What Universities Might Do Better for Their Communities,
April 7, 2000
Mary Lindenstein Walshok
An industrial sociologist by training, now Associate Vice Chancellor for Extended Studies and Public Service at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Walshok begins by challenging universities, exploring the social uses of knowledge, assessing the new knowledge needs of diverse populations, and providing a matrix approach to matching university resources to community knowledge needs. In the second half of the book she focuses on special economic, human, and civic benefits, and ends with her bottom line: neither communities, nor universities, can learn in isolation.
Creating World Brain and the Virtual Intelligence Community,
April 7, 2000
Edward O. Wilson
EDITED 9 July 2007 to add comment and links to other books.
Comment: This is still one of the best books for someone who wants to think deeply about knowledge. Below are links to some others I recommend.
Our answer to Levy, but an order of magnitude more practical and steeped in some of the best endnotes I've ever enjoyed. Consilience is the “jumping together” of knowledge across boundaries, and the greatest enterprise of the mind. He begins with an example, showing how biology, ethics, social science, and environmental policy must all come together to properly resolve a global environmental issue, but actually do not-the learned individuals are fragmented into four separate communities, and within those communities further fragmented into nationalities and cliques and jobs, and it is our greater loss for we cannot arrive at the best policy without being able to integrate the knowledge across all these boundaries. He emphasizes that the public must be educated and have access to this unified knowledge, not just the policymakers. He poses, and then answers across the book, this question: “What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important to human welfare?” In my own mind, Edward O. Wilson has defined both national and global intelligence writ large, and done so in way that suggests the “virtual intelligence community” is a very practical and achievable vision.
“Master's Class” for Information-Driven Smart People,
April 7, 2000
Reva Basch
Reva, one of the top five information brokers in the USA, sought out and interviewed 35 professional or gifted amateur commercial online (fee for service) searchers and provides in this book a delightful free-flowing conversation with each of them as a “master's class” for intelligence and information professionals.
I was given this book at Hacker's (the MIT/Silicon Valley legal and largely very rich group, of which I am an elected member) by a NASA engineer, went to bed, could not get the book out of mind, got up, and read it through the night. If it were not for the fact that Intelink is largely useless to the rest of the world and soon to be displaced by my own and other “extranets”, this book would be triumphal. As it is, I consider it an extremely good baseline for understanding the good and the bad of how the U.S. Intelligence Community addresses the contradictions between needing access to open sources and emerging information technologies while maintaining its ultra-conservative views on maintaining very restricted access controls to everything and everyone within its domain. I have enormous regard for what these folks accomplished, and wish they had been able to do it openly, for a much larger “virtual intelligence community” willing and able to share information. For a spy, information shared is information lost-until they get over this, and learn that information not only increases in value with dissemination but is also a magnet for 100 pieces of information that would never have reached them otherwise, the U.S. Intelligence Community will continue to be starved for both information and connectivity….an SGML leper in an XML world.
Solid Basic of Starting an Information Brokering Business,
April 7, 2000
Sue Rugge
In contrast to Mary Ellen's book, this book is actually for self-starters who are thinking about creating their own small business and covers such excellent basics as the market for information, what an information broker does, the pros and cons of the information business, and then the tools, followed by chapters on marketing, pricing, and project management. Although seven years old now, I still regard this as a good starting point for those who would understand the information brokering business (a small niche within the larger open source intelligence business).
This book is a very fine compilation, spanning a whole range of technical and non-technical aspects of information warfare, and including my own invited chapter on “Creating a Smart Nation: Information Strategy, Virtual Intelligence, and Information Warfare.” This is a basic text and those in charge of our information warfare segments today would do well to read it again and again because most of them are focusing on one tiny slice of the IW mission, hot bits.
This sequel to the first book on cyberwar is even better (and the first one was very good) because it is much more deliberate about addressing strategy and diplomacy (part one); society, law, and commerce (part two); operations and information warfare (part three, where most military professionals get stuck); and intelligence, assessment, and modeling (part four). My chapter on “Information Peacekeeping, the Purest Form of War” appears here, but based on the lack of feedback I suspect all of the contributions in this section are a decade away from being understood with the U.S. Government.
