Public Intelligence Blog

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The George Washington University
University Seminar on Reflexive Systems
Friday, March 2, 2012 from 10:00 am-12:00 pm
Funger Hall, Room 320,
2201 G Street NW

A Confluence of Third Phase Science
And Dialogic Design Science

Kenneth C Bausch
Institute for 21^st Century Agoras
Riverdale, GA 30274

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Gerard de Zeeuw introduced the term ‘Third Phase Science’ in 1997.   A deliberative method which is called Dialogic Design Science (DDS; see http://dialogicdesignscience.wikispaces.com) illustrates an effective way of implementing third phase science as a means of understanding and adapting complex social situations. This presentation will explain De Zeeuw’s concept in non-specialist language and expand on the historical context of third phase science as a means of addressing contemporary needs. It shows how DDS completes Third Phase Science as an axiomatic science and makes third phase science into a valuable design methodology.

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Kenneth C. Bausch, PhD, grew up in Ohio and received his BA in Philosophy from Duns Scotus College followed by four years of intensive theological studies at St. Leonard’s College.  He began his professional life as a Catholic priest of the Franciscan Order and has been a pastor, a high school teacher, an inner-city organizer working with street gangs and community groups, a counselor, a social service administrator, a real estate agent, a homebuilder, a contractor, a university professor, a research director, and an organizational consultant. Ken holds an MA in

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Psychology from the State University of West Georgia and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Saybrook University.  Ken now holds the leadership role at the Institute for 21st Century Agoras Institute, Capella University, and is currently teaching an online course through Flinders University in Australia.  His published books include The Emerging Consensus in Social Systems Theory (with Aleco Christakis; Information Age Publishing, Greenwich, CT 2006) and with Tom Flanagan, A Democratic approach to Sustainable Futures (2011).

See Also:

How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom And Power to Construct the Future (Research in Public Management)

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14-18 May 2012

Venue:IHS Jane’s, 133 Houndsditch (City)

Place:London, United Kingdom

Date:21-25 May 2012

Please register by mailing to Lynne Samuel (Lynne.Samuel@janes.com). Have a look at the training programme or go directly to the full course website.

Arno Reuser

Open Source Intelligence Methods & Techniques training programme

Venue:IHS Jane’s, Dupont Circle

Place:Washington D.C., United States of America

Date:7-11 May 2012

Please register by mailing to Lynne Samuel (Lynne.Samuel@janes.com). Have a look at the training programme or go directly to the full course website.

Michel Bauwens

Below by Nick Mendoza is recommended!

Up front extract:

With the decline of state capitalism, capitalist governments and corporations now dream of the internet as the tool for corporate growth through ontological colonialism, free to expand within the mind and the planet, exploiting everyone alike.

Metal, code, flesh: Why we need a ‘Rights of the Internet’ declaration

The internet, as a living being which is part human, should have rights of its own.

Nicolas Mendoza

Nicolas Mendoza is a scholar, artist and researcher in global media from The University of Melbourne.

Al Jazeera, 15 February 2012

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Chiang Mai, Thailand - “OH $%#@!”, reads the caption under the image depicting a group of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks and holding both humorous and denunciatory signs, “The internet is here”. The caption not only conveys the sentiment that drove US congressmen to drop their support of the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) bills, but can also be said to summarise the analysis of the January 18 blackout by several of the most prominent media experts and scholars.

Larry Downes eloquently describes the January 18 events as “the dramatic introduction of bitroots politics”. In case the leaks, springs and occupations of 2011 left any room for doubt, the recognition of the internet as a political force in itself has moved from academic theoretical discussion to hard tangible reality. Lawrence Lessig portrays this sense of general underlying bewilderment by using the haunting metaphor of “a giant” when describing the web as a political force:

For the first time ever, the internet had taken on Hollywood extremists and won. And not just in a close fight: the power demonstrated by internet activists was wildly greater than the power Hollywood lobbyists could muster. They had awoken a giant. They had no clue about just how angry that giant could be.

However, the “January 18 blackout” victory guarantees “the internet” nothing. As Clay Shirky explained a few days before the blackout, rather than the end of this struggle, the SOPA/PIPA incident is just one chapter in the greater project of crippling the internet to eliminate its autonomy:

The hard thing is this: get ready, because more is coming. SOPA is simply a reversion of COICA [Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act], which was proposed last year, which did not pass. And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA [Digital Millenium Copyright Act] to disallow sharing as a technical means. And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act, which horrified those industries. (…) PIPA and SOPA are not oddities, they’re not anomalies, they’re not events. They’re the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now. And if we defeat these, as I hope we do, more is coming.

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Lynn Wheeler

Study links ultrafast machine trading with risk of crash

(PhysOrg.com) — In the United States, ultrafast trading in financial markets between 2006 and 2011 was the underlying factor for over 18,000 extreme price changes, according to a new study. Neil Johnson, a professor in the physics department of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, one of the authors of the study, thinks that a buildup of such “fractures” can destabilize the market. This study, “Financial Black Swans Driven by Ultrafast Machine Ecology” was submitted to arXiv earlier this month, suggesting the link between extreme-change fractures and market crashes.

Read full article.

More information: Financial black swans driven by ultrafast machine ecology, by Neil Johnson, Guannan Zhao, Eric Hunsader, Jing Meng, Amith Ravindar, Spencer Carran, Brian Tivnan, arXiv:1202.1448v1 [physics.soc-ph]

Phi Beta Iota:  Computational mathematics is light years ahead of government oversight, never mind the control fraud inherent in that putative oversight.  Who is representing the public interest here?  Nobody.  This would be an excellent focus for the first true multinational multiagency intelligence and counterintelligence centre….however, such a centre would be even better if it were “whole.”

Patrick Meier

In my previous blog post on the use of drones for human rights, I also advocated for the use of drones to support nonviolent civil resistance efforts. Obviously, like the use of any technology in such contexts, doing so presents both new opportunities and obvious dangers. In this blog post, I consider the use of DIY drones in the context of civil resistance, both vis-a-vis theory and practice. While I’ve read the civil resistance literature rather widely for my dissertation, I decided to get input from two of the world’s leading experts on the topic.

The first expert opined as follows: “Whether a given technology delivers strategic or tactical avantage is typically dependent on context. So to the extent that a drone can be useful in getting evidence that delegitimizes a movement’s opponent (i.e. exposing atrocities), and/or legitimizes a movement (i.e. docu-menting strictly nonviolent activities), and/or provides useful intelligence to a movement about an opponent’s current capabilities (i.e. the amount of supplies an adversary has), strengths, and weaknesses, then one could indeed argue that drones could provide strategic or tactical advantages.  But contextually speaking, if the amount of human and financial resources necessary to acquire and deploy a drone are a drain on beneficial activities that a movement may otherwise be undertaking, then it’s a cost/benefit analysis.”

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Howard Rheingold

Ten popular concept mapping tools

Open Government Partnership

The Open Government Partnership is a global effort to make governments better. We all want more transparent, effective and accountable governments — with institutions that empower citizens and are responsive to their aspirations. But this work is never easy.

It takes political leadership. It takes technical knowledge. It takes sustained effort and investment. It takes collaboration between governments and civil society.

The Open Government Partnership is a new multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. In the spirit of multi-stakeholder collaboration, OGP is overseen by a steering committee of governments and civil society organizations.

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Tip of the Hat to Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet (2012)

Clay Johnson

Why Developers are So Important

Original Post 10 June 2010.  Hot now.

I was asked a question by @mollsiebee from Fierce Government IT at the InformationWeek GovernmentIT Leadership Forum a couple weeks ago, that I didn’t do a good job of responding to. The question — as I recall — was why developers matter if people aren’t paying attention anyhow. Ordinary citizens need access to government data — isn’t that the point? And if nobody’s asking for it, then who cares?

Thankfully, my hairline (and other evolutionary traits) helps people to avoid confusing me with Steve Ballmer even though my message is similar. Though there’s probably a little less profit motive to it. I’ll explain.

Since the first information technology boom around 50,000 years ago with the invention of speech, there have always been information gatekeepers. Around 6,000 years ago at the dawn of writing, these gatekeepers were called scribes. Writing was a trade secret of professional scribes and understanding this technology led to great power in society. Some of the really good ones were eventually revered like gods. Check out what they have to say about Imhotep over in Egypt.

Fast forward a few thousand years and printers become the new scribes. While knowledge gets further democratized with the invention of the printing press, it still takes some capital to get your hands on a printing press. You needed not only to get your hands on a press, but even Johannes Gutenberg had to partner up with a paper mill to print his bibles. Printers become powerful folk and as literacy rates changed, the printers replaced the scribes as the gatekeepers of information.

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Howard Rheingold

VIDEO (1:03) The Information Diet – Introduction

Introduction to the concepts behind The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, a new book by Clay Johnson. The Information Diet makes the case that it’s time we started being as selective with the information we consume as we are the food that we eat, then describes what a healthy diet and healthy habits look like.

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EXTRACT from one Review:

Johnson* makes a strong case that content farms are the media industry’s equivalent of factory farms: producing cheap, low quality information to maximize profit. And if we don’t educate ourselves as consumers, then we’re basically doing the brain equivalent of eating at McDonalds every day… destroying our mental health and driving serious journalists, the organic family farmers of the media industry, out of business.

If the premise sounds a little depressing, it is. But a strong dose of humor and charming anecdotes make the medicine go down. And just like factory farms are depressing, the response — farmers markets, grass-fed beef, and HGH-free milk — can be empowering and delicious.