, understood as desire for otherness.

This paper integrates broad philosophical considerations on the role of academia with the use of cybernetic models of viable systems and of distributed cognition, yielding practical guidelines for the organization of academia.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model of education that is non-reproductive; that is, productive of non-trivial machines. The reason for this is the postulate that society’s main problems are second-order deficiencies, which cannot be fixed by doing what we do better or more intensely, but rather by changing what we do.

This paper proposes several guidelines for non-reproductive education based on Von Foerster’s concept of a non-trivial machine and of legitimate questions, and Ashby’s law of requisite variety. The ideas presented are corollaries and the result of a philosophical fleshing-out of said concepts and laws.

In order to have a non-reproductive education, it is necessary to limit the role of central control and promote self-evaluation in education at every level of recursion: that is, in the relationship between state and educational institutions, educational institutions and teachers, teacher and students and students as evaluators of themselves.

First, the concept of genuine self-evaluation is proposed, to distinguish this from what is currently called self-evaluation; which, it is shown, is not truly so. Second, the concept of authentic research is proposed, as distinguished from original research. This is useful for seeing how legitimate questions work at all levels of education. Third, a number of relationships between cybernetics and philosophical thought are established. Fourth, a model for non-reproductive education is proposed.

This paper is an account of management and organisational interventions in multiple institutions and enterprises in Colombia during the past 10 years, mainly influenced by Stafford Beer's ideas and work. It offers comments about the use of these ideas in three projects; particularly it focuses on an intervention in the National Controller's Office. These are accounts of failure and success. However, assessments of success and failure are tempered by difficulties in appreciating the complexity of social processes and our inability to see cause‐effect connections. The paper offers insights about concrete aspects of these interventions and the footprints they have left in the country.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a research agenda to improve on representative, participatory and deliberative forms of democracy. It argues for an inclusive democracy built upon a cybernetic understanding of governance and organization structure.

Based on complexity management strategies, the paper offers a conceptual construction of governance and democracy. The case of Colombia over the past 60 years is used to illustrate these strategies; it makes apparent that in spite of good intentions, the cybernetics of the country and its cities has faltered over this period, hindering its democracy. To learn how to overcome this weakness and support the evolution towards an inclusive democracy, the authors propose a research agenda aimed at studying the viability of cities.

The paper indicates that there is a broad field to apply management cybernetic tools in the political domain, as for example the classic archetypes that inhibit the emergence of effective structural recursion and people's local participation in global issues, restricting their social inclusion.

In many Colombian cities and towns people live in very difficult conditions and to survive they often fall into corruption, but others display apparent resiliency, solidarity, communitarian organization and so forth. Learning about good practices should help visualise strategies towards democratic inclusion and good governance.

The main question supporting the whole research could be expressed as, how is it possible to reduce power imbalances that inhibit and restrict the effective participation of its citizens? The corresponding answer will imply improving citizen's quality of life beginning with democratic structures to live in and to practice active citizenship.

The paper offers insights about inclusion and effective governance; it argues that “connecting” a local person's views and actions to global policies is feasible and that this is necessary for effective inclusion.

This tribute to Stafford Beer is written from the particular situation of a Latin American country. Within this context, we believe that it could be convenient to dissolve the systems movement to assume an ethical‐political position that transforms the relations of dependence in the world‐system from the point of view of economic development. A contribution to this task is the formation of amplifiers of regulatory capacity that has been developed in Colombia. In this paper, we present some preliminary advances of autoethospoiesis and some of its future perspectives of research and action. One of our main objectives is to apply this functor with recurrent, recursive, and incursive operators to the world‐system model.