Category: Methods & Process

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Worth a Look: Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus & Crisis Mapping

Augmented Reality, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), International Aid, IO Sense-Making, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Maps, Methods & Process, Policies, Tools, Worth A Look

About this talk

Clay Shirky looks at “cognitive surplus” — the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world.  TED Video of Talk.

About Clay Sharpey

Clay Shirky believes that new technologies enabling loose ­collaboration — and taking advantage of “spare” brainpower — will change the way society works.  Learn more.

Core Point: Over a trillion hours a year in cognitive surplus–Internet and media tools are shifting all of us from consumption to production.  We like to create; we like to share.  Now we can.

More From TED on The Rise of Collaboration

Recommended by Dr. Kent Myers.  His additional commentary:

This talk gets at something that could go into the proposal for Virtual Systemic Inquiry (VSI).  I need to emphasize that the VSI products have civic value.  That motivates participation, but we also need to make it a little more obvious and easy how to participate, in order that generosity can flow more readily from more people.  That's what I was trying to get at by making projects more standardized and quick.  Software can let that flow, as Shirky says.  The process and products should probably be pretty in some way too, like IDEO (also LOL cats).

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NIGHTWATCH Extract: China – North Korea Law Enforcement…the Hybrid Model Advances

02 China, 08 Wild Cards, Collective Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Reform, Strategy

China-North Korea: China offered to help North Korea control cross-border crime and build law-enforcement forces, according to a report by Agence France-Presse on 12 August. A spokesman also said China provided military equipment to North Korea's National Defense Commission during a visit by China's Deputy Public Security Minister Liu Jing on 8 August.

North Korea's Security Ministry staff and a Chinese public security delegation met on 12 August, according to the Korean Central News Agency.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: The reports are intermittent in the public media, but cumulatively they establish a pattern of China using economic and law enforcement linkages to tie North Korea more tightly. When North Korean leadership has been strong, it strongly and successfully has resisted Chinese initiatives. That does not appear to be the case at this time.  China's admission of providing “military equipment” is unusual and rare. The actors mentioned in the report suggest the reference is to crowd control equipment.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: Hybrid and M4IS2 (along with bottom-up self-governance) will be the defining attributes of local to global governance in the 21st Century.  The USA has consistently made the mistake of selling arms and withholding information sharing and intelligence capacity building (providing stealable funds does not count).  A mix of hybrid bi-lateral (such as Australian-Cambodian task forces on human trafficking) and hybrid multi-lateral (e.g. a regional intelligence centre for Central America) will flip the international relations and national security paradigms.

See Also:

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Journal: Fairfax County Intelligence Up for Bid

10 Security, 11 Society, Intelligence (government), Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Peace Intelligence
Friday, August 6, 2010

FedBiz

Fairfax County looking for intelligence analysts

Fairfax County is seeking bidders for a new contract that injects private sector intelligence analysts into regional law enforcement and homeland security efforts.

The county began working with intelligence analysts five years ago, and the existing contract with Fairfax-based ManTech International Corp. is set to expire at the end of the year.

Under the agreement, the defense contractor has provided eight analysts who work to identify terrorist threats in the national capital region and also provide support for more bread-and-butter police work.

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Free Republic: US Grand Strategy? List of 11 No-Nos

Articles & Chapters, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Strategy

Phi Beta Iota: Free Republic came to our attention today, as a good example of the common sense of We the People.  We have added  them to Righteous Sites.  Below found there on Grand Strategy.

FPRI-Temple University Consortium on Grand Strategy • The Telegram No. 3

Can the United States Do Grand Strategy?

April 2010

By Walter A. McDougall

Excerpt: Angelo Codevilla, who says that what passes for strategy in the U.S. government is mostly wishful or sloppy thinking, made the same point in operational terms. “Because doing the right thing is important to Americans as to no other people, American politics is like politics nowhere else…. Basing statecraft on the American people’s penchant for trying to do the right thing, as did Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, brings forth awesome energy…. But using the American people’s righteousness as a propellant for private dreams, as did [Woodrow] Wilson, or as cover for tergiversation, as did George W. Bush, is ruinous.”

Related piece same title, with bibliography, by McDougall in Orbis, Journal of World Affairs:

Excerpt: “So whatever buzz words become the shorthand for a new American strategy, I expect the most we can hope for is that our national security agencies and their consulting firms just post on their walls the business strategist Richard Rumelt’s list of ten strategic blunders and meditate on them every day.[32] They are:

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Journal: Just How Important is the WikiLeaks AF Dump?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Chuck Spinney Recommends

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Kiss This War Goodbye

By FRANK RICH, New York Times,  July 31, 2010

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 1, 2010, on page WK8 of the New York edition.

IT was on a Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, that The Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers. Few readers may have been more excited than a circle of aspiring undergraduate journalists who’d worked at The Harvard Crimson. Though the identity of The Times’s source wouldn’t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who’d become an antiwar activist around Boston. We recognized the papers’ contents, as reported in The Times, because we’d heard the war stories from the loquacious Ellsberg himself.
. . . . . . .

What was often forgotten last week is that the Pentagon Papers had no game-changing news about that war either and also described events predating the then-current president.

. . . . . . .

The papers’ punch was in the many inside details they added to the war’s chronicle over four previous administrations and, especially, in their shocking and irrefutable evidence that Nixon’s immediate predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had systematically lied to the country about his intentions and the war’s progress.

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Journal: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Mapping, Methods & Process

WIRED DANGER ROOM

  • By Noah Shachtman July 28, 2010  |Categories: Spies, Secrecy and Surveillance

    • The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

    The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

    The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

    Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

    FULL STORY ONLINE

    Phi  Beta Iota: Both CIA and Google (as well as DoD/USDI) are treating OSINT as a technical processing problem.  They will fail for lack of focus on human intelligence–all humans, all minds, all the time; and for lack of respect of the four quadrants cubed (knowledge, new craft, spivak).  When they can overcome the web of fragmented knowledge, and get a grip on all information in all languages all the time (the information cube), we will be impressed.  Right now, Google is nowhere near getting a grip on everything digital, let alone analog or unpublished.

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    Journal: Who will trust open source security from the government? Any government?

    Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process
    Looking for Integrity...

    Sometimes the old joke is true. Sometimes the government is just trying to help.

    An open source consortium funded by military and civilian security agencies within the U.S. government has released a final version of Suricata, a new security framework.

    . . . . . . .

    Unfortunately the timing of the release could not have been worse, coming as it did the same week the Washington Post launched its series Top Secret America, detailing just how immense and intrusive the nation’s national security apparatus has become, an economic boom for Washington seen as increasingly dangerous by many on both the left and right.

    Jonkman acknowledged the help of “thousands of people” in delivering Version 1.0 of the software, which was immediately fisked by Martin Roesch, creator of Snort, who called it a cheap knock-off funded with taxpayer dollars.

    . . . . . . .

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