April 2011 – Page 14 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/04/232011/04/23

Participatory (Crowd-Sourced) Futures Planning

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Open Government, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Serious Games, Strategy, Threats, Tools

whether talking about a intelligent knowledge infrastructure, robert's global brain, or suresh's project matching for climate change initiatives, this article seemed useful.

Noah Raford
Large-scale participatory futures systems

Futurescaper is an online tool for making sense of the drivers, trends and forces that will shape the future. As a user interface system, it is horrible. As a tool for analyzing and understanding complex systems, it works pretty well. Several people asked me about this after my last post, so here is some more detail.

Following the logic of collective intelligence (as part of my my PhD), I broke up the the scenario thinking process into discrete chunks, came up with a system for analyzing and relating them together, and then distilled them into key outputs for helping the scenario development process: 1) Emergent Thematic Maps 2) Revealing Hidden Connections 3) Drilling Down

Read full post.

See Also by Noah Radford:

The Three Systems, an Overview

The first system is called “Futurescaper” and was developed in partnership with the International Futures Forum (IFF), Tony Hodgson and my friend Nathan Koren. This was piloted on a project for the UK Government, exploring secondary and tertiary impacts of climate change.

The second system is called “SenseMaker Scenarios.” This uses a customized version of Cognitive Edge’s SenseMaker Suite to aggregate micro-stories about the future into themes and patterns for scenario generation. This was done with Dave Snowden and Wendy Schultz, and was unveiled at the 2010 RAHS conference in Singapore.

The third system is called “FogCatcher”, and was developed with Anab Jain and Jon Ardern from Superflux. This was based on a modified version of Jerome C. Glenn’s futures wheel, combined with a “hot or not” style cross-impact analysis engine. As before, this approach benefited greatly from previous conversations with my colleagues above, but also from others such as Andrew Curry of the Futures Company, Emile Hooge of Nova7, Indy Johar of 00:/research, Vinay Gupta and others.

All three projects are still in continuous development and available for experimental project use.

Contributing Editor: Lucius

Authors & Editors

From the original Planet of the Apes movie. Lucius is the Zira's socially-rebellious nephew to whom Taylor tells “to keep the flags of discontent flying”

Lucius: …What?

Taylor: The flags of discontent. Remember, never trust anybody over thirty.

Lucius by day works for an international organization on security issues. Since 2001 he has been a Linux and Open Source software user. He has also been involved in the Barcamp and Hackerspace movements.

2011/04/232011/04/24

Seth Goden: The [Public] Realization is Now

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence

I of II: The [public] realization is now

New polling out this week shows that Americans are frustrated with the world and pessimistic about the future. They're losing patience with the economy, with their prospects, with their leaders (of both parties).

What's actually happening is this: we're realizing that the industrial revolution is fading. The 80 year long run that brought ever-increasing productivity (and along with it, well-paying jobs for an ever-expanding middle class) is ending.

It's one thing to read about the changes the internet brought, it's another to experience them. People who thought they had a valuable skill or degree have discovered that being an anonymous middleman doesn't guarantee job security. Individuals who were trained to comply and follow instructions have discovered that the deal is over… and it isn't their fault, because they've always done what they were told.

This isn't fair of course. It's not fair to train for years, to pay your dues, to invest in a house or a career and then suddenly see it fade.

For a while, politicians and organizations promised that things would get back to normal. Those promises aren't enough, though, and it's clear to many that this might be the new normal. In fact, it is the new normal.

I regularly hear from people who say, “enough with this conceptual stuff, tell me how to get my factory moving, my day job replaced, my consistent paycheck restored…” There's an idea that somehow, if we just do things with more effort or skill, we can go back to the Brady Bunch and mass markets and mediocre products that pay off for years. It's not an idea, though, it's a myth.

Some people insist that if we focus on “business fundamentals” and get “back to basics,” all will return. Not so. The promise that you can get paid really well to do precisely what your boss instructs you to do is now a dream, no longer a reality.

It takes a long time for a generation to come around to significant revolutionary change. The newspaper business, the steel business, law firms, the car business, the record business, even computers… one by one, our industries are being turned upside down, and so quickly that it requires us to change faster than we'd like.

It's unpleasant, it's not fair, but it's all we've got. The sooner we realize that the world has changed, the sooner we can accept it and make something of what we've got. Whining isn't a scalable solution.

Tomorrow: part II—the opportunity

See Also:

Paradigms of Failure

The Substance of Governance

2010 INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability

2011/04/232011/04/23

Reference: Dr. Joseph Tainter, Seven YouTube Segments on “Why Societies Collapse and What It Means to Us”

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Policies, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Real Time, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Serious Games, Strategy, Threats, YouTube

Utah State University. Professor in the Department of Environment & Society, (Social conflict in environmental issues, human responses to climate change and environmental degradation, human uses of energy and resources).

“We Need An Adult Conversation–Our Political System is Dysfunctional”

Complexity & Catastrophe (103)
Complexity & Resilience (119)

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

Wikipedia Joseph Tainter

FEATURED (2010):

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (1 of 7)

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (2 of 7)

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (3 of 7)

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (4 of 7)

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (5 of 7) (Conclusions)

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (6 of 7) (Q&A)

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (7 of 7) (Q&A)

Tip of the Hat to newculture at YouTube for gifted uploads.

Found and recommended by Contributing Editor Lucius.

Phi Beta Iota: There are no challenges that cannot be addressed with a combination of collective intelligence and individual integrity. Infinite free energy, and the eradication of waste across all industries, are immediately achievable if (big if) the public will reengage in its own governance.

See Also:

M4IS2

2011/04/23

Government 2.0 Melds with Crowd-Sourcing

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Open Government, Policies, Reform, Serious Games, Strategy, Threats, Waste (materials, food, etc)

In Oakland, A Creative Strategy for Financing the City's Solar Roofs

Using a new “crowdfunding” program called Solar Mosaic, the city is selling solar tiles to locals for $100 a pop and installing them on public buildings

By Maria Gallucci, SolveClimate News

Apr 22, 2011

The city of Oakland, Calif., is getting its residents to help build out a clean energy economy, one solar tile at a time.

By selling 5,000 tiles at $100 each to locals, the city is aiming to piece together entire rooftop solar arrays at seven budget-strapped schools, youth centers and houses of worship. A team of Oaklanders will be trained and hired to install the panels by as early as July.

The city's efforts are part of a pilot program called Solar Mosaic, a web-based marketplace for community solar initiatives that launched on April 15.

Using the “crowdfunding” model, residents can help generate energy savings and scale back greenhouse gas emissions without having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a solar installation at home.

Read rest of article….

Phi Beta Iota: The existing tax system in the USA is so corrupt it must be abolished. The public is now ready for line-item crowd-sourcing and the fully-transparent Automated Payments/Transaction Tax.

Serious (Honest) Thinking About US Budget

2011/04/222011/04/22

On Intelligence–Out of Touch Squared

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence

A very interesting article by Chuck. Earlier I was thinking along similar lines about how the Military Intelligence System has devolved in the same manner as our air strategy.

When I first signed up, the Army had a number of sites in far flung places with strange sounding names. The advantage was the people working their were somewhat in tune with the psychological mindset of the people who lived in proximity to the “threat”. When they were concerned it raised our awareness of activities by the “other side”. The local population always had better intelligence than we did, but it was an indicator that we picked up on and used to focus our efforts.

Enter technology (re: US Air Force) resulting in the consolidation of intelligence activities to major fixed bases (somewhat like our overall military strategy – hunker down). We no longer have that view of the population, hell, we don't have any concept of the human terrain in those areas or anywhere else (with the exception of Korea where we have not run away).

Continue reading “On Intelligence–Out of Touch Squared”

2011/04/222011/04/22

Dutch Thinking: Roads to Be Solar Panels

05 Energy, Cultural Intelligence

solar-road-design — Click on Image to Enlarge

Dutch To Build Solar Panels Into Their Roads, Starting With Bike Lanes

by Alex Davies, Paris, France on 04.22.11

Science & Technology, treehugger.com

The Dutch are well known for their ubiquitous bike lanes, to the point where Amsterdam is neck and neck with Copenhagen for the title of most bike-loving capital in Europe. Now, Denmark will have to come up with something big to match the latest plan from the Netherlands – the installation of solar panels in roads, starting with bike lanes.

Talk about the efficient use of space: if you're going to have roads (and hopefully you'll have bike lanes), why not put that space to work producing energy? Called the Solaroad, the project is the brainchild of Dutch research firm TNO. The idea is pretty straightforward: a layer of concrete forms the road itself. A centimeter thick layer of crystalline silicon solar cells is laid on top, and covered by a layer of toughened glass. The energy potential: 50kWh per square meter per year, which can then be used to power street lighting, traffic systems and households.

Read rest of article….

See Also:

Arno Reuser