Keynote Speakers

Fernando Flores

Title: Blogging: A New Computer Eyes, Innovation and Identities Projection

An axiom of every good investor is not to buy shares when the goodness of them is already into newspapers. Before, the information was circulating in some form, for example from mouth-to-mouth, closed circles, or newsletters. Nowadays the news can also occur in blogs that point to public or private communities that discuss topics that traditional media do not carry or even hide. Nowadays, standard communication media are trapped in a Cartesian or Platonic correspondence assumption. They want to tell us how things really are, how they have occurred, and how they will happen, disregarding a concrete world of problems where opportunities and threats live in real time for people. Searching and exploring the world of blogs can create an acceleration of innovation and a dissolution of the previous status quo. Here, the search unit is not a word, but actions, worries, opportunities, threats, etc. That is, people living and pursuing shared goals with others. Which new searching tools can help to find trends, innovations and ideas taking consciousness in the context described above? Can IR help to end with this illusion of pseudo-objectivity and manipulation of passive individuals?

Biography:

Fernando Flores Labra is a former Chilean cabinet minister during the government of Chilean president Salvador Allende and then spent three years as a political prisoner of General Augusto Pinochet. Released after negotiations of Amnesty International, he established his family in Palo Alto and started to work as a researcher of the Computer Science department at Stanford University where he studied a PhD under the guidance of Hubert Dreyfus, Stuart Dreyfus, John Searle and Ann Markussen. There he developed his work on philosophy, coaching, and workflow technology, influenced by Heidegger, Francisco Varela, Terry Winograd, John Austin and others. He obtained a PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. His thesis was titled Management and Communication in the Office of the Future. He created several companies including "Logonet", an educational company; "Business Design Associates", a management consulting company; and "Action Technologies", a software company, where he introduced new distinctions in Workflow Analysis, Groupware, software design and business process analysis. A few years ago Flores came back to Chile and was elected to the Senate. His latest project is a movement called Atina Chile, a re-foundation of political life.

He is the author of Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life; Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (with Terry Winograd); Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity, and contributor to Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years, a special issue of the Communications of the ACM journal.