From Swords To Plowshares
Thomas Depierre
All Maps are Wrong
All Maps are Wrong
Some are Useful
All MODELS are Wrong
Some are Useful
From Swords To Plowshares
Thomas Depierre
Caveat 1
- FOSS, Open-Source, Libre, Free
- Trust me i know
- Used interchangeably here
- Do not matter for this topic
Caveat 2
- Broad language
- Sake of brevity
- Yes, lot of difference
- We are looking at the big picture
A Model of FOSS
Proprietary software
FOSS
User
-
Enhance Freedom
-
The User control what runs on their machine
-
Users can contribute
-
Create a community
-
Opposed to Proprietary
Safety Science in Complex Domain
Safety II
Safety Differently
Resilience Engineering
Cognitive Systems Engineering
We build Complex Systems
Complex systems are systems whose behaviour is intrinsically difficult to model due to the dependencies, relationships, or interactions between their parts or between a given system and its environment.
fault tolerance isn’t composable
Peter Alvaro
We build Dynamic Systems
Law of Stretched Systems
every system is stretched to operate at its capacity; as soon as there is some improvement, for example in the form of new technology, it will be exploited to achieve a new intensity and tempo of activity.
Larry Hirschhorn
A few more models if we have time
- ETTO
- Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off
- if you wait until you have found the perfect solution, the system changed too much
- better go with a partial one for now
- Work-As-Imagined vs Work-As-Done
- Incident is your system telling you where these two mental model diverge
- Incidents as untyped pointers
- Why do things go right ?
- Incidents as unexpected investments/probes/experiments
- you paid the price already, at least get some sense-making out of it
- ...
Where to go for more ?
- https://github.com/lorin/resilience-engineering/blob/master/intro.md
- http://resiliencepapers.club
- Velocity 2013: Johan Bergström "What, Where And When Is Risk In System Design?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb_zYs8G6Co
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Velocity NY 2013: Richard Cook, "Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60
-
The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error, Sidney Dekker
- Learning Reviews. A lot of them
- https://www.learningfromincidents.io/
- https://www.jeli.io/howie-the-post-incident-guide/
- ...
Swords to Plowshare: GUADEC 2026 Keynote
By di4nao
