Tony Judge is an Australian who has lived most of his life in Zimbabwe or Europe
-- and for the past 25 years in Brussels with the Union of International
Associations (url: http://www.uia.org ),
founded in 1910, which is a clearinghouse for information on some 20,000
international nonprofit organizations. It can be best described as an international
nonprofit research institute. It has a staff of 20.
His primary function there is as director of communications and research. This involves
responsibility fordevelopment and production of a series of reference books through a
variety of databases. These products generate the main income of the organization. The
work is highly computerized. The books and CDs include:
Yearbook
of International Organizations
Encyclopedia
of World Problems and Human Potential
International
Congress Calendar
Whos
Who in International Organizations
World
Directory of Spiritual and Religious Organizations
Transnational
Associations (quarterly)
The challenge for the UIA, and for the network of international organizations, is to
identify new strategies and ways of functioning in response to increasingly complex
networks of some 9,000 problems, the 8,000 strategies advocated in response to them, and
in the light of fragmented domains of knowledge.
Tony Judge's research concerns touch on themes such as network and tensegrity
organization, information sciences and knowledge organization, futures, meeting
organization as a laboratory for new approaches to social organization, use of metaphor as
an unexplored vehicle for new approaches to complexity and social organization, values and
understandings of human develop- ment, and use of computer graphics to render new
strategies comprehensible. He has written some 200 papers and reports. These increasingly
focus on the use of metaphor in reframing approaches to social organization. Recent papers
include: Poetry-making and Policy-making: arranging a marriage
between Beatuy and the Beast;
He has been associated with bodies such as the: International Studies Association, World
Futures Studies Federation, Committee on Conceptual and Terminological Analysis,
International Society for Knowledge Organization, World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and
the Club of Budapest. He has been involved in various consultancy capacities with bodies
such as UNESCO, Commonwealth Science Council, Council of Europe, and UNITAR.
He has attended many international gatherings and has become progressively more intrigued
by the experimental opportunities offered by unusual initiatives in breaking out of
conventional approaches to their organization. Amongst other things, he has defined
himself as a "save the world conference junky" -- because of the learnings
associated with such gatherings of the hopeful and the wise and in the light of their
inadequacy to the challenges of the times.
Tony Judge's original training was as a chemical engineer, followed by an MBA. His wife is
German and they have one son, an Australian, who has just graduated as a chemical
engineer.
