Review
Constantly committed to truth and honesty [this work] demonstrates his ability to grasp the real issues and to take into account the views and concerns of men of good will from all nations and all cultures. –Admiral Pierre Lacoste, French Navy (Retired), Former Director of Foreign Intelligence (DGSE)
Robert Steele goes well beyond the original visions of the best of Directors of Central Intelligence, and has crafted a brilliant, sensible, and honorable future for the intelligence profession. –Major General Oleg Kalugin, KGB (Retired), Elected Deputy to the Russian Parliament.
Robert Steele is unusual for an American….he is clearly internationalist in his orientation. He has written a book that can bring us together in facing our greatest enemies: ignorance, poverty, and mistrust. –Rear Admiral Hamit Gulemere Aybars, Turkish Navy (Retired)
By Farhan Bokhari in Islamabad and James Lamont in New Delhi
Half of the planned assistance pledged by the US to Pakistan is likely to be wastefully spent on administrative costs, Islamabad’s most senior finance official has said.
Phi Beta Iota: This is really about AID not letting Pakistan steal most of the money, as CIA likes to allow.
The latest campus revolutionaries are the so-called edupunks — and their mission is to break up the ivory tower so everyone can pile into the classroom. MIT was the first university to heed the edupunk call: it started posting syllabi, course notes and videotaped lectures on ocw.mit.edu back in 2001. Harvard, Berkeley, Yale, Princeton and Stanford soon followed suit, with their own schemes for posting videos of their most popular courses. Now Academic Earth aggregates all this material so you can audit classes from the comfort of your computer.
Above from TIME Magazine's Top 50 Web Sites of 2009. Click below to see all 50 sites.
With a tip of the hat to Dominic Frace, who is the sole true pioneer for Gray Literature as a community of practice, click on the GrayNet logo to visit his very professional Who Is in Gray Literature.
A converstion is developing that will lead to a taxonomy for collective intelligence in all its forms, including public intelligence. Below is a first effort by Tom Atlee that decisively corrects our preliminary conclusion that public intelligence was the umbrella term.
Tom Atlee
Dear Robert,
I guess I'm stuck on what seems to me the straight-forward simplicity of “collective intelligence” as the overall category — as the intelligence capacity of any collective — family, group, organization, community, society, culture, network — they're all collectives (at least in my sense of the word). “Intelligence capacity” includes things like problem-solving, pattern recognition, analytic or integral model-making, learning (knowledge-building and revision), application of knowledge, insight, etc. — anything and everything having to do with engaging successfully with the patterns of reality. The different types of intelligence have diverse gifts to offer — different types of cognition needed to deal with certain types of patterns — e.g., Gardner's seven “multiple intelligences” (including emotional intelligence), on the one hand, or “business intelligence” and “street smarts” on the other. In this definition, at this level, I find “collective intelligence” to be totally embracive of the requisite diversity, and the term “public intelligence” to be awkward, at best (public as opposed to private?).
However, there's a whole ‘nother framing from which to view this, which I sense is your “home base” — “the craft of intelligence (as in “intelligence agency”). I see the “craft of intelligence” (as a specific sub-category of the broader CAPACITY of intelligence, in this case focused on the collective practice of gathering, sorting, organizing, and analyzing data into useful patterns (information, understanding, narratives, meaning) for decision-makers. With this definition, at this level, the term “public intelligence” means to me the publicly visible and highly participatory practice of doing that for democratic decision-makers who, in the fullest democratic sense, includes or is the public, itself (the citizenry), who are practicing intelligence to inform their own empowered decision-making.
So public intelligence is, for me, a subset of collective intelligence. Much of my “wise democracy” work can be squeezed into the “public intelligence” category. But I have also framed collective intelligence more broadly and think of my larger work as being largely involved with that broader category.
“Co-intelligence” is a larger category still, involving the interactive, collaborative intelligence of the whole (which can be a group, but it can also be an event, nature, evolution, the universe, or Spirit).
I hope that's useful, at least in terms of where to place me in the weave you're creating…
Co-heartedly,Tom
We urge one and all to support Tom Atlee's gentle intelligent efforts to restore the Collective Intelligence that is inherent in humanity as a Whole. Visit him at the Co-Intelligence Institute and make your donation there, please.
Stephen E. Arnold is an independent consultant. He's the author of The Google Legacy: How Search Became the New Application Platform, the first three editions of the Enterprise Search Report, and Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator. His work has been distributed by Bear Stearns and Outsell Inc. This information is based on research for this forthcoming study, Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Search System Doesn't Work, Gilbane Group, 2008. His Web site is www.arnoldit.com.
Marshall Auerback has 27 years of experience in the investment management business, serving as a global portfolio strategist for RAB Capital Plc, a UK-based fund management group with $2 billion under management, since 2003. He is also co-manager of the RAB Gold Fund. He serves as an economic consultant to PIMCO, the world’s largest bond fund management group, and as a fellow of the Economists for Peace and Security. He is one of the Brainstrusters associated with New Deal 2.0 as sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.
