Public Intelligence – Page 4 – Public Intelligence Blog

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.

2011/06/13

Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Cynthia Kurtz

Alpha I-L, Public Intelligence

Cynthia Kurtz is an independent researcher, writer and software designer who consults in the field of organizational and community narrative for decision support, conflict resolution and collective sensemaking. Her free online book at workingwithstories.org helps people use narrative techniques to benefit their own communities and organizations. She is building open source software at rakontu.org to help small groups share and work with their stories to achieve common goals. Her blog is at storycoloredglasses.com. Cynthia's original background is in ethology and evolutionary biology.

2011/06/13

Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Larry Sanger

Alpha Q-U, Public Intelligence

Founder of Wikipedia (which lost its way, trolls took over), founder of WatchKnow.org, an educational video directory, founder of Citizendium, a wiki encyclopedia project that is expert-guided, public participatory, and real-names-only. Ph.D. 2000, The Ohio State University, Philosophy. Dissertation: Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification. See also The Digital Universe, The Digital Universe Foundation, and the Encyclopedia of Earth (2005-6)

2011/04/12

Who’s Who in Collective Intelligence: Charles Wyble

Alpha V-Z, Collective Intelligence, Public Intelligence

Charles Wyble is a senior systems and security engineer with 15+ years of experience. His focus in 2011 is contiuining to expand his data ownership, and building socalwifi.net

He lives in sunny southern california, with his wife Patricia and 3 dogs isis, ospf and Juniper . Yes they are named after routing protocols and the other networking company. He frequently hosts hacker parties, where all sorts of cool stuff gets built.

He believes very strongly in owning his data. It's a critical and often overlooked part of security. As such, he maintains numerous web properties on a Linux server farm located at his residence, connected to the best DSL ATT has to offer.

2011/04/082020/04/04

Who’s Who in Intelligence (Decision-Support): Robert David Steele – Hispanic Robert David STEELE Vivas

Alpha Q-U, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Cyber-Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, Public Intelligence

PERSONAL WEB SITE HERE

There are too many past links to this post to change them all, apologies for that. Above link leads to https://robertdavidsteele.com with pages on Overview, Contact, #BigIdeas, About, Qualifications, Appearances, Publications (most linked and free online), Espanol, Francais, and Web Sites.

Want to talk? Make a donation, it triggers an email from Robert.

2011/02/14

Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Daniel Ellsberg

Alpha E-H, Public Intelligence

Structured Web Hits

Daniel Ellsberg, Ph.D. (born April 7, 1931) is a former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of US government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers.

Wikipedia Page

Other Photos of Daniel Ellsberg

Journal: Afghanistan = Viet-Nam, National Security Council Remains “Like a Moron”

Review: Secrets–A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

Review (DVD): The Most Dangerous Man in America–Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (Conscience Over Career)

Event: 19 Jan, Santa Clara CA – WikiLeaks: Why it Matters. Why it Doesn’t? Daniel Ellsberg, Clay Shirky, Neville Roy Singham, Peter Thiel

2010/09/162013/05/21

Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Carol Dumaine

Alpha A-D, Global Futures Partnership, Policy, Public Intelligence, Reform

carol dumaine with graham allison — Click on Image to Enlarge

Ms. Carol Dumaine is one of a very small number of individuals who have sought to pursue what Gifford Pinchot calls “intrapreneurship,” but on a global scale.

She first came to international attention when she pioneered Global Futures Partnership, an analytic endeavor seeking to enhance outreach and cross-fertilization across varied communities of practice.

She received the following recognition from the emergent M4IS2 community in 2002:

Global Futures Partnership, Central Intelligence Agency
OSS '02: 21st Century Emerging Leadership Award. Global Futures Partnership, Central Intelligence Agency. Under the leadership of Carol Dumaine with her extraordinary vision, the Global Futures Partnership has created strategic learning forums bringing the rich perspectives of the outside world into the classified environment in a manner never before attempted. This official but revolutionary endeavor nurtures an outside-in channel for integrating a diversity of perspectives. It is a vanguard toward a future in which the lines between national and global intelligence, and between governmental and nongovernmental intelligence, are blurred into extinction.

She is interested in the areas of “knowledge ecosystems,” “ecologies of innovation,” and “collective intelligence” for applicable models, practices and theories which may be useful to prototyping a new capacity for “strategic intelligence” in energy and environmental security.

Carol Dumaine is a graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and has a Master's degree from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

On the left is her May 2009 presentation to the International Security Forum in Geneva, and on the right, a March 2009 presentation at the Institute for Environmental Security of the Brookings Institute.