Intelligence (Collective & Quantum) – Page 13

2007/01/172009/12/04

Review: Infotopia–How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

4 Star, Change & Innovation, Democracy, Education (General), Future, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

Amazon Page

Complements Wikinomics, Solid but Incomplete,

January 17, 2007

Cass Sunstein

I was initially disappointed, but adjusted my expectations when I reminded myself that the author is at root a lawyer. The bottom line on this book is that it provided a very educated and well-footnoted discourse the nature and prospects for group deliberation, but there are three *huge* missing pieces:

1) Education as the necessary continuous foundation for deliberation

2) Collective Intelligence as an emerging discipline (see the Innovators spread sheet at Earth Intelligence Network); and

3) No reference to Serious Games/Games for Change or budgets as a foundation for planning the future rather than predicting it.

In the general overview the author discusses information cocoons (self-segregation and myopia) and information influences/social pressures that can repress free thinking and sharing.

The four big problems that he finds in the history of deliberation are amplifying errors; hidden profiles & favoring common or “familiar” knowledge; cascades & polarization; and negative reinforements from being within a narrow group.

Today I am missing a meeting on Predictive Markets in DC (AEI-Brookings) and while I regret that, I have thoroughly enjoyed the author's deep look at Prediction Markets, with special reference to Google and Microsoft use of these internally. This book, at a minimum, provides the very best overview of prediction markets that I have come across. At the end of the book is an appendix listing 18 specific predictions markets with their URLs.

The author goes on to provide an overview of the Wiki world, and is generally very kind to Jimbo Wales and Wikipedia, and less focused on the many altneratives and enhancements of the open Wiki. It would have been helpful here to have some insights for the general reader on Doug Englebart's Open Hypertextdocument System (OHS) and Pierre Levy's Information Economy Meta Language (IEML), both of which may well leave the mob-like open wiki's in the dust.

Worthy of note: Soar Technology is quoted as saying that Wikis cut project development time in half.

The book draws to a close with further discussion of the challenges of self-segregation, the options for aggregating views and knowledge and for encouraging feedback, and the urgency of finding incentives to induce full disclosure and full participation from all who have something to contribute.

This book excels in its own narrowly-chosen domain, but it is isolated from the larger scheme of things including needed educational changes, the importance of belief systems as the objective of Intelligence and Information Operations (I2O), the role of Serious Games/Games for Change, and the considerable work that has been done by Collective Intelligence pioneers, who just held their first convergence conference call on 15 January 2007.

Final note: the author uses NASA and the Columbia disaster, and CIA and the Iraq disaster, as examples, but does not adequately discuss the pathologies of bureaucracy and the politicization of intelligence and space. As a former CIA employee who also reads a great deal, I can assert with confidence that CIA has no trouble aggregating all that it knew, including the reports of the 30 line crossers who went in and then came back to report there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction. CIA has two problems: 1) Dick Cheney refused to listen; and 2) George Tenet lacked the integrity to go public and go to Congress to challenge Dick Cheney's malicious and impeachable offenses against America (see my reviews of “VICE” and of “One Percent Doctrine” on Cheney, and my many reviews on the mistakes leading up to and within the Iraq war). See also my reviews of “Fog Facts” and “Lost History” and Gaddis' “The Landscape of History.”

To end on an upbeat note, what I see in this book, and “Wikinomics” and “Collective Intelligence” and “Tao of Democracy” and my own “The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political,” is a desperate need for Amazon to take on the task of aggregating books and building out from books to create social communities where all these books can be “seen” and “read” and “understood” as a whole. We remain fragmented in the production and dissemination of information, and consequently, in our own mind-sets and world-views. Time to change that, perhaps with Wiki-books that lock-down the original and then give free license to apply OHS linkages at the paragraph level, and unlimited wike build-outs. That's what I am in Seattle to discuss this week.

Click Here to Vote on Review at Amazon,

on Cover Above to Buy or Read Other Reviews,

I Respond to Comments Here or There

2007/01/162009/12/04

Review: Wikinomics–How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

5 Star, Economics, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public)

Amazon Page

Solid FOUR, Some Preening, Double-Spaced Overview,

January 16, 2007

Don Tapscott

Out of respect for Laura K. Turner's deeper knowledge of this author, I am integrating some of her observations and correcting myself where appropriate. The edit below raising the book to a four was done immediately after publishing the original review.

EDIT: After reading Cass Sunstein's book, which earned a four, I feel compelled to raise this to a four but Amazon does not allow me to change star ratings. This is a solid four, the preening not-withstanding.

There are a *lot* of platitudes in this double-spaced book, to the point that I felt I was reading a very simplified version of more complex ideas (which is of course a plus when dealing with ill-informed corporate chiefs and policy-makers (see Ben Gilad, “Blindspots” from Infonortics UK, not available via Amazon).

I've read stuff by this primary author (Tapscott) before and he has certainly made sustained contributions to our understanding, am just wondering if this book was a bit too quickly done–it struck me as more simplistic and shallower than I expected. Although Ms. Turner refers to seven distinct business models, neither “model” nor “business model” appear in the book's index, and my original impression, after a second look at the book and my notes, stands: the subtitle says it all: this is about mass collaboration.

There are a few flaws with this book that would normally take it down to three stars, but given the importance of the topic, the quick read, and the known serious past of the author, I have brought it back up to four after comparing it with “Infotopia.” It is double-spaced with a heavy dose of jargon, with a very over-simplified and uncritical view of the unfettered joys of globalization. This author has evidently never heard of “true cost” or “natural capitalism.”

In light of Ms. Turner's comments, I freely admit to lacking the deeper understanding of past books by the primary author, and I suspect that her spirited defense of this book rests more on substance from the past that a reader of this book cannot fathom.

As one who was first educated in the 1970's, I found it a real irritant to have the author appear to invent and be the catalyst for ideas like prosumer (Alvin Toffler, first used in his keynote speech to my annual conference in 1993), importance of external knowledge (Peter Drucker), and the paradigm shift (Thomas Kuhn in “The Structure of Scientific Revolution”). The author says that he “Don” wrote the book on paradigm shifts. Although the author footnotes the first two, not the third, this is in the end-notes and the sense of preening and exaggeration is distinctly annoying, especially when combined with the almost total lack of recognition of any of the 300 or so books by others about wealth of knowledge, infinite wealth, forbidden knowledge, Voltaire's bastards, etc. This struck me as a very self-centered book in more ways than one.

Now, Ms. Turner says a book should be judged on its rigor, coherence, creativity, and readability. B for the first two, A for the second two.

Although the author mentions GoogleEarth on more than one occasion, there is not real development in this book of the importance of the geospatial foundation for sharing all information in historical and cultural context.

A few minor thoughts worth noting:

–Well-done Wikis (the author makes no mention of trolls or all the other problems associated with Wikipedia) cut email by 75% and meetings by 50%. Would that this were so, and properly documented, but it's a start.

–90% of most R&D is internal and therefore lacking in the diversity that might come from the larger open network. This is *very* important. We need to build the World Brain and machine-speed translation and integration. Singapore, the Nordic nations, and even Estonia are ahead of the USA in this area.

–top billion people are believed by some to have 2-6 spare hours a day during which they could be contributing knowledge and mentoring to the larger group. [Bottom five billion desperately need to be connected to the Net for free, and if we did that–for what we have spent on Iraq we could have given out 5 billion free cell phones–they would create infinite wealthy.]

–Bill Gates thinks that Free/Open Source Software is communist. I guess that's the equivalent of me thinking Microsoft is fascist.

–Four things I had *not* heard of: CollabNet, Scorecard, InnoCentive, and TakingITGlobal.

I am posting two customer images here to try to make the point that the world of mass collaboration is a great deal more complicated and also a great deal more exciting, than the author communicates.

Bottom line: if you are not immersed in this topic, and want one book to partly understand your kids and the emerging, this one will do nicely. It was not deep enough to fully occupy me during a five hour trip from coast to coast–take a second book as back-up.

In addition to acknowledging Ms. Turner's helpful and professionally presented observations, I am using the new feature to add links to other books I recommend. You can see my many lists (especially the one on creating infinite wealth and the other on cheating the 90% that do the real work) for many other recommendations, and if you want to see my reviews easily when books have tens or hundreds of reviews, use the selection box in the upper right of your Amazon profile page. I do not list the author's books because of the limit to 10, but certainly Paradigm Shift and The Digital Economy as well as Digital Capital can be considered.

I conclude that I read broadly and Ms. Turner reads deeply, and I hope this review is a useful intersection of our combined paths.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Introduction to Paradigms: Overview, Definitions, Categories, Basics, Optimizing Paradigms & Paradigm Engines
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

Three new references (10 May 2008):
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2006/08/092009/12/04

Review: The Wealth of Networks–How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Hardcover)

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Culture, Research, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Amazon Page

Manifesto for the 21st Century of Informed Prosperous Democracy,

August 9, 2006

Yochai Benkler

Edit of 14 Apr 08 to add links (feature not available at the time).

Lawrence Lessig could not say enough good things about this book when he spoke at Wikimania 2006 in Boston last week, so I ordered it while listening to him. It arrived today and I dropped everything to go through it.

This book could well be the manifesto for 21st Century of Informed Prosperous Democracy. It is a meticulous erudite discussion of why information should not be treated as property, and why the “last mile” should be built by the neighborhood as a commons, “I'll carry your bits if you carry mine.”

The bottom line of this book, and I will cite some other books briefly, is that democracy and prosperity are both enhanced by shared rather than restricted information. The open commons model is the only one that allows us to harness the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth, where each individual can made incremental improvements that cascade without restraint to the benefit of all others.

As I write this, both the publishing and software industries are in the midst of a “last ditch” defense of copyright and proprietary software. I believe they are destined to fail, and IBM stands out as an innovative company that sees the writing on the wall–see especially IBM's leadership in developing “Services Science.”

The author has written the authoritative analytic account of the new social and political and financial realities of a networked world with information embedded goods. There have been earlier accounts–for example, the cover story of Business Week on “The Power of Us” with its many accounts of how Lego, for example, received 1,600 free engineering development hours from its engaged customers of all ages. Thomas Stewart's “The Wealth of Knowledge,” Barry Carter's “Infinite Wealth,” Alvin and Heidi Toffler's most recent “Revolutionary Wealth,” all come to the same conclusion: you cannot manage 21st Century information-rich networks with 20th Century industrial control models.

Lawrence Lessig says it best when he speaks of the old world as “Read Only” and the new world as “Read-Write” or interactive. His fulsome praise for this author and this book suggest that the era of sharing and voluntary work has come of age.

On that note, I wish to observe that those who label the volunteers who craft Wikis including the Wikipedia as “suckers” are completely off-base. The volunteers are the smartest of the smart, the vanguard for a new economy in which bartering and sharing displace centralized financial and industrial control. Indeed, with the localization of energy, water, and agriculture, this book by this author could not be more important or timelier.

One final supportive anecdote, this one from the brilliant Michael Eisen, champion of open publishing. He captured the new paradigm perfectly at Wikimania when he likened the current publishing environment as one in which scientists give birth to babies, the publishers play a mid-wifery role, and then claim that as midwives, they have a perpetual right to the babies and will only lease them back to the parents. What a gloriously illuminating analogy this is.

I will end by tying this book and this author to C.K. Prahalad's “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.” That other book focuses on the fact that the five billion poor are actually worth four trillion in disposable income, versus the one billion rich worth one trillion. C.K. Prahalad posits a world in which capitalism stops focusing on making disposable high-end high cost goods, and turns instead to making sustainable low-cost goods. I see the day coming when–the avowed goal of the Wiki Foundation–there is universal free access to all information in all languages all the time.

If Marx and his Communist Manifesto were the tipping point for communism, this book is the tipping point for communal moral capitalism. Yochai Benkler is–along with Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, Lawrence Lessig, Jimbo Wales, Ward Cunningham, Brewster Kahle, and Cass Sunstein, one of the bright shining lights in our constellation of change makers.

He ends his book on an optimistic note. Despite the craven collaboration of the U.S. Congress in extending copyright forever into the distant future, he posits a reversal of all these bad laws (it used to be legal to discriminate against women and people of color) by the combination of cultural, social, economic, and technical forces that have their own imperative. Would that it were so, sooner.

I beg indulgence for listing five books I have published. I know you all know about Smart Mobs, Wisdom of the Crowds, Army of Davids, etc. See also the literature resilience, panarchy, and social entrepreneurship.

Peace (and prosperity) for all, in our time.

2006/07/222009/12/04

Review: Free Software, Free Society–Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (Hardcover)

6 Star Top 10%, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public)

Amazon Page

Essential Reading for any Intelligent Adult Favoring Social Progress,

July 22, 2006

Richard M. Stallman

I bought this book at Hackers on Planet Earth 6, and then after reading it in the morning, had the double benefit of hearing the author as keynote speaker in the afternoon. He is everything the book's contents suggest, and more. The author is one of the original MIT hackers (pick up a used copy of Shirley Turkle's “My Second Self, Computers and the Human Spirit” and/or Steven Levy's “Hacker's” which the author himself recommends.

The author's brilliant bottom line is quite clear throughout the book: software copyright prevents people from improving or sharing the foundation for progress in the digital era.

The author's social-technical innovation, which appears now to be acquiring tsunami force around the world, and is manifested in the Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) movement that is being nurtured by governments worldwide from Brazil to China to Israel to the United Kingdom to Norway, is to modify copyright to a term he credits to another, copyleft, meaning that copyright in the new definition grants ALL permissions EXCEPT the permission to RESTRICT the enhancement and sharing of the software.

The author is also very careful to define the term free as meaning freedom of movement and growth, not free of price. GNU, his invention, removes computational obstacles to competition, and levels the playing field for more important innovations. In his view, the core issue is not about price, but about eliminating restrictions to freedom of sharing and enhancement.

On page 37 he sums up his life's purpose: “Proprietary and secret software is the moral equivalent of runners having a fist fight (during the race)” — they all lose.

The author carefully distinguishes between the free and open source software, citing the first as a movement with values, the second as a process.

His candidacy for a Nobel Prize is captured in the sentence on page 61, “Free software contributes to human knowledge, non-free software does not.”

Across the book, a collection of essays put into a very well ordered (not necessarily chronological) form, this book is a history of GNU (not UNIX) by its creator and co-founder of the Free Software Foundation. It is replete with concise useful discussions of terms, conditions, and cultures relevant to the future of mankind as a thinking forward looking species.

Section two, on copyright, copyleft, and patents is very helpful, and likely to become a standard in the field as the public fires elected representatives who sell out to Mickey Mouse copyright extenders, and demands a return to the original Constitutional limitation of copyright as an artifact of government, not a natural right, focused on nurturing knowledge. It means mention that Lawrence Lessig (see my reviews of his books) writes the introduction–the two authors together, along with Cass Sunstein, may be the most important trio of thinkers with respect to the future of man in the context of science, copyright, risk, and software as a human global contributor to sanity.

The author's keynote address at HOPE 6 is discussed toward the end of the book, where he lists the Four Freedoms:

Freedom 0: Run a program as you wish, for any purpose you wish, not limited to any narrowly defined application.

Freedom 1: Help yourself by improving the program (which requires access to source code).

Freedom 2: Help your neighbor by sharing a copy of the program with them.

Freedom 3: Help community by sharing the improved copy at large.

There is no question in my mind but that this manifesto of a single man's life's work is as important as Tom Paine's Common Sense treatises. There is a war now emergent between the classes (US elites bribing foreign elites, both screwing their publics over for private gain), and between corporations and the people, corporations long having abused the independent legal personality that was granted to promote business, and ended up being a legal barrier to holding corporate managers accountable for grand theft and social irresponsibility.

Toward the end the author offers thoughtful suggestions on how to “drop out” of the proprietary software world, and his thinking resonates with “No Logo” and its recommendations on selective purchasing.

This book is not a technical book although it offers up many understandable insights to technical matters underlying the social philosophy of the author. It is not a legal book either, but offers important informed commentary vital to getting the law focused again on human progress. Finally, in no way does the book dismiss the importance of capitalism–the author clearly states that it is entirely appropriate to charge a fee for one's contributions–this is about the “how” not the “how much.

Absolutely superb collection of essays, extremely important to where we go in the future. The author is not only an original hacker, he represents hacking as it should be understood by the authorities (see my review of Bruce Sterling, Hackers at the Edge of the Electronic Frontier), and as I see them–as people who have the “right stuff” and are testing the edge, pushing the frontier. In a world of drones, these are the libertarian spirits that may well keep us out of perpetual prison.

For reference: DARPA's STRONG ANGEL program, empowered now by DoD Directive 3000.cc. specifically seeks to create a suite of collaborative sharing and analytic tools that can be provided free to any non-governmental organization and any state and local government. Support costs have to be shared. It is now understood at the highest levels of the US military that we cannot make peace without sharing all information in all languages all the time (my third book), and this is progress.

2006/07/072012/10/31

2006 THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

Books w/Steele, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) lost by eighty-three votes in 2006. A retired U.S. Army Colonel who pioneered Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and whose service on the House Committee for Homeland Security focused on the urgency of greating public intelligence useful to our state, county, municipality, and tribal leaders, his defeat came in part because two editorial boards in his district turned against him with the tide of the times, completely unaware of his very big ideas. This book, published in 2006, was distributed to every member of the House by his staff, and to every Senator by my staff, and we can now be quite certain that not a single Member every actually read this book (just as they do not actually read the legislation they vote on such as the Patriot Act). To read Congressman Simmon's Forword only, click on his photo below.

For a number of related references in the related areas of electoral, intelligence, governance, and national security reform, see Search: smart nation intelligence reform electoral reform national security reform

2006/07/072012/10/31

2006 INFORMATION OPERATIONS: All Information, All Languages, All the Time

Books w/Steele, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

I have learned a great deal from colleagues at the U.S. Special Operations Command. Their most memorable lesson is captured in the following quotation from a person who in my mind represents the very best intellect and ethics that command has to offer:

“Secret intelligence is 10% of all-source intelligence, and all-source intelligence is 10% of Information Operaitons (IO).”

I have long known that acquisition and logistics are the red-headed step-children of the global defense community, and long realized that we create force structure without regard to the actual threat or the actual geospatial conditions in which we will be waging war and peace, but with this book I attempted to address the totality of our information needs in relation to strategic planning and programming for Whole of Government operations, not just military operations. I also believe that we have failed to develop decision support as well as IO capabilities relevant to cdost avoidance, burden sharing, and leveraging opportunities for creating a prosperous world at peace.

Technical Preface by Robert Garigue, CA (RIP)

2006/04/042009/12/04

Review: An Army of Davids–How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths (Hardcover)

4 Star, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

5 for Horizontal Knowledge, 3 for the Rest, 4 on Balance,

April 4, 2006

Glenn Reynolds

There are two “five star” ideas in this book:

1) That horizontal knowledge, peer to peer and distributed network knowledge, is quickly burying bureaucratic “top down” or vertical knowledge.

2) That “technological capitalism,” the author's term, enables the information works to control the means of production, finally achieving what I call “communal capitalism.”

3) Against bureaucracies, terrorists have the learning curve advantage. Against civilians, they did not.” The author is referring to the fact that the entire US intelligence and defense apparatus failed to stop the first two 9-11 planes whose attack was two years in the making, but citizens armed with a cell phone figured it out in 109 minutes and stopped the third plane.

4) Further to this, the author provides a riveting discussion of a story overlooked by the mass media on 9-11, the “improvised Navy” that helped evacuate lower Manhattan in what some call an American Dunkirk.

5) The author discusses the explosion in consumer creation and sharing, and makes a compelling case of suggesting that traditional aggregators of information are dead. Google is likely to die in the next five years, but something after Google will help structure, filter, link, and monetize. We are in a transition period and need to reach a place where all historical information, all current scholarship, and all future online publications, both formal and informal, can be leveraged through semantic web and synthetic information architectures.

Now to bring this full circle, I want to mention just a couple of other books, because what is happening in the USA today, ahead of the rest of the world, are three things:

1) The public was sparked by Howard Dean, and now is becoming empowered and mobilized. Citizen advocacy groups are integrating localized observation, information sharing technologies, and collective brainpower to the point that they are more competent and quicker than the government or corporate or media bureaucracies.

2) This Collective Intelligence or Army of Davids is becoming enraged over the end of the cheap oil (which the government knew about in 1974-1979 and concealed in order to keep the bribes from oil companies coming), the end of free water, the rise of pandemic disease, the decline in education and morality and responsible foreign policy.

3) Intelligent observations are being made by stellar thinkers just as Jeffrey Sachs The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time and C. K. Prahalad The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks) with the result that this Collective Intelligence, now mobilized and incited by the Bush Administration, sees a better way–a path into the future where we spend on peace and ending poverty, instead of war and invading other countries on a web of lies.

Bottom line: this is a useful book that provides a fragment of the total mosaic. I am very glad I got it, and hope that this review will not only lead you to buy the book, but to read my other reviews, which in the aggregate, provide a free graduate education on global issues in about two hours.

EDIT of 11 Dec 07: See also, with reviews:
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
The Global Brain: Your Roadmap for Innovating Faster and Smarter in a Networked World
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
The Wisdom of Crowds
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom