The Peter Lang Virtual Systemic Community
If a Nobel prize could be awarded for a person who’s work and spirit has inspired thousands of people in an appreciative and life-affirming manner and who’s work and spirit has inspired amazing results for numerous companies, organisations, professional teams and individual professional workers, it has to be our friend, mentor and colleague over many years, Peter Lang, KCC Foundation London. Unfortunately, such an award does not exist. Therefore, we decided to do something else to honour Peter Lang and preserve the impact of his lifelong career and work for the future. On Thursday 7th February 2013 we founded the Peter Lang Foundation in order to do this.
After Peter passed away on 12th July 2016, the members of the Foundation decided in April 2017 to close down the Foundation. Instead, we agreed to create this virtual based social media systemic community as an international tool to assist in exploring, keeping the histories of, and innovating systemic development. Constructed virtually, all archives, documentations and similar that members share on the platform are easily accessible through electronic means via the internet to members from the systemic appreciative communities all over the world.
How can you use this virtual community website?
The purpose of this virtual community website is to create a platform that will support the preservation and development of systemic thinking and document the numerous significant contributions Peter Lang has given the systemic world through the years. This virtual website will also support further related developments of systemic approaches, the appreciative approach and future innovations. This website is constructed so that everybody can join easily and get access to, start and join the ongoing debates and dialogue with other members of the community in various ways. It will also be possible for you to advertise upcoming events that might interest other members of the community.
- This is a virtual platform where students and professionals with interests in systemic and appreciative positions can share their ideas, questions, and interests relevant to their systemic practices.
- This site will provide an opportunity for you to upload material of interest related to systemic and appreciative ideas and enjoy similar contributions from other members of the community website. The site endeavours to build a collection of videos, DVD’s and similar recordings with Peter Lang and people performing work in his spirit.
- This site will facilitate your sharing of ideas and enable you to join on-going dialogues about systemic ideas, approaches and technologies
- This site will enable you to share and join dialogues around systemic ways of working in different contexts and share and enter dialogues with others in the community around ideas of and creation of new work approaches and new work techniques,
- This site will enable you to share stories from your work with others in the community and inspire each others systemic and appreciative work,
- This site will enable you to ask questions to the community about anything theoretical or practical in respect of gaining a better understanding of systemic positions and abilities in relation to your work
- This site will enable you to ask questions and join dialogues across generations – students to senior systemic professionals – to inspire each others thinking and practices in the community about the systemic and appreciative ways of understanding and approaching the world and people living in it.
- This site will allow you to share your own systemic and appreciative creations and publications such as papers, articles, books, as well as presentations or notes from seminars and workshops or lectures in the systemic community that might inspire others in the community.
This virtual community website will also contain a special section where you can share and get access to specific stories and data regarding Peter Lang’s life and work and serves as a way of honouring Peter Lang’s and his colleagues’ lifelong contributions to the systemic community. The section documents Peter’s and his colleagues’ careers that played a major part in developing systemic and appreciative thinking and it’s practice.
The virtual community aims to preserve and maintain the legacy of Peter Lang’s systemic and appreciative thinking and his development of its practice for future generations. In doing so, the website community aims to collect, acquire and secure for posterity the many documentations of Peter Lang’s work which are scattered all over the world. These documents, videos etc. will be organised and digitalised in order to be accessible for future generations of systemic researchers and practitioners all over the world. This will ensure that Peter Lang and his colleagues inspirational work can be further developed, researched and enjoyed in years to come by professionals working for example within the fields of research, clinical practice, psychotherapy, supervision, teaching, training, learning organisations, consultation, management, conflict resolution, peace work and similar all over the world.