Month: June 2011

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Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Paul Fernhout

Alpha E-H, Public Intelligence
Paul Fernhout

Paul Fernhout has been helping his wife (Cynthia Kurtz) develop Rakontu, a free and open source software communications and sensemaking tool for small purpose-driven communities that focuses on exchanging stories. He has hopes to expand Rakontu eventually into a broader Public Intelligence platform including a semantic desktop, simulations, narrative methods, visualization tools, and structured arguments. He has done some earlier work towards a FOSS social semantic desktop based on a triple store called “The Pointrel System“.

Building on something Albert Einstein said long ago about nuclear energy, he likes to remind people that in his opinion “The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity”.

Paul participated in Doug Engelbart's 2000 Unfinished Revolution II Colloquium hosted by Stanford University which discussed themes on public collaboration about solving pressing global issues in networked improvement communities, and he made several related email contributions.   He believes Public Intelligence could be a way to build on Doug Engelbart's early innovations to collectively figure out how to use advanced technologies of abundance for the betterment of global society. He calls for the public funding of such tools in an essay entitled “The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc.”  and also in an OpenPCAST suggestion to the US government on the same theme.  He has written several essays on post-scarcity abundance themes, including speculations on reforming Princeton University and reforming the CIA into post-scarcity institutions. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, he wrote a parable  about collective efforts by individually-weak abundance-minded actors in the presence of strong centralized scarcity-minded organizations, which he feels unfortunately has been all too prescient about the course of that war.

He is currently exploring the idea that there have always been at least five types of interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) with the balance between the five economies shifting due to cultural changes and technological changes.

Paul is a graduate of Princeton University (A.B. Psychology '85, same year as Michelle Obama), studied Ecology and Evolution at SUNY Stony Brook (M.A. Biology '93), and received a Navy Science Award for a robot he created for a high school science fair back before that was a common thing.

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Event: 26 Oct 2011 Assisi Italy Pope, Peace, & Prayer — 5th Inter-Faith Event Since 1986 — Terms of Reference…

01 Poverty, 02 Diplomacy, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
His Holiness Benedict XVI

UPDATED 26 October 2011 (Vatican focus on global financial reform / authority, need for ethics – avoids addressing secular corruption as we suggested in below letter sent January 2011)

Penguin: Vatican Calls for World Government…Oopps

Vatican, Ethics, & Truth I (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

Vatican, Ethics, & Truth II (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

Occupy Wall Street’s Most Unlikely Ally: The Pope

Vatican Breaks Bread (Sort Of) With Occupiers

Cardinal Turkson: Beyond Wall Street

2011: Commercial Intelligence and Competitive Strategy in International Markets – Context and Challenge Inteligencia Empresarial y Estrategia Competitiva en Mercados Internacional – Contexto y Desafio

UPDATED 18 June 2011 (Turkey Rising, Truth, Convergence of Science & Religion)

Turkey Rising–21st Century an Ottoman Century?

Catholic Church Getting Serious About “Truth”

Review: God and Science–Coming Full Circle

Review: The Beginning of All Things–Science and Religion

Review: Questions of Truth–Fifty-one Responses to Questions About God, Science, and Belief

M4IS2

UPDATED 10 February 2011 (All Other Assisi Links)

Seven Answers–Robert Steele in Rome

Assisi-Rome 2nd Meeting

Egypt & Jordan: Muslim & Christian Side by Side

Revolution & Secession: The Game is ON!

Revolution Kickstarted by Facebook Generation

Assisi, Egypt, US Hypocrisy, Global Revolution

Reference: Correspondence on Assisi Intelligence

Reference: Intelligence for the Spirit of Assisi

ON INTELLIGENCE: Open Letter to the President

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Dr. Russell Ackoff (P): Reflections on IC and DoD + Design RECAP

Ethics, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design
Dr. Russell Ackoff

Doing the Right Thing for IC and DoD

Dr. Russell Ackoff (P)

The President wants $400B shaved off security over 12 years. The DNI thinks he is excluded from that number. Possibly, but that's only because the President hasn't yet come up with a similar number for intelligence. $80B for all intelligence is too much, and intelligence agencies need to cut back. Congress in its Appropriations bill implores the DNI to think differently as we head into this new era.  But there is no real program to do that. The community was breathlessly awaiting the DNI's strategy. It is a short list of nice sentiments, duly framed and posted on all the floors, without a hint of irony. Yet the DNI is not completely insensitive to the situation. When presenting his strategy, he observed that since 9/11 intelligence has only grown, and that there is no living experience with cutbacks nor any mechanisms for managing it. It simply isn't done. Mr. Leiter, the NCTC chief, was agitated at the meeting, sensing a train wreck. Along with Gates, he cautioned that a salami slicing approach would be the absolute worst way to do it. Like Gates, Leiter promptly resigned a week later, preferring to go out on top, before the deluge.

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Campaign for Liberty: Steele on IC and DoD

Advanced Cyber/IO, Articles & Chapters, Autonomous Internet, Blog Wisdom
Home Page

National Intelligence and National Defense

By Robert David Steele Vivas

Published 06/17/11

Right up front, here is the value proposition: a revolution in national security affairs can immediately deliver three things:

1. Permit the rapid (four years) reduction of the secret intelligence community budget from $80 billion to under $20 billion and permit the rapid (four years) reduction of the active and reserve military budget from over $1 trillion a year (which is how much the US Government borrows every year “in our name”) to under $250 billion a year, with a strict focus on defense against real modern threats instead of fabricated or exaggerated threats;

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Jon Lebkowsky: Collaboration, Cooperation, Democracy

11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
Jon Lebkowsky Bio

Everybody’s head is a strange universe filled with echos of voices they’ve heard over and over again. Against this, we try to manifest our intentions, to persuade with more voice, more conversation. Sometimes we get through, but even when we get through, we’re often filtered, just as we’re filtering. Is it any wonder that it’s so difficult to build and sustain an effective collaboration?

I’m looking at the ways that we strive to aggregate our attentions, find common ground, and work together. Over the years I’ve approached this through the lens of democracy, or what I’ve referred to as the “democratic intention” to create a participatory process that works. The older I get and the more I think about it, the more I realize that this intention, though we so often profess it, is actually rare. Most of us would really like to assert our self interest, our own preferences, but society is a collision of interests and preferences, we have to give in order to take. In a recent discussion of the book The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, I was struck by the hardwired assumption that self-interest inherently rules, and cooperation is reached most effectively with an understanding of that point, thus the prisoner’s dilemma. In fact, I find that real people are fuzzy on that point, they’re not necessarily or inherently all about self-interest. We’re far more complex than that.

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Builders of the Next Net

Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet
Venessa Miemis
this is the second post in a series to highlight the people and projects coming together at this year’s Contact Conference, Oct 20, 2011 in NYCOne of the big areas we’ll be highlighting at Contact is ‘next net’ technologies – hardware and software tools that bring people internet access and the ability to connect, communicate and share information without the risk of censorship or shut-down.

Below are just a few of the people and projects we’re looking forward to bringing together this October:

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Narrative Battle & Public Diplomacy in 21st Century

Advanced Cyber/IO, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence
John Marke

The Narrative Battle & Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century

By John Marke

Warfare in the 21st century is about the battle for the mind – it is about ideas and perceptions. Understanding how people make sense of what’s happening around them, i.e., socially constructed reality is a key element of this dynamic.

Military strategists, at least the ones I favor, i.e. Sun Tzu, Liddell Hart, and John Boyd, would all agree that ideas have consequences and are perhaps more consequential than bullets, especially in today’s environment of limited war.  What we think, what we say, and how we act need to be congruent – that is the essence of integrity.  Clearly articulating our ideas and demonstrating the integrity between ideas and actions – are vital components of war and peace in the 21st century….and they must authenticate basic human values of justice and truth.  There is a moral dimension to war; and without a firm commitment to justice and truth, no narrative will be sustainable.

I choose to look at Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield as the context for exploring the importance of the narrative in war because it is timely but has also passed into history, as contrasted to Iraq or Afghanistan which are battles still in play as of this writing.

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