I will not replicate all that is at www.oss.net and to a much lesser extent, www.earth-intelligence.net, but do want to recognize a handful of extraordinary individuals by isolating their especially meritorious contributiions to the long-running debate about national intelligence reform and re-invention.
BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences (or unconferences). They are open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early-stage web applications, and were related to open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. The format has also been used for a variety of other topics, including public transit, health care, and political organizing.
BarCamps are organized and evangelized largely through the web; anyone can initiate a BarCamp using the BarCamp wiki.
The procedural framework consists of sessions proposed and scheduled each day by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using whiteboards or paper taped to the wall. This approach has been dubbed to play on words, The Open Grid approach.
FooCamps and BarCamps are based on simplified variations of Open Space Technology (OST), relying on the self-organizing character of OST. Unlike classical conference formats, BarCamps and OST rely on the passion and the responsibility of the participants.
Although the format is loosely structured, there are rules at BarCamp. All attendees are encouraged to present or facilitate a session. Everyone is also asked to share information and experiences of the event via public web channels, including blogs, photo sharing, social bookmarking, twitter, wikis, and IRC. This encouragement to share is a deliberate change from the “off-the-record by default” and “no recordings” rules at many invite-only participant driven conferences. It also turns a physical, face-to-face event into a ‘hybrid event‘ which enables remote online engagement with Barcamp participants.
What I have found to be true is that when the issue faced is more important than their position, people in power positions will engage. In other words, they’ll step up when:
the situation reaches the point that they realize that they can’t solve it alone;
it is critical to their success; and
they’ve found a partner to work with that they’re willing to trust.
Essentially, these are the conditions when anyone will engage. It’s just that people with more to lose tend to wait longer. By then, the situation is really messy and they’re desperate.
Peggy Holman knows a lot about change in organizations and communities and she wrote Engaging Emergence to help people not only deal with unexpected and chaotic change, but even come out ahead by engaging it proactively.
But proactive engagement means letting go of some things just as much as discovering new things. To help you navigate, Peggy presents her list of The Five Things We Need To Let Go Of To Effectively Deal With Emergence:
Marketing involves spending money and it's fraught with the fear of failure (because it often doesn't work).
This mix creates the perfect opportunity to play it safe and to follow the leader.
Jumping on the brandwagon, if you must coin a phrase.
Here's the thing: while the second imitator might make it pay, the third, the fourth, the tenth–not so much. The more you try to fit in, the worse you do. The more you rush to follow the leader, the less likely you will be to catch up.
Phi Beta Iota: A major negative feature of bureaucracy, apart from its inherent propensity to magnify fraud, waste, and abuse, lies in its eradication of diversity and innovation. It is a bureaucracy precisely because the past demanded control and repetition and reliability from small cogs in big machines. That is NOT what we need now, in fact it is counter-productive. Live free or die….
Two great events coming up this weekend in Austin, sponsored by EFF-Austin.
Friday, join us at NPO Camp – a Barcamp for Nonprofits and Techs. We had one of these several months ago, and it was a real blast! The idea here is to bring the nonprofit and technology communities together for a day and talk about the technical challenges the NPOs face, while educating the techs about that world. Last event, we had 200+ attendees forming into sessions and pods; all were lively. Greg Foster, our newest EFF-Austin board member, has done most of the legwork in organizing the event, with major production assistance from Maggie Duval, also a board member and producer of the annual Plutopia event during SXSW. Sign up here.
Saturday, coders and journalists come together to build innovative news applications at the Austin News Hackathon, cosponsored by EFF-Austin and the local Hacks Hackers chapter led by Cindy Royal. The day will begin with a presentation by Matt Stiles and Niran Babalola of the Texas Tribune, talking about some of the news apps they’ve been developing. Then teams will form to match ideas from journalists with technical expertise from the coders who are attending. These kinds of events are the future of journalism! This event also benefited from Maggie Duval’s production assistance. Sign up here.
Both events will be catered by Pick Up Stix of South Austin.
Phi Beta Iota: The convergence-emergence that is starting to pick up momentum is happening all around us. Here we see two example of “cognitive surplus” creating “infinite wealth” as web and code geeks help, respectively, non-profit organizations and journalists. This is the model of the future–there is plenty of wealth for everyone, we just need to stop corruption at all levels across all domains–we do this with transparency where money is involved, and with open space where money is not involved.
The Citizen Initiative Review is a major development on the road to sustainability. It should be supported and promoted by everyone involved with environmental, ecological, and sustainability issues. Let me explain.
1. INTELLIGENCE
Think about what intelligence actually is and why it evolved in the first place. Intelligence evolved because it helps us make better decisions about how to engage with the world around us. It enhances our ability to be “right”, to see what's really going on and act accordingly. Organisms and societies that make stupid decisions get weeded out by natural selection — sooner or later.
Thus there is a tight relationship between intelligence — the ability to learn our way into congruence/fit with our environment, adjusting to changes and challenges as we go — and sustainability — the ability to maintain our society over time in the face of changes and challenges. Collective intelligence at the societal level — the ability of a society as a whole to perceive, reflect on, understand, and act on the real conditions it faces — is an obvious and absolutely fundamental necessity for developing sustainability. To the extent we can't collectively perceive, reflect on, understand and act on the real conditions we as a civilization face, we will collapse, taking down much of nature with us (because we are so big and powerful and have our fingers in virtually every natural pie). On the other hand, to the extent we can engage intelligently with the world around us, we will survive — or, to speak ecospeak, we will “be sustainable”. This follows the pretty standard Evolution 101 survival-if-you-fit logic.
The only reason I can see why all this is not totally obvious to everyone is that the societal capacity — and the field of inquiry and practice — that I and thousands of other theorists and practitioners call “collective intelligence” is simply not widely known or understood by society at large and by activists in particular. While this is understandable — because the field is so new — it is a potentially fatal area of ignorance.
The naming of this phenomenon — “collective intelligence” — has been a vital a step in its development — as vital as Newton naming “gravity”. Before Newton, apples just “fell”. We had apples and we had “falling”. We didn't have “gravity”. Once Newton framed this phenomenon of “falling” as a force acting on the apple and gave that force a name — “gravity” — he instantly made modern astrophysics and space travel possible. Before that, those things were simply beyond our reach.
Similarly, to the extent we understand (a) that collective intelligence — especially societal intelligence — is a vital whole-system capacity without which we WILL NOT achieve sustainability and (b) that there is a rapidly growing body of wisdom and know-how about how to enhance that capacity, then and only then will mass movements for a sustainable society include the development of that capacity as a priority in their work — right up there with spreading the word on climate change, stopping the destruction of rain forests, and developing sustainable agriculture, transportation, buildings and energy.
2. CITIZEN DELIBERATION AND SOCIETAL INTELLIGENCE
One of the most powerful innovations to further collective intelligence at the whole-society level is the citizen deliberative council. It is important because citizens individually lack what they need to practice high quality citizenship. They lack sufficient time, sufficient quality information, sufficient freedom from distraction, and sufficient opportunity to talk with each other productively. So they fall back on partisan opinion leaders to tell them what to do — or else they simply slide along the well-greased track of entertaining or bread-winning distractions-from-citizenship. This leaves the field open to massive manipulation — a process in which environmentalists only occasionally get the upper hand, only to be defeated repeatedly by the self-interested agents of collective stupidity.
Description of Video: Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?
BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences (or unconferences). They are open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early-stage web applications, and were related to open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. The format has also been used for a variety of other topics, including public transit, health care, and political organizing.
