Warning Notice: This is a “heavy” site prone to jamming. It's worth the effort to take a look, and has been added to the Professional Sites list. There are also some screwy blockages on copying text. This is not quite ready for prime time, but it is a righteous good start.
We were impressed by the Earth Science Initative of the Bush-Cheney White House, and this effort appears to take that earlier initiative further, this time in partnership with CISCO, which still has not given up on “owning” the Cloud.
The site proposes that the challenge is “Flying Blind” in a complex and volatile world (they don't mention that changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three); and that the solution is a global nervous system able to sense, predict, and act.
This is a geek's wet dream, totally focused on bit and byte management and completely lacking a Strategic Analytic Model or any sense of how to mobilize the Eight Tribes and do Multinational Engagement on a global scale, but it has enormous potential if (big if) the public can demand that every aspect of this offiering be Open–it should be accessible via Free'Open Source Software (F/OSS); generate Open Source Intelligence (OSINT); and both receive and broadcast all information via Open Spectrum and a Cloud that is NOT owned by CISCO, open to devices that are NOT infrastructure-dependent (e.g. Haggle).
