Collaboration, Peer production, Peer networks, Crowdsourcing….the more I read about these topics the more I understand the enormous opportunities for social development and governance that are already out there. But at the same time, there are some new challenges to address.
For every new concept introduced in Government 3.0 I have the same reaction. First, I am all confused about it. Second, I start to understand it, but at the same time it always looks kind of utopian or not really applicable in the government field. And finally, I find some practical examples and ideas that allow me to think that these concepts are in fact both interesting and feasible.
Powerful and effective heuristics are the only way to quickly communicate the complex understandings required to save humanity, because they facilitate quick feedback. They break through information logjams. They reduce information overload. The various elite powers on the planet use heuristics in the form of propaganda to mislead the people and drive them like cattle toward a predetermined objective. But they have a great advantage over us. It's easier to confuse than enlighten. It's easier to destroy than to build. It's easier to get people to misunderstand complexity than to get them to understand it.
So unless we become clever at heuristics, we are outnumbered and outgunned. And we need to be cognizant of any model that can help us dilate the conduits of feedback to the point where our big picture understandings can spread like lightening to the general public. There are many ways to do this, mostly by commandeering well-understood terms and putting them to new uses.
While I was watching the Boston Marathon bombing coverage I heard them talk about victims who were at one point in critical condition but who had been reevaluated to serious condition. And it made me want to look up the precise definitions of these terms. That's when I saw that they could have usefulness describing all kinds of complex social dynamics. After all, that's what systems theory is all about. The five terms are: undetermined, good, fair, serious, and critical. You can find definitions here at wikipedia:
Briefly, they are: waiting assessment; stable within normal limits; indicators are favorable; indicators are questionable; and indicators are unfavorable. These concepts can be applied at every level and context of social dynamics because they are terms that describe systems. And as Donella H. Meadows stressed, the whole point of systems theory is to cut through all the jargon of the multiplicity of specialties. The point is to make things as simple as possible without making them too simple. Simplify but don't oversimplify.
Suggestions for process-oriented titles of global issue reports
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Given the increasingly disastrous “state of the world”, and that foreseen for the future, it is appropriate to ask whether another language might enable meaning to be carried otherwise — and potentially more imaginatively and fruitfully. There is clearly a fundamental problem with respect to the relationship between states of any kind — one which obscures consideration of the dynamics which may be vital to the essence of meaning. This is only too evident in the case of Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, North Korea-South Korea, and the like — as with the “two-state solutions” proposed in the first case.
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With respect to enhancing insight into the dynamic, a striking innovation in “turning statistics into knowledge” — with the slogan “unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world” — has been offered by the Gapminder initiative, within the context of the OECD Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies. A provocatve case might however be made for re-imaging “statistics” — as exemplifying state language – with something akin to “dynastics”.
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It can be readily argued that this collection of “states” offers no indication of how they are interrelated systemically between the domains so thematically bounded. This systemic connectivity has been the primary preoccupation of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential now accessible online.
A web-based, open platform for actors in all sectors to share, visualize, and analyze data related to the underlying conditions of conflict that exist in areas prone to violence and mass atrocities globally to inform policy and enable action.
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Atrocity prevention is about more than collecting and presenting data about conflict risk and opportunities for peacebuilding in an eye-catching and clever way. We also need to present data in a way that simultaneously entices and helps facilitate exchanges among networks of actors who don't usually talk to one another. All sectors must be creatively engaged and working together to effectively confront the challenges that make up the underlying conditions of conflict. These social, economic, political, and security issues are all interrelated. Absent the big picture, solving one problem in isolation may just exacerbate another.
Nicholas Carr, futurist and author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, has provided a tremendous amount of insight into how/why technology, and the Internet specifically, shapes both our behaviors and neurophysiology. According to Carr while the Web is unarguably a tremendous asset, it has also re-wired our neural pathways via neuro-plasticity. Due to the design of Web 2.0 the Internet has made us less contemplative, less empathetic, and more schizophrenic in our thinking. Carr's work serves as an excellent compliment to the writings of other Web 2.0 contrarians such as Jaron Lanier and Doug Rushkoff.
Post below is a brief interview with Carr conducted in late 2012:
SEED-Scale (Self-Evaluation for Effective Decision-making) is a methodology for community-organizing and resilience-building pioneered by the NGO Future Generations. SEED-Scale is a powerful and attractive alternative in an environment presently dominated by the over-professionalized and foundation-funded 501(c)3 Model. Unlike the 501(c)3, SEED-Scale approaches community-organizing from a much different perspective. In many ways it recaptures the spirit of grassroots movements such as AIM (American Indian Movement), and is in important respects similar to the Zapatistas democratic/egalitarian/bottom-up approach in Latin America:
SEED-SCALE offers a solution…It does this by focusing on the one resource available to us all: Human Energy. When human energy is viewed as the essential commodity that will improve lives, individuals are shown to already posses an infinite resource they can build on. Therefore, resourcefulness is the end result, rather than a compulsion for resource consumption. Working with resources already owned—and everyone who is alive owns the resource of their own energy—then technologies, social systems, information, financing will all follow. And if momentum builds around the application of human energy, it will shape to local ecology, economy, and values.
