Goodnotes

On Wikileaks

2010-07-28T04:20:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-24T19:07:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-24T18:27:00.000-07:00

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

2009-12-06T23:20:00.001-08:00

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

2009-04-22T06:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-16T10:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-04T07:31:00.000-08:00

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.

flying through space and time

2009-02-18T14:07:00.000-08:00

I visited the UC Berkeley School of Information Management Studies (SIMS) for one day. One 24 hour cycle and sick as all heck. But it was good. It was like an acaadmic non-tactile ITP. Same issues. Or at least the same issues I was looking at: exchange, access, sharing, knowledge generation. group behavior, the intersection of sociology with information science with information technology with policy and governance.

Pros: Strong academic orientation, strong academic support, good relationships with other departments and outside foundations and organizations. Free thinking. In California.

Cons: More corporate oriented, slightly square, very screen oriented. Most people go work for Google or somesuch.

The Curveball

2008-07-12T22:56:00.001-07:00

I remember vividly the moment I understood the Bell Curve for the first time; astounded and amused, I found the academic world on its head with a curve simply representing complex truths that simpletons could understand. Previously I had thought of it as an artifact, a fossil of abstract thinking by some theorist somewhere in time. Dry and buried, and who cares.

It was a same kind of epiphany that has driven me lately; grooving on the fine line between structured and unstructured information. And whats the difference anyway if you boil it all down to 1s and 0s. But then again, who said those are meaningful anyway?

I drew up a little diagram which may be an anchoring point for further study someday (the real kind where you hunker down with colleagues and books and have an oral). It has to do with the relationship of data produced with the whole complex circumstances and frameworks produced by human intent and motivation. If we mean to structure a thought, then that thought can be articulated, the activity can be codified, the processes can be externalised and ordained, the information collected, processed, reamalgamated, stored and the record disposed. If there ever has been an archaeologist of data processes, I tip the pith hat and run down the trail.

Hello Monrovia

quick notes

2008-04-01T21:32:00.000-07:00

tracking it back

the good practice cycle
information collection > summarized/broken down/structured > synthesized > disseminated > feedback received > information collection modification

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

oh well. but maybe 7 out of 9 is not bad

at least semantics and philosophy of language were practical undergrad courses after all!

Ontologies and hullabaloo

2007-11-12T12:29:00.000-08:00

If entropy is the likely distribution of material objects within a space, and an onotology is a system of meaning, is the language that any group creates an expression of the distribution within their space as well? For fun, I’ll assume so.

The most hullabaloo creating presentation in the whole of the KM-Intranets-Search-Taxonomies conference (www.kmworld.com/2007) was by Microsoft, strangely, and during the taxonomy set. The collective rejected the proposition of a very smart man, the proposition that an arbitrary machine language is a more meaningful proxy for the ideal human language than any existing human language.

Filled with passionate self-proclaimed “bunheads,” or MLIS grads, working in government and private sectors, the Taxonomy track crowd displayed an old fashioned romance with words and language. But interestingly, a good portion of the crowd had delved into the technology realm long ago. And not in a superficial way. We are taking hardcore female-dominant group of polymath geeks; chicks who had meshed custom databases and the Dewey Decimal System in the late 80s, their applications then set free from the isolation of bookshelves with advent of the networked age.

But back to Microsoft. The behemoth was represented by an amiable but slightly autistic fellow who claimed he had created a true ontology. With flick of hand, he revealed a funny diagram.

Patiently and methodically, he explained that the item in the middle was the true referent of all the associated words. Different audiences may desire to use, or may best understand, the true meaning by being shown the word of choice, since the common reference in the middle doesn’t change. Simply swapping out the word of one for the other would allow a website, for example, to use the correct terminology without losing the meaning. Now how would one actually do this, in concrete terms?

By assigning an arbitrary symbol to the common referent in the middle, as below.

For no reason whatsoever, I devolved into sputtering outrage, watching the presentation. Visions of Aristotle and Wittgenstein danced in my head. The platonic form of cilantro rose up before me, swaying slightly in the breeze. What would my world be without a strong understanding of Magritte’s lovely pipe? The sign is not the symbol is not the thing itself is not the ideal form is not the random neurons shooting through our minds.

Ce n'est pas cilantro!

In retrospect, the nerdy gentleman deserved more credit for cleanly solving a tricky problem of translation between semantic domains. No blood, no irritating emergent complexity, all language in entropy. These pesky humans -- I could hear him thinking secretly -- why can’t they just settle? When I pointed out the similarity in his approach to the development of Esperanto, he laughed out loud and agreed.

I did wonder later, though, if this really was an interesting step in the direction of a universal translator which would simultaneously lock current languages into place in their evolution, and, more spookily, transfer even more of our collective mind to the rosetta-stone-like machine grid. The more I thought about it, the simpler and better his solution seemed. For the machine. Does the distribution of all languages more integrally include machine language now? Will I wake up in 50 years and say 5-9-21-55-1-24, express love in a lottery number string?

Perhaps its all sentimentality, but, for posterity, here’s my own take on a true ontology:

I can’t help it, I love the messy human mind; the struggle, the reaching, the dirty negotiation and bliss of reconciled meaning.

collapse of borders

2007-09-10T18:31:00.000-07:00

The thought here is about networks vs. institutions

Just reading Guehenno's End of the Nation State and in it we find a somewhat blistering if highfalutin critique of the "networked age." Not to contradict my boss, but it seems overly negative, and taking the argument to its logical conclusion, is somewhat romantically tragic.

He claims the beginning of the modern "nation state" was struck at the French Revolution, and describes how globalisation, network thinking, and the end of the cold war are bringing about the collapse of an ancient tie of people to physical space. This basic tie supports all Euro-centric organising ideas of institutional rule (kingdom and nation state), with governing parties being able to collect taxes and otherwise dominate by defining territory. He describes how Middle Eastern governing notions were never tied to territory, but rather networks of tribes and clans wandering in the sands, and predicts that the world will become "Lebanonized." This means, "the collapse of the political" and the end of the nation state as we civilized people know it.

I suppose I start from a different point in understanding the idea of networks, in that I see the behavior rooted in natural systems; biological, physical, chemical, economic, etc. This approach has a sound scientific basis. So we might be naturally disdainful of this alarm bell, which seems overly ....? Wait a second, in fact, the only real counterpoint I can think of (besides insubstantial comments on eurocentricism, overintellectulising, and what I can only describe as being overly-French) - is that this argument is overly centered on humans!

It might seem contradictory, but bear with me.

The essential argument he makes is that networks make institutions weak. Specifically, information networks make our current institutions weak because all our institutions until now have been grounded, literally in national territories. And institutions, as an organizing system, are key to the rule of law, therefore bad news for the nation state, the pinnacle of institutional development. But it also means bad news, following Guehenno's logic, for all institutions that are founded on any kind of universal principle - schools, health systems, legal systems, religious systems. Standards can only be imposed in a system that embraces the universal basis of a standard; i.e. standard doses of inoculations, standard No Child Left Behind testing, standard application of the First Amendment. The more networks hold sway, the less universality there is and therefore the less universally any standard can be upheld. The center does not hold and slouching towards Bethlehem we go. VERY good argument! Networks DO have a habit of undermining what we call "institutions." And within this logic, it is true. And perhaps it will play out in the way he describes.

But, if we look at biological systems, or other non-political human systems behavior, we see that standards are always being contested, though there is a funny relationship to physical space. Networks not only undermine institutions, they also build them up, keep them alive. Networks coalesce and dissolve into other forms.

At any given time, there is a central point in any network, for a millisecond before it moves elsewhere. There is a critical mass that defines the network, gives it definition; the social movement gets enough signatures to get on the ballot, the crowd in central park has enough alcohol and noise that it becomes a assaulting mob. But within its structure and on the borders, actually everywhere, the definition of any network is contested in large ways and small. People signing the initiative may change their mind, the mob may contain people who protect the victims. The US is a nation state governed by the rule of law, but it is contested every day on the streets of Park Slope! It just that it doesn't get far before being contradicted or ignored. The funny part about physical space is that the actual terrain tends to influence the shape of the network, its components and its nodes/clusters, etc.

Horribly, though, if you take the scientific view of the situation (a la Duncan Watts,Barabasi, etc.), it is inevitable that the nation state is contested and is replaced, upgraded, or it degrades. In this thinking, nation states are only the temporary solidification, the arbitrary ossification of networks that once existed, and attempted to make their rules permanent. The French state is the the solidification of a network of revolutionaries that attempted to make their values stick by embedding them in institutional forms (schools, governments, etc.). The current nation states are breaking down exactly in the way Guehenno describes - tribes held in check for decades are contesting the old European and US borderlines. By de facto behavior, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is flaunted by nations everywhere as just the expression of that other social network of people - those westerners with their exasperating expectations. In fact, China's actions betray an understanding of the nation state in a whole different way, don't you think?

Its not cheerful, politically, to think that this might be the case. Though I disagree with Guehenno's linear view of political evolution (european-defined democratic boundaried nation state being at the the pinnacle of some grand timeline of humanity), I hate to disagree with it either! As much as I know that time is non-linear, history is multifaceted, vast movements can be redirected in the blink of an eye, I also think there might be optimal "settings" for our little earth. If the earth with all its humans are one little system within a huge universe, I like to think there might be a few best ways it could run. And maybe collections of people in countries that decide their own destiny and respect humanity is one way. Damn American optimism again.

The funny thing, in the end, about Guehenno's argument is that it is almost obsessively focused on the human, and the political. It fits in network logic to fit its own argument, going only a quarter of the way to understanding network behavior but falling short.

2007-08-29T17:56:00.000-07:00

OK, I guess I will try to use this space more constructively to jot down thoughts, not just inspirational texts.

Here are topics I will try to post on:

1. Collective negotiation of meaning
2. Collective creation/recreation of language
3. Categorisation
4. Connotation and Denotation
5. Reference
6. The One/The Tipping Point
7. The morphing of a bell curve into a power curve and back again
8. Group negotiation

this hereby begins the next stage of the great search