Here is a fragment from a listserve that is related to reflexivity. It explains how social science is different from physical science. Assuming that an approach developed for physical systems can also be used for social systems will miss a key feature of social systems.
Very interesting paper on application of science to agriculture, in which the authors come up with this very interesting notion of ‘systemic science':
“A systemic science is a science that influences its own subject area.”
This explicitly tackles the challenge thrown down by Michel Foucault concerning the human sciences, for which the problematic was that their object of study (say the human mind) was at the same time their subject (us humans studying that object of study). The application to agricultural is very clear, succinct and makes very good sense of such a systemic science. Don't know the authors and haven't come across any of their previous work. The paper is longish but very readable:
Phi Beta Iota: BGen James Cox, CA, as Deputy N-2, was General William Clark, USA / SACEUR ‘s action flag for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). He arranged for Robert Steele to brief all flag officers and colonels in charge of military intelligence across all NATO and Partnership for Peace (Eastern European) countries, and he sponsored the triad of NATO OSINT documents that remain a standard in the field, albeit long over-due for being replaced with a new “rainbow series” that itemizes sources and methods within each of the eight tribes: Academic/Gold, Civil Society/Brown, Commerce/Gray, Government/Red, Law Enforcement/NYPD Blue, Media/Orange, Military/Olive Green, and Non-Governmental/Non-Profit/UN Blue. Our efforts to inform the Secretary General of the United Nations have failed so far.
On the Record:
I can say that even during what was done and the establishment of an ‘OSINT' cell in the SHAPE Int staff, I never thought that anyone had it fully ‘right.' By that I mean, when the OSINT cell was raised in SHAPE, all they did was collect open source information, mainly from print media like Jane's, the Economist Intelligence Unit and Stratfor, and feed it to the small analytical staff. There was no analyizing the open source information in its own right and producing ‘real' OSINT from it.
The process, to my mind, simply stopped at “OSINFO” and never got to “OSINT.”
Even today, I think this is still a problem in most ‘modern' intelligence staffs. People think that simply collecting open source info – although now from a wider range of sources – is OSINT, when I say it is not. It's like collecting satellite pictures and calling them IMINT … the job isn't done until they are analyzed and an assessment made.
BGen James Cox, CA (Then) UNOSOM II Chief of Staff in Mogadishu
If I was king of the world, I would build an OSINT organization to rival existing national SIGINT organizations (CSEC in Canada, NSA in US) and HUMINT organizations (CSIS in Canada, CIA in US). This OSINT organization would be in a number of big buildings around the country, tapped into all the sources you have long written about (media, experts, academia … all tribes) AND they would produce magnificent ‘single source' OSINT products that could be added to SIGINT, HUMINT, IMINT etc. products at the national level.
Given the power and range of today's global communications, I suspect OSINT products would be more complete and powerful than any other single source product.
Phi Beta Iota: And 96% of the time, any other all-source product, at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of time.
“This is the report that Ushahidi did not want you to see.” Or so the rumors in certain circles would have it. Some go as far as suggesting that Ushahidi tried to burry or delay the publication. On the other hand, some rumors claim that the report was a conspiracy to malign and discredit Ushahidi. Either way, what is clear is this: Ushahidi is an NGO that prides itself in promoting transparency & accountability; an organization prepared to take risks—and yes fail—in the pursuit of this mission. In order to live up to this commitment, any analysis of the organizaion should be open for the public to read and discuss.
The report in question is CrowdGlobe: Mapping the Maps. A Meta-level Analysis of Ushahidi & Crowdmap. Astute observers will discover that I am indeed one of the co-authors. Published by Internews in collaboration with George Washington University, the report (PDF) reveals that 93% of 12,000+ Crowdmaps analyzed had fewer than 10 reports while a full 61% of Crowdmaps had no reports at all. The rest of the findings are depicted in the infographic below (click to enlarge) and eloquently summarized in the above 5-minute presentation delivered at the 2012 Crisis Mappers Conference (ICCM 2012).
Phi Beta Iota: This is a good start — and applause for moral high ground. Now take it a step further — no one or two opens will do by themselves. We have to go “all in” across all the opens. Open cloud, open hardware, open software, open spectrum, open standards. See the list (preliminary) and the manifesto at http://tinyurl.com/OSE-LIST
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In the end, I believe that those who call forth the most collective intelligence and wisdom will be those who can manifest – and help others manifest – two vital capacities:
1. the ability to include more of what is normally overlooked and excluded and
2. the ability to use diversity and disturbance creatively.
Obviously, these are not always easy to do. But then, neither is “Love your neighbor as yourself”. However, we all need to exercise these holistic muscles at least a little bit on our shared journey to collective wisdom.
These capacities are important because our world is whole, complex, interconnected, and always changing. It is seriously messy and hard to track. It is all too easy to overlook the many non-obvious, non-trivial factors that will – or could – play a big role in what's going to happen next.
In order to notice as many of these tricky factors as possible, we need to step out of our normal ways of thinking and feeling. That's why I advocate a bias towards inclusion and the ability, once we include some of those tricky borderline cases, to use the resulting diversity and disturbance creatively.
So this is an invitation to welcome into our midst some non-obvious, non-trivial people, puzzles, information, perspectives, and resources that we would rather not have to pay attention to but which – from some loftily objective perspective – we had better take into account if we want to achieve anything remotely like wisdom and transformational innovation. Mainstream business-as-usual – especially limited to our comfort zones – is just not going to cut it.
THE FRINGES
Some practitioners of Open Space have a saying – “Welcome the stranger” – that hints at this. Open Space – like many other nonlinear “emergent processes” (e.g., The World Cafe, Appreciative Inquiry, Dynamic Facilitation) – has a quirky capacity to productively deal with the resulting diversity and disturbance.
A big problem in sharing even excellent, well-sourced information on the theme of pedophiles occupying the highest ranks of organizations, whether they be corporate, governmental or even religious, is not the sense of incredulity such information usually provokes in typically asleep middle-class readers who have lived relatively protected, cocooned existences oblivious to the innumerable black undersides of what some call reality. That's to be expected from those who live in middle-class cocoons. The real difficulty is in examining and sharing information on practices that are unarguably loathsome, depraved, vile, degenerate and in essence evil, and done by people we look upon as our highest and most respectable leaders. It's easy to accuse someone of evil, and it is insufficient by itself to do so. One has to provide evidence, and providing evidence entails describing something ineffably malign and almost unutterable in its horror – that's hard to do, by comparison, because except for those with a strong appetite or attraction to very, very dark things, a minority, no one else, understandably, wants to look at such things. People flee from what repels them, and what is more repellent than pederasts, especially those who have great power and privilege?
This undoubtedly largely has to do with living in a dominantly secular age. The influence of those who don't believe in a Divine Order or God is pervasive enough to compel the masses to assume the flip side: to take for granted there is no Devil, no source of deep, abiding non-human evil. Anything conveyed about people and their practices that smacks of a quality or degree of evil that puts the smug assumptions of modernity into doubt, that makes the Satanic much more plausible despite the stubborn persistence of modernity's assumptions about good and evil, is an object of terror and revulsion to the degree that modernity's values has descended into people's hearts and minds. Not that religious “authorities” can be counted on to protect innocent children. Note the Catholic Church's endless calls to stop abortion, which victimizes innocent children, they say, which is all well and good, but its compulsive, monotonic repetition of this meme seems to be a sign of a compensatory spilling-out of a guilty conscience for having permitted and protected the many pederast priests in its midst. They seem to ignore the more concrete or real crime in exchange for protesting the more abstract one when it comes to their most repeated phrase: innocent children. This happens likely because the real crime is done by their very own, at the center of power and control in the Church, by priests and their bishops.
For these and other reasons, getting the message out about pedophiles who are very powerful is more challenging and daunting than getting out information on any other category of crimes performed by members of the Elite. Yet the task should be done, if only as a microscopic, belated effort to help get some chance of justice for the countless and truly innocent children victimized and even tortured and killed by pederasts, especially those in the highest places, plus to help prevent new such crimes by the high and mighty especially.
