On Wikileaks

its interesting, right - that most of the information was public, but because it doesn't support the dominant narrative, it is considered threatening on a more technical basis - against protocol.

of course, any information that puts lives in danger should be treated differently, be protected. And its good to hear it reinforced, even in this murky debate - that human life is paramount.

But it seems like the administration is trying to have its cake and eat it too: saying its a massive breach with serious consequences, while at the same time saying the value of the information itself is low since it is in the public domain. So, to me, then, the breach is more about interpretation, emphasis and the use of narrative in political interaction than it is about actual data availability. A political breach, essentially. And that political breach is not illegal, but because it is so potentially harmful to our agenda, it is being interpreted as a protocol breach that is illegal and if it endangers lives, is also unethical. I doubt there would be much steam for prosecuting a protocol breach that for example revealed the dastardliness of the Iranian regime.

However, it speaks to the disconnect between big institutions and the actual behavior of increasingly greater numbers of people who have individual access. Big institutions, the fulcrums of our world, assume a high degree of control over information access. Individuals, regardless of nation state, institution, etc., also assume a high degree of control over information access.

other interesting effects seem to be: something like the Rorschach test effect for data - the more there is the more variance in interpretation; and, the observer effect, again, which is the effect the information has when it is observed by a third party vs. when it is delivered point to point.

but the whole thing doesn't bode well for our great institutions.

Cloudthink Part II

After re-reading Ethan Zuckerman's post on slacktivism, it was worthy to re-think the problem of conflating mass action with collective organization. He makes some very good points about clearly seeing a lot of social/political use of technology for what it is: not changemaking, just affiliation.

I found a model that describes several steps a group goes through as it becomes engaged , self-aware or participatory. It is Sherry Arnstein's "Ladder of Citizen Participation." It seems a bit more exact in describing the gaps between "a lot of people doing the same thing" (e.g. twittering about Tehrani clashes between the basiji and green-wearing youngsters) and organized self-empowered changemaking groups (especially grassroots movements). My old gripe about the gaps seems just a tad simplistic itself. (see Cloudthink post).

So the argument now might go more like this: If we hope to turn the dispersed actions of many into actual big meta change, it might be worthy to look at models that describe the transition from accidental action or even apathy into revolution. Lets not get too geeky here, but it has got to be better than just trial and error. Isn't that the lesson of all of these schools of government and leadership? That there are actually some methods that produce better results than the gestalt expressing the gestalt?

the observer effect

changes that the act of observation will make on the phenomenon being observed. related to heisenberg uncertainty theory.

note to self - expand thought on how the effect can be seen to an exponentially greater degree in political dynamics. e.g. how opinion/stance, if observed, can easily be understood as advocacy.

post-crisis

Many guesses were confirmed in the assignment in Port-au-Prince. Crisis proximity requiring a faster and more detailed response cycle, data quality being a goal but somewhat of a red herring, variability being both the best friend and worst enemy of "good" reporting, the inter-wovenness of reporting, information supply chain and governance. Each one of these topics is a life of work.

But something falls short, somehow; there's a missing bit I haven't quite crossed yet, I'm still a polywog somehow with the equator just over the horizon. The vortex at the heart of governance and fora and negotiated truth/speech. The center produces the stream, and I'm just watching the stream, trying to make it go faster, better, cleaner. Because maybe I'm afraid to go closer to where words change meaning as soon as they are shared, where words catalyze little state changes all over the place all the time.

That sounds too complex though. I have to keep turning the Gordian knot over and over and over. Meanwhile the kids are catching up and I am losing my desire to go fast. Quite the opposite, I increasingly desire to hold absolutely still. Slow myself.

Someone asked me once in some late night grad school pub test what superhero I would be. I said I would stop time, while being able to move about. To rearrange the pieces, to set the variables differently, the alter the outcome. I wouldn't care if anyone knew. To save a life.

Nothing has been so important to me in a long time; I have been swimming as hard as I can, eyes on the horizon, but I think now maybe all this frantic busyness hasn't been the key.

Quick Notes duh duh deux

After listening to the man who called me Rafael (note to self: improve habla espanol, for crissakes), I now wonder how far the rigor just keeps the organizational body healthy, and how much it just keeps it busy.

I used to think:
good information ancestry
decision support > requires concise information analysis > requires well edited information publication > requires wide ranging information collection > requires well structured reporting to be generated > requires well defined reporting templates > requires clear dissemination of guidelines including templates > requires well articulated process > requires well articulated business

but now its not so linear or methodical. perhaps more like:
good decision support > implies analysis or gut instinct sometimes within ethical frameworks > sometimes drawn from publications or in person briefings > drawn sometimes from data collection > requires information to be shared or stolen

is this too cynical? but I see the way the world is governed and its not far off.

only previous edit to thought was reinforced evidence of all parties gaming information systems wherever they can, in both the fun and dark sense.

Cloudthink

The hype around "crowdsourcing" (a cool term coined by an intelligent but hype-y author) makes me wonder how it is that the hype factory is unaware of its own groupthink. I am going to coin a new term: cloudthink.

Cloudthink is what we collectively get when we have Amazon, or any other taxonomists including the group of Flickr users, do all out thinking and categorizing for us. We think like a big massy gassy cloud. The technology is neutral - it displays our patterns. It shows us as we are: the greek choir, the mob who sees Antigone's civil disobedience as bad for the state. Group categorizing, whether by closed group of highly educated taxonomists, or an open group of global citizens, has no inherent good, and is certainly not democratic. Its just a methodology. The lighter the governance or adherence to "universal" principles, the more likely the group is akin to the Greek choir; seeking balance and justice, but sometimes demanding too much in the heat of emotion.

Evidence pieces in point: Ushahidi in Kenya crisis, Amazon in non-crisis. Both tools in which group categorization of information is heavily in play.

One one hand, you have Ushahidi, this amazing project that aims to use distributed technologies to collect (or "crowdsource") incident reports/news for democratic aims in the Horn of Africa region. During recent Kenyan post-election crisis, the ability to transmit on-the-ground reports by eyewitnesses and make it available to each other and the outside world enabled a citizen reporting capability that really walks the line between journalism and activism, but nonetheless seems more dedicated to truth in reporting than the average schlock on US cableboxes.

Absolutely amazing and can't express enough admiration. Collective categorizing and tagging allows for easy fast mass collection of data. One of the really exciting possibilities here is the collective filtering and and collective pattern generation- the trend over time, the peaks and the valleys. To understand the cycle of violence, in order to have advance warning. Or to use the connective tissue of the network itself to enable better reporting response if it happens there or elsewhere. But again, the tool is actually neutral. It could be used by any group to achive whatever categorization of incidents. My incident "Tutsi murder" is your incident "Hutu justice."

Second case: Amazon's #amazonfails mini non-crisis. Capitalist behemoth, online winner despite all recessionary signals. Seemingly little relation to social justice. Their taxonomists are centralized - a small group, one would assume, of specialists which categorize and tag resources (in this case, books). In contrast to Ushahidi, the technology allows users to contribute to the body of tagging, but not override the underlying taxonomy. The taxonomy is set. The tags are secondary. SO useful, so easy to find things.

The collective filtering here then, is also secondary to the main taxonomy. The effects in these two functions could both slightly repulsive in a social sense. First, the taxonomy itself is subjective and can be manipulated or modified in error. Case in point: the "gay" search results. Second, the collective filtering effect that leads to further and further polarization of thought - the recommendation engine only recommends things that are similar, not different.

In both Amazon and Ushahidi casesabove, there is no real news. However, you could say that not enough thought is being given to the balance between the wisdom of crowds and the madness of crowds. (Long overdue, I am just reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.) It always seemed that Shirky and others were conflating collective participation with democracy, (an of course democracy being the shiny golden semi-religious ideal). How many articles, posts, blurbs, soundbites have I heard about the incredible wisdom of crowds? Given our problems with the big structures of our American lives -- politics, economics, etc. -- perhaps the joy at the door being blown off publicly created information (both access to and ability to contribute to these public spaces), and scores of private sources, itself was a kind of frenzy or madness.

But Ushahidi and Amazon (and flickr, and delicious, and bla bla bla) make the same oversight: conflating mass participation with actions guided by (old-skool, yes, but still grounding) universal principles like democratic activity. I might argue that collective participation can turn into democratic activity if it is guided by principle. In fact, Shirky seems to suggest this in the first days of social software. Its no surprise that we have untamed human natures. Thats why we created principles to begin with, no?

The point is that both Ushahidi and Amazon can be gamed, both by specialists on the inside, and the Thebans in the commons. Thebans collectively revealed the truth that no individual could reveal - the origin of Oedipus. But they also demand justice, and proclaim maxims that are only true unto the group in a specific point in time. I wouldn't argue for more regulation, god no. But if we are aware of our group behaviours, at least we can take action.

Otherwise, the machine is being fed by the happy mob. Cloudthink.

keep it together or merge with the universe

So the latest brainstorm has been over access. What is access? Who decides it, by what criteria, using what logic, who controls it, who overrides it? There are some strong loci of theory and practice around communities of librarians and archivists, freedom of speech and civil rights practitioners, cryptographers and security analysts, and IT guys.

The above curveset is not quite done, but already it seems striking to relate it to the curve to the right describing learning and cognitive information processing.

Am I trying too hard to reconcile a cognitive model with policy?

ict4peace

I went to a 2-day retreat to discuss Crisis Information Management. I participated in discussions the first day, before leaving on Friday.

I thought halfway through the morning that there were some strong trends in the presentations: Need to visualize, summarize, cut through the information overload, and the need to have a quick toolkit up fast. There was a mix of actors there, so conversation was decent even if not groundbreaking. I created the displayed good but not groundbreaking theoretical slopes.

The general sense I got from the discussion was that there were some ratios involved: the closer you got the the crisis, both in space, time, and in responsibility, the more real-time and more detail one needed to respond to the crisis. The further away, and less hands-on involved, the more aggregation was required and more delay tolerable.

You could roughly map this, it seemed, to levels of organizational responsibility: tactical/line manager all the way to strategic. However, on further thought, wouldn't the strategists also want real-time detailed information in a crisis? As in other forms of organic organization, things crystallize very quickly at the point of state change. Maybe a point to explore further.