I am beginning to despise the word "social" in "social networks", "social networking", "social software", and so forth ......

Saul Hansell, in the piece "Steering Between Unsocial Networks and Social Spam" from today's (5/13/08) New York Times, sort of agrees with me.

Is this ridiculous, or what?
Sure, it's a nice story line, but are we to believe that if you hang out with violent people you will become violent?

In any case, while I am still working on my contribution to the discourse on Web 2.0 & Government, I have two recommendations for any of our readers interested in the matter:

First, Philipp Mueller, who has already contributed some guest entries to this blog, is offering a course on "Government 2.0" for master students at Erfurt University's School of Public Policy (ESPP) (Spring term 2008). The course covers various aspects such as Web 2.0, open source, NPM, PPP, citizen-centric governance or performance management. The sessions can be viewed online or downloaded as an mp3 file.

Second, a blog by David Osimo, a researcher at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre IPTS, who is working on the impact of Web 2.0 on public services.

Many of the "exhibits" are network representations (including a few that I use in elementary lectures on network science). And the website showing them (since the exhibits are all digital) is amazing.

Check it out: Design and the Elastic Mind .

International Meeting on Methodology for Empirical Research on Social Interactions, Social Networks, and Health

which will be held early in May in Cambridge. It's being organized by Chuck Manski and Nicholas Christakis, and hosted by The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard.

Objective: To bring together econometricians, social statisticians and social network analysts to improve research on the relationship between social interactions and healthy.

Speakers and topics:

Opening Remarks, Charles Manski, Northwestern University

"Social Contagion in Health Behaviors in Current and Future Longitudinally Resolved Social Network Datasets" Nicholas Christakis, Harvard University

"Stochastic Blockmodels for Networks with Mixed Membership and Challenges for Modeling Dynamically Evolving Networks" Steve Fienberg, Carnegie Mellon University

"Social Interactions from the Perspective of Economics" Steven Durlauf, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"New Models for Dynamic Analysis of Multi-Sided (Large Scale) Conflict" Peter Bearman, Columbia University

"Human Dynamics: From Priorities to Human Travel Patterns" Laszlo Barabasi, Northeastern University

"Superspreaders or Limited Access Highways? Explaining Generalized Epidemics and Prevalence Disparities in HIV" Martina Morris, University of Washington

"Separating Social Influence from Social Selection on the Basis of Longitudinal Data and Statistical Models" Tom Snijders, University of Oxford

"Longitudinal Model of Network Formation: Heider's Theory of Balance vs. Simmel's Triadic Formation", Mark Handcock, University of Washington

"Network Topology and its Implications for Model-Building" Pip Pattison, University of Melbourne

"Selection and Influence: Models for Individual Attributes and Social Network Structures" Garry Robins, University of Melbourne

"The Average Outcome and Inequality Implications of Segregation in the Presence of Social Spillovers " Bryan Graham, University of California, Berkeley

"Point Process Estimation of Large-scale Spatial Dependencies", Matthew Harding, Stanford University

Closing remarks, Nicholas Christakis, Harvard University

Contact Info:

Gabrielle Stone, IQSS Events Coordinator

tel: 617-495-9489

"From the Bottom-up: Building the 21st Century CIA"

Sean Dennehy
Chief of the CIA Intellipedia Development Cell

Don Burke
Intellipedia Doyen

Abstract: In this seminar, Sean Dennehy and Don Burke will brief the technical and cultural changes underway at the CIA involving the adoption of wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking tools. These tools are being used to improve information sharing across the US Intelligence Community by moving information out of traditional channels. Sean and Don will also host a question and answer session. In 2005, Dr. Calvin Andrus published “The Wiki and The Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.” Three years later, a vibrant and rapidly growing community has transformed how the CIA aggregates, communicates, and organizes intelligence information.

Sean Dennehy has more than 15 years of experience in various elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, DIA’s Joint Staff Intelligence, and supporting US Air Force operations. As the pilot customer for Intellipedia, he has become a leading change agent for incorporating Enterprise 2.0 solutions into the Intelligence Community's business practices. He has developed an innovative “sabbatical” program that introduces Intelligence Community officers to the numerous web 2.0 applications that are being deployed on multiple intelligence networks. The focus of his efforts is encouraging a viral adoption where officers replace existing processes to take advantage of network effects encountered when individuals move projects out of “channels” and onto “platforms”. His actions are based on the National Intelligence Strategy’s six main characteristics: results-focused, collaborative, bold, future-oriented, self-evaluating, and innovative. Together with a small cadre of early adopters, Mr. Dennehy is helping to break down stovepipes to allow intelligence professionals to truly act as a "community”.

Don Burke is a leading proponent of the Enterprise 2.0 ethos within the Intelligence Community and is currently the "Intellipedia Doyen", which is a role he has held since the spring of 2006. In this role he is partnered with other early adopters in an effort to demonstrate the value of social software tools, educate the Community on how to use these tools, and advocate for improvements to the environment with the goal of improving our ability to capture our knowledge and expertise. Mr. Burke is currently employed by the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology and has a diverse 19+ year background in the Federal Government working a wide range of technical and analytical issues including collection, technical analysis, congressionally directed actions, direct support to operations, project management, advanced visualization technologies, software development, budgeting, and management. Mr. Burke was quoted extensively in the October 2007 SIGNAL magazine article "Intellipedia Seeks Ultimate Information Sharing."

Relevant Readings:

1. NY Times Article (good for general introduction to IC cultural and technological issues)
URL:
2. 2004 - Seminal Paper about why the IC needs to adopt social software technologies
Title: The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community
3. Wikipedia article on "Intellipedia"

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The article appeared in a special section of the New York Times today called "Tech Innovation". The section is filled to the brim with exciting and innovative ideas - one of these coming from the ever resourceful Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs. Together with his team he developed the prediction markets tool "Brain" (Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks), which can be employed to predict the demand of a new service, such as Internet television. I loved Huberman's quote a propos his brainchild: "We want to reduce the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of 12 or 13 people." Hopefully the right ones.

The Virginia Tech Symposium on Enhancing Resilience To Catastrophic Events Through Communicative Planning

Introduction

The Institute for Policy and Governance and the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech invite scholars to consider how collaborative planning can enhance resilience to events that threaten to overcome the social and ecological integrity of communities, states, and societies. Presentations and discussion will be held in Blacksburg, VA on November 16-18, 2008, and symposium papers will be edited and revised for journal and/or book publication in early 2009.

Description and Call For Papers

In an essay entitled "The Resilient Community", Virginia Tech Planning Professor Paul Knox (2007) suggested that the widely-admired response of the university to the April 16th 2007 campus shootings was grounded in affective bonds and close-knit social networks that instill community spirit. The bedrock of Virginia Tech’s common identity and shared purpose, Knox suggested, was collaborative interaction that challenges assumptions, stretches the imagination, and develops self-awareness, as students and faculty interact in ways that remake their inner selves, social selves, and professional selves.

Over the past year, planning scholars at Virginia Tech have been considering how collaboration might enhance resilience not only in intentional communities like universities but also within neighborhoods, states, and societies. We wish to extend this arena of scholarly interest and compelling social need by inviting speakers to Blacksburg to consider how collaboration can enhance resilience to disruptions that can occur across a spectrum of time, space, and organizational complexity, from unforeseen violence to disasters like hurricane Katrina to the biospheric catastrophe of rapid anthropogenic climate change.

Resilience is a potent interdisciplinary systems metaphor whose origins lie in the Latin word "resilíre", meaning "to leap back." Hazard planners, security analysts, and others have deployed the term to describe efforts to restore and maintain an optimal stable condition. A more promising approach for our purposes defines resilience as an interactive product of an unsettling event and a social and biophysical system that can exist in multiple stable states, at scales that may encompass communities, states, or societies. These systems may stabilize, change, or collapse when their integrity is compromised by an event that could be rapid and discrete and irreversible like a terrorist attack, gradual and insidious like climate change, or incremental and spatially heterogeneous like a drought. Resilience is the capacity to withstand loss and recover, to weather disturbance without dramatic loss of identity or structural or functional complexity.

We seek to understand how communicative planning can enhance resilience and how resilience thinking can expand the domain of communicative action. Communicative planners have shown how careful listening and interpretation can accommodate differences in styles of speech, forms of knowledge, and styles of reasoning to promote social learning and yield agreements that are both creative and equitable. Communicative planning scholarship has lately joined in defining emergent forms of collaborative governance, and enlarging its scope from stakeholder-based processes to a diversity of collaborative approaches that can bring to life new discursive frameworks and worldviews that over time can shape institutions, such as regional civic roundtables (Innes and Rongerude 2006) and community reconciliation processes (Sandercock 2003).

We invite interested individuals to submit abstracts that respond to three areas of inquiry:

1. What can collaborative processes contribute toward resilience?

Do collaborative processes create or enhance awareness of resilience dynamics, such as the presence of regime change thresholds, or the possibility of transformative alternatives? Papers might explore how collaborative processes promote learning and knowing and the rapid diffusion of ideas and innovations, nurture and reproduce expertise and ways of knowing. Papers may also address other capacities beyond knowledge formation, such as how collaborative processes may contribute to passing a threshold into an alternative regime, or help manage a system to withstand shocks and avoid a threshold. Another approach would be to examine how leaders can enhance collaborative capacity to identify mutual interest, forge common identity, or foster shared sense of purpose and will to act.

2. How can we design and conduct collaborative processes to enhance resilience?

The principal application of stakeholder-based collaborative planning processes has been to resolve otherwise-intractable disputes. Are similar design and process guidelines appropriate to enhance resilience, or does the new objective call for a different design and approach? In addition, papers might examine how, and under what conditions, collaborative processes might be associated with other forms of networked governance in order to maintain system continuity and integrity, or reorganize in response to changing conditions when existing ways of governing become untenable.

3. When and under what circumstances can collaborative processes contribute to resilience?

While it may take years to foster collective identity and action through collaboration, events that threaten to overcome system integrity often cannot be anticipated and opportunities to influence system reorganization may be fleeting. Papers might examine how collaborative processes can be situated to address threats that are be rapid and discrete, as well as those that are gradual, insidious, incremental, potentially irreversible, intergenerational, or spatially heterogeneous. In addition, papers might consider the circumstances in which collaboration can enhance generalized resilience capacity, which is associated with diverse organizational forms and ways of knowing, loose connections between self-organizing units, and unimpeded circulation of feedback throughout a system (Walker and Salt 2006).

Key Dates

Abstract deadline 30 April 2008
Notification of acceptance 15 May 2008
Deadline for full papers 1 October 2008
Symposium 16-18 November 2008
Papers Revised for Publication May 2009 (tentatively)

Abstract Submission

Proposals for papers or posters are to be sent by e-mail to resilience@vt.edu.
The body of the e-mail (no attachments please) should contain:

* Title of the proposed paper
* Abstract of less than 300 words, and
* Complete address and professional affiliation of all (co)-author(s).

The deadline for proposals is 30 April 2008.

Financial Support

Travel cost reimbursement will be provided for symposium participants, as well as local transportation, food, and lodging.

Hosts

* Institute for Policy and Governance, Virginia Tech
* School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech

Conference Chair

* Bruce Evan Goldstein, Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech

Advisory Committee

* Max Stephenson, Director, Institute for Policy and Governance, Virginia Tech
* John Randolph, Director, School Policy and International Affairs, Virginia Tech
* R. Bruce Hull, Professor of Forestry, Virginia Tech
* Paul Knox, University Distinguished Professor and Senior Fellow for International Advancement, Virginia Tech

Contact

Bruce Evan Goldstein

Urban Affairs and Planning

103 Architecture Annex

Virginia Tech

Blacksburg, VA 24061

Conference E-mail: resilience@vt.edu
Conference Website: : http://www.ipg.vt.edu/resilience.html

References

Innes, Judith and Jane Rongerude. 2006. "Collaborative Regional Initiatives: Civic Entrepreneurs Work to Fill the Governance Gap ." Working Paper 2006-04. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California at Berkeley.

Knox, Paul. 2007. "The Resilient Community." Planning, June issue.

Sandercock, Leonie. 2003. "Out of the Closet: The Importance of Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice." Planning Theory and Practice 4(1):11-28.

Walker, Brian and David Salt. 2006. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

The way consumers filter their news is being highlighted now that a generation of Americans is coming of age in the midst of a campaign that has generated intense interest and voter involvement. Exit polls in 22 states estimate that more than three million voters under the age of 30 participated in Democratic primaries this year, up from about one million four years ago.

Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was never asked for advice, and was in Paris when the May 22 meeting was held.

“I talked to Rice and said, ‘Condi, what happened?’ ” he recalled. “And her reaction was: ‘I was surprised too, but it is a decision that has been made and the president is standing behind Jerry’s decision. Jerry is the guy on the ground.’ And there was no further debate about it.”

In this election season, perhaps the hardest thing to evaluate about the candidates is one of the most important: how would she or he create a deliberative Presidency? We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our policies at home and abroad, and the next Presidency will be built brick by brick through the myriad of decisions that need to be made in response to the particular challenges that arise on a daily basis. Those decisions must reflect the President's vision of the world, but through the prism of the information and options that exist at particular instances in time. What does it take for the Presidency to successfully navigate the uncertainties of the 21st century?

Extensive research on individual and organizational decision making, including my own work on networks, highlights one prerequisite to high quality decisions: diversity of perspectives and sources of information. The modern Presidency is made up of a mix of careerists and transient political appointees in the Executive Office of the President, connected to relatively slow changing agencies. The key challenge is one of how to manage the connections among these individuals, in order to balance the simultaneous needs for deliberation and decision. Disagreement offers Presidents a menu of choices, where dissent can keep options open, and forces others to critically examine their own perspectives.

The successful President is one who can manage this complex network, creating a pull of information and viewpoints upwards. Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her study of Lincoln, presents a compelling portrait of a President who filled his cabinet with individuals with strong personalities and often conflicting views. In a rather different fashion, Franklin Roosevelt also structured his network so as to receive multiple perspectives, through privately soliciting information from rivals within the White House.

Recent Presidents have developed more institutionalized mechanisms to funnel information upwards. My colleague, Roger Porter, has documented the collegial, if sometimes adversarial, process of soliciting input from agencies regarding economic policy in the Ford administration. I have studied how the regulatory review processes instituted in the Reagan administration has offered the White House a steady stream of signals about regulatory policy in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Both of these processes took advantage of the natural differences of perspective that are embedded within the bureaucracy. These differences can be used to provide illumination as well as heat.

The President also needs to admit some degree of uncertainty as to the best course of action. No President, of course, has begun a speech "I am 51% certainty that I have made the best choice." But internal discussion must begin with an assumption of uncertainty and a respect for alternative points of view. That deliberative foundation must come from the President.

The general set of issues to balance is how distribute involvement in various decisions. Who has information, perspective, and expertise to contribute to a decision? How does one not clog the decision making network with issues of secondary importance so that the key decisions get the collective attention they deserve?

The history book has not yet closed on the current administration, but insider portrayals suggest a systematic mismanagement of the decision-making network. The decision to dissolve the Iraqi army is an example par excellence. This was one of the fundamental strategic decisions post invasion, and one where different bureaucratic actors had different things to contribute to the decision. Clearly, Bremer was in a privileged position vis a vis some of the information, but that did not mean that he was even the best person to process that information. Nation building generally, and rebuilding Iraq specifically was a domain that no one in the US government could claim such unique expertise as to require such deference. This case, and others like it, suggest a fundamental mis-management of the inter-agency process in foreign policy in the Bush Administration.

There is a potential trade-off of decisiveness and discipline on the one hand, and deliberativeness on the other. Clearly, the costs of dithering sometimes exceed the benefits of discussion. However, we face long run existential threats at home and abroad: with radical changes in the distribution of power in the world, and a restructuring of our economy at home. This next Presidency may well prove to be a pivotal one in history, and, to be successful, will require a network that supplies information and perspectives with which to choose the future.

Over the past year, the Obama campaign has quietly worked to integrate the online technologies that fueled the rise of Howard Dean —as well as social-networking and video tools that didn't even exist in 2004 — with the kind of neighbor-to-neighbor movement-building that Obama learned as a young organizer on the streets of Chicago.

…

The meeting in San Marcos wasn't advertised in any traditional sense. Instead, the campaign posted the event on my.barackobama.com — its social-networking site affectionately known as "MyBo" — and e-mailed local residents who had donated to the campaign or surrendered their addresses as the price of admission to an Obama rally. And the volunteers who showed up won't be micromanaged…. They'll be able to call their own shots, from organizing local rallies to recruiting and training a crew of fellow Obama supporters to man their precincts on election day. To identify and mobilize Obama backers, they'll log on to the password-protected texasprecinctcaptains.com, download the phone numbers of targeted voters, make calls from their homes and upload the results to Austin headquarters. They'll also organize early-voting open houses — which will be publicized on MyBo — to boost turnout among core supporters. "Instead of hoping that your neighbors vote," Ukman tells them in an unintentional twist on the campaign's central theme, "you're going to take them to the polls."

…

Hildebrand actually flipped the equation, using the physical crowds Obama could draw to his rallies to bolster the campaign's e-mail list. In February and March of 2007, just after Obama announced his candidacy, the campaign set up huge rallies in cities from Los Angeles to Austin to Cleveland. In return for a ticket, supporters were asked only to provide their e-mail, zip code and telephone number

…

In Iowa, as many people under thirty caucused as did senior citizens. In every contest, the youth vote has at least doubled and often tripled previous records. Riemer is quick to point out that these successes aren't just the result of the campaign organizing young people but of young people organizing themselves.

Figueroa's goal is not to put supporters to work but to enable them to put themselves to work, without having to depend on the campaign for constant guidance. "We decided that we didn't want to train volunteers," he says. "We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves."

To turn well-meaning students and nurses and social workers into self-sufficient organizers, the campaign has put nearly 7,000 supporters through an intensive, four-day seminar known as "Camp Obama."

…

A strategy that leans so heavily on the grass roots is not without risk. In February, right-wing blogs had a field day when a Fox News affiliate ran footage of a volunteer office in Houston decorated with a Che Guevara flag.

VENDOR-DRIVEN Theory: a vendor's conception or mental scheme of something to be done, or of the method of doing it;

As we are moving into network society, we need to be aware of the phenomenon of vendor-driven theorizing and able to critically reflect vendor-driven theories.

- When we talk about theory, it makes sense to distinguish between theories observing the world and theories shaping the world. Let us call the first, explanatory theories (e.g. Newtonian Physics) and the second constitutive theories ( Liberal Democracy). Of course, most theories are hybrids (think Marxism, Liberalism, or Confucianism), but we can distinguish when hybrid theories observe or shape.

- I use the term vendor-driven theories to talk about situations in which a supposedly neutral software application or management approach introduces a substantive theory into a process. Think of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management in the business world in the 1990s as examples of how the software changed the theory of how business was done.

- ERP and CRM vendors, integrated solution providers, and consulting firms have recently discovered the public sector as the next market for existing software applications. ERP has been re-christened GRP, as in Government Resource Planning and CRM, CiRM, as in Citizen Relationship Management. Government officials and public administrators have been happy to take up the ideas pitched to them and are implementing.

- What is interesting is to ask of course, in how far the analogy between ERP and GRP and CRM and CiRM works and where it breaks down? We also have to ask in how far these vendor-driven theories carry transformative potential and if it corresponds with our ideas about how governance should be organized.

This posting is indebted to Alexander Schellong, Hasnain Bokhari, and Philipp Zimmermann. In discussions with them I developed an appreciation for the amazing/scary transformative power of vendor driven theorizing. I believe it is an important term to introduce into the debate, which I hereby do.