I recently had the distinct honor of being on the opening plenary of the 2012 Skoll World Forum in Oxford. The panel, “Innovation in Times of Flux: Opportunities on the Heels of Crisis” was moderated by Judith Rodin, CEO of the Rockefeller Foundation. I've spent the past six years creating linkages between the humanitarian space and technology community, so the conversations we began during the panel prompted me to think more deeply about innovation in the humanitarian space. Clearly, humanitarian crises have catalyzed a number of important innovations in recent years. At the same time, however, these crises extend the cracks that ultimately reveal the inadequacies of existing humanita-rian organizations, particularly those resistant to change; and “any organization that is not changing is a battle-field monument” (While 1992).
These cracks, or gaps, are increasingly filled by disaster-affected communities themselves thanks in part to the rapid commercialization of communication technology. Question is: will the multi-billion dollar humanitarian industry change rapidly enough to avoid being left in the dustbin of history?
Crises often reveal that “existing routines are inadequate or even counter-productive [since] response will necessarily operate beyond the boundary of planned and resourced capabilities” (Leonard and Howitt 2007). More formally, “the ‘symmetry-breaking' effects of disasters undermine linearly designed and centralized administrative activities” (Corbacioglu 2006). This may explain why “increasing attention is now paid to the capacity of disaster-affected communities to ‘bounce back' or to recover with little or no external assistance following a disaster” (Manyena 2006).
The US State Department has become the world’s leading user of ediplomacy. Ediplomacy now employs over 150 full-time personnel working in 25 different ediplomacy nodes at Headquarters. More than 900 people use it at US missions abroad.
Ediplomacy is now used across eight different program areas at State: Knowledge Management, Public Diplomacy and Internet Freedom dominate in terms of staffing and resources. However, it is also being used for Information Management, Consular, Disaster Response, harnessing External Resources and Policy Planning.
In some areas ediplomacy is changing the way State does business. In Public Diplomacy, State now operates what is effectively a global media empire, reaching a larger direct audience than the paid circulation of the ten largest US dailies and employing an army of diplomat-journalists to feed its 600-plus platforms. In other areas, like Knowledge Management, ediplomacy is finding solutions to problems that have plagued foreign ministries for centuries.
The slow pace of adaptation to ediplomacy by many foreign ministries suggests there is a degree of uncertainty over what ediplomacy is all about, what it can do and how pervasive its influence is going to be. This report – the result of a four-month research project in Washington DC – should help provide those answers.
ROBERT STEELE: Fergus Hanson of Australia has done a truly superb job of describing the considerable efforts within the Department of State to achieve some semblance of electronic coherence and capacity. What he misses–and this does not reduce the value of his effort in the slightest–is the complete absence of strategy or substance within State, or legitimacy in the eyes of those being addressed. If the Department of State were to demand the pre-approved Open Source Agency for the South-Central Campus, and get serious about being the lead agency for public intelligence in the public interest, ediplomacy could become something more than lipstick on the pig. The money is available. What is lacking right now is intelligence with integrity in support of global Whole of Government strategy, operations, tactics, and technical advancement (i.e. Open Source Everything).
In his new book, Vijay Vaitheeswaran argues that we’re thinking about worldchanging innovation all wrong: It’s not going to come from where we expect it.
Arnie Cooper
www.fastcoexist.com, 19 March 2012
The world is currently standing “on the cusp of a post-industrial revolution.” So writes Vijay Vaitheeswaran in his new book, Need, Speed and Greed: How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness and Tame the World’s Most Wicked Problems, out March 13. Vaitheeswaran, a 20-year veteran correspondent for The Economist and adviser to the World Economic Forum, wrote the book, he says, as a way to inspire bottom-up solutions to top-down problems like resource depletion, climate change, and growing income inequality. We spoke with Vaitheeswaran about the importance of disruptive technologies, social entrepreneurship, and embracing China’s rise.
Co.Exist: As you point out in your book, modern humanity has arrived at the first phase of an unprecedented “innovation revolution,” yet many are being left behind. Why is that and what are we gonna do about it?
Vijay Vaitheeswaran: First, I think it’s a wonderful time to be alive. Shockingly, this might be the best time to be in the bottom billion because of transformations like mobile telephony and micro-credit. But it’s getting much harder to be in the middle class in places like America. The principal reason for this, I think, is that educational systems are increasingly out of touch with the needs of the ideas economy. The current education system that our and other countries developed was suited to the industrial revolution, a one-size-fits-all model for education that treats people as commodities. But we’re in an innovation age where creativity, individual initiative, willingness to think out of the box and disrupt established business or even lifestyle patterns is much more important than simple manual tasks that produce the next widget. So I think the great challenge for developed economies like the U.S. is to reinvent education. The challenge for each one of us is to keep relearning how to learn.
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[Editor’s note: This is the first in a new column series from the pragmatic visionaries at the Thornburg Center for Professional Development for edtech digest]
“The availability of technologies to youth is its own instructor.” –Nobelist Herbert A. Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001), Author of Science of the Artificial and a Father of Artificial Intelligence
EXTRACT: TOYS MIRROR WHAT’S NEXT IN TECHNOLOGY
In the same way that Erector Sets were patterned after the technologies of the third phase of the industrial revolution, the LEGO MindStorms kits reflect the structure of emerging technology and careers in the 21st Century. In 2006, Nano Quest from FIRST Robotics enabled students to program LEGO robots to mimic biological, chemical, and physical systems across micro-, meso-, and nano-scales.
Back in 2002 while I was at a major Command, Friedman made a pitch to provide “ground truth” intelligence on contract. While some folks went gaga over his presentation, there were many small indicators that all was not well. Apparently Friedman was asked to leave LSU for reasons undetermined. Offically, according to STRATFOR ” In 1997, a small company that would eventually grow into Stratfor—called Strategic Intelligence LLC—left Baton Rouge and LSU, where its founder George Friedman had been a professor. A 1999 profile in Texas Monthly said the company “couldn't thrive” in Baton Rouge, and that's why Friedman took it to Austin, where it blossomed into a global powerhouse.”
Reasoning heard on the street by colleagues active in San Antonio, he was bankrolled by Mossad and they wanted him in an area of hightech.
I have read his comments about OSS and you specifically; his arrogance is unbelievable. His “analysts” are currently UT-Austin students with a couple of “seasoned veterans”, none of whom have an intelligence
background.
He has been described as a neocon and I think that fits. From where I sit, I think STRATFOR is finished, they are trying very hard to regain their client base….with little success…
EXTRACT: Armed with this conviction about “where the action is,” I found my philosophical research invariably led me into study and research within each of the scientific fields with which my conceptual inquiries shared a sufficiently long border, including inter alia neuroscience, cybernetics, complexity theory, semiotics, perceptual control theory, communication theory, psychology and psychoanalysis. I pursued these empirical studies in depth alongside my work in analytic philosophy, and so accordingly, for what it’s worth, my academic credentials have come to include degrees in cybernetics (from Brunel University—in the former Institute of Cybernetics) and in social sciences and neuroscience as well as philosophy (from Oxford), among other things, grounding my philosophical inquiries with training and research on the empirical side of the fence.
EXTRACT: Academic philosophy has lately made a fetish of arguments in the sense of disputation, in place of arguments in the sense of argumentation to establish the reasonableness or otherwise of conclusions reached. A more and more arcane, deliberately exclusive technical vocabulary has largely displaced a long tradition of philosophical writing accessible to those from other disciplines. Philosophers have increasingly been talking only to themselves, and in voices increasingly shrill. Competition thriving on disagreement has replaced cooperation in the service of reaching agreement. Technical, often pseudoscientific logic-chopping and internecine disputes, spurred on by what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences,” have replaced an overriding interest in cooperative engagement with colleagues outside philosophy, in the humanities and in the sciences. Dogged by false oppositions between logic and rhetoric, the empirical and the conceptual, philosophers for the first time in modern intellectual history have found themselves operating in a vacuum.
EXTRACT: Four of the largest books in Wilk’s library — where he keeps his kaleidoscope collection — comprise his thesis. His friends call it “the slab”. Its title is Principium Metamorpholigica. Metamorphology, from metamorphosis, is, according to Wilk, a “nascent discipline” concerned with the science of change. So far, Wilk is its only practitioner. His thesis is highly technical, drawing on the work of cyberneticians such as Gregory Bateson and DJ Stewart, who supervised the doctoral work. Its central argument: that change is instant and easy, no matter how large the system.
a one-year introductory course on the philosophical and scientific understanding of change
and its application in rapidly pinpointing minimalist interventions
EXTRACT: Each Interchange design session normally results in a pertinent and elegant solution that can be implemented at once, with immediate and bankable results, only occasionally requiring a second or third session to secure the client’s objectives. Daunting challenges and ambitious objectives—regardless of how longstanding and intractable, . . . or new, daring and unprecedented—can be successfully addressed and secured within days or weeks, and executives can accordingly dispense with normal expectations of feasibility and timescales. In place of high-risk, high-profile, high-cost initiatives, Interchange enables clients to achieve the same or better results reliably—in a fraction of the time—through low-risk, low-profile, catalytic interventions or “nudges” whose marginal cost of implementation is typically negligible.
