Intelligence (Wealth of Networks) – Page 12

2007/01/232009/12/04

Review: The Starfish and the Spider–The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Consciousness & Social IQ, Democracy, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

Amazon Page

Compelling and Sensible, Offers Hope in Face of High-Level Threats,

January 23, 2007

Ori Brafman

I like this book very much and recommend that it be read in conjunction with “Wikinomics” and “Infotopia,” or at least read my reviews there. Each of these three books has its own perspective and the combine well. There are other books, such as Kevin Kelly's and Howard Rheingold's that were ten to fifteen years ahead of what is now “conventional wisdom” and it is important to give credit to the true pioneers.

From a business and governance perspective, the book is valuable in emphasizing that any endeavor based on information will improve with decentralization–more dots will be captured, shared, understood, and acted on in a timely fashion. I have been saying for over a decade that in the age of distributed information, central intelligence is an oxymoron, something the Central Intelligence Agency, my former employer, simply refuses to believe.

I listened to Al Gore last night on Global Warming, in Boise, Idaho–10,000 people who gave him multiple standing ovations, and I plan to listen to George Bush on Iraq tonight. Al gets it, George does not. Centralized systems cannot defeat decentralized systems. Al Gore is leading a massive global campaign to get all of us to change the planet from the bottom up, while George (or Dick Cheney, depending on who you think actually runs the place) is deepening America's loss of global standing and moral stature at the same time that he is bankrupting the treasury and destroying the Armed Forces–and planning a conventional attack on Iran at the same time. One of these guys is sane, the other is a nutcase. The good news is that decentralized morality can triumph over centralized corruption, and that is the back story on Al Gore's emergence as a virtual Earth Leader.

The authors offer us a number of gems and conclude with ten rules I will list below.

The key point is that a distributed brain or organization is more resilient and more likely to pick up weak signals. Distributed consensus is both scalable and sustainable, while centralized coercion is neither.

The authors place great emphasis on the importance of a spiritually-compelling ide[a]ology as the glue that helps decentralized organizations adjust to external and internal challenges much faster and with greater precision (as well as fewer resources) that any centralized system can manage. The “catalyst” model (Al Gore) is compared with the “commander in chief” model (George Bush) and there is no doubt at all which is the superior model for addressing today's complex high-level threats.

Indeed, it may be that between state secessions and popular boycotts of corporations using the federal government to pick people's pockets, that the Internet could create a form of global self-governance that makes the Federal government largely irrelevant, while re-directing funds from waging war to waging peace. That is the next big step. The authors specifically say that the price of software is declining toward zero. It will be content, sense-making, and what IBM calls “services science” that will add value and be marketable.

The authors describe Amazon and E-Bay in very favorable terms, and as hybrids with a centralized infrastructure for delivering services, but a vast decentralized network of customers who are also “prosumers” (Alvin Toffler's term) creating value on the network with their reviews and buying patterns. The authors' phrase “decentralized creativity and centralized consistency” jumped out at me.

The ten “rules” (better described as guidelines) are:

01 Diseconomies of scale
02 Network effect
03 Power of chaos
04 Knowledge at the edge
05 Everyone wants to contribute
06 Beware the hydra response
07 Catalysts rule
08 *Values* are the heart of any organization or network
09 Measure, monitor, and manage
10 Flatten or be flattened

Overall, this is a very fine book. I also recommend the emerging literature on the “true cost” meme and on natural capitalism, demonstrating that a proper understanding of the true and long-term costs of any product or service actually makes businesses more profitable and more sustainable.

I have added an image I created in the 1990's when I first started advocating Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), today I am focused on a non-profit, the Earth Intelligence Network, whose objective is to empower individuals and communities with public intelligence in the public interest. This book gave me hope, gave me a sense that we can indeed come together as a global network, and displace the authoritarian and corrupt governments that have been bribed by corporations to loot our commonwealth.

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.

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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.

2006/07/072012/10/31

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)

2006/04/282009/12/04

Review: Revolutionary Wealth (Hardcover)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

TIME as translated into wealth, fouir-part anti-poverty plan,

April 28, 2006

Alvin Toffler

Their first key focus is on TIME and its relation to space, knowledge, and effectiveness as translated into wealth. Innovative businesses are going 100 mph; civil collective groups at 90 mph; the US family at 60 mph, labor unions at 30 mph, government bureaucracies at 25 mph, education at 10 mph, non-governmental organizations including the United Nations at 5 mph, US politics and the participation process at 3 mph, and law enforcement and the law it enforces at 1 mph. This is really quite a helpful informed judgment as to the relative unfitness of all but two of the groups.

The TIME section of the book has some very interesting insights including the fact that anything that requires time, like filling in a form, or that adds time to a process through regulation, is in fact a TIME TAX that is more costly than an old money tax.

The Tofflers note that vice is globalizing faster than virtue. This is very important from a taxation and social goods perspective.

They spend a great deal of time discussing the intangible economy that consists of non-rival knowledge that can be shared and bartered; volunteer time that produces economy value (notably parents who teach their children sanitary habits, how to speak, and discipline or social IQ); and alternative forms of capital–social, moral, whatever. They point out that 60% of the value of the industrial era companies is intangible knowledge, while almost 100% of the new economy is intangible.

This entire book is an Information Operations reference. They discuss global battles to manage our minds in multiple domains–religious, cultural, economic, moral. We need to pay more attention to what filters the target audience uses to determine the truth, and what filters the hostile groups are using to try to shape the local perception of truth to fit their wishes.

The book moves on to discuss what the Tofflers call the “outside brain” or the sum aggregate of knowledge that is available for individual exploitation. By one account, this consists of 12,000 petabytes.

They then begin the heart of the book on “prosumption” and the economic and social value of what they believe can no longer be called capitalism in the traditional sense.

The authors spend a sufficient amount of time exploring the implications of information technology on knowledge creation and capitalization, to include cell phones or other microchip devices that serve simultaneously as identity devices, bank accounts, and knowledge devices (as WIRED said in one issue, point the phone and read the bar code, and see if this product will kill you or if someone else was killed or abused as part of the product's development)

Having explored the emergence of the new economy, they then return to their opening discussion of time, and point out that America's infrastructure and institutions are imploding. Our energy, transportation, health, and educational infrastructures are 50 years out of date and cannot be converted or upgraded fast enough. So we have two Americas, an old industrial era poor America, and a new knowledge age rich America. They articulate a battle raging between decay and revolutionary birth, noting that micro-cash and the Internet are empowering social entrepreneurs who use the Internet to mobilize both volunteers and contributions. Micro finance is liberating small innovators from the death knell of merchant banks and venture capitalists with old mind-sets.

I learned two big things relevant to government tax fraud. Although I knew of import-export tax fraud ($50 billion a year in false pricing, an advanced form of corporate money laundering) Major corporations and most nations are heavily engaged in barter or counter-trades (e.g. billions of dollars in vodka for equivalent value in Pepsi BUT the US corporation can manipulate the valuations). They say many corporations are now moving to a form of internal corporate money so that their subsidiaries can do off the books trades that do not require either taxation or foreign exchange transactions.

The final third of the book is an absorbing discussion of how knowledge can eliminate extreme poverty, which the authors believe is more important than closing the gap between rich and poor. They emphasize that both India and China are leap-frogging the industrial era, with India focusing on connectivity to reduce poverty as well as urbanization, while China is focusing on setting standards that will allow it to “own” future information technology architectures. Africa and Latin America are being lost to Chinese immigrants, language, trade, and aid.

The Toffler's articulate a four part anti-poverty plan that makes sense to me: 1) Use knowledge to wipe out subsistence agriculture, which is the foundation for extreme poverty. They discuss how bio-technology can impact on crop yield, include medical vaccinations, convert crops into fuel, allow precision farming which dramatically reduces water and seed and fertilization costs, and improve sales while sensing disease or other threats to the crops. 2) Empower women, as this one focus leads to advances across the board. 3) End corruption by using knowledge and technology to make it next to impossible and largely transparent–the carrot side of this is that knowledge and technology can lower costs and increase government salaries. 4) Avoid industrial poisons, e.g. do not go with chlorine and oil based industry

The book concludes with a review of China, India, Japan, and Europe as either threats (the first two) or potential disasters (the last two). The authors, while extolling the possibilities of Chinese capitalism, are careful to point out the many things that could go catastrophically wrong for China, and do a similarly balanced presentation on India.

The Tofflers come across as cheerleaders for the future, accepting of the decay and disaster that will be required to dismantle dysfunctional systems including (my observation) the U.S. Government. They see real possibilities of eliminating poverty and stabilizing the world.

If you like this book, bookmark my review page, 1000+ non-fiction books that underlie and expand on this superb work by the Tofflers.

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