Consider these to be notes in progress.
Access
Access, the human kind, is essential to three roles I find of interest: investor, social activist, and amateur reporter.
Access is commonly thought of as a matter of being able to call people
up and talk to them. This is a misleading view of access.
Access to ideas, access to resources, access to goodwill, access to
friendship and the ability to have one’s gifts valued and
received; each of these, and more, are vital. Perhaps the most
fundamental form of access is access to important problems.
We don’t draw on our gifts until we face
problems and address them. People who are
able to get access to really critical problems
develop rare and valued expertise. This deep expertise is
trivialized in talk about one’s “track record,” which is the outward
and visible trace of an inner grace forged be effort, risk, and
reflection.
The principal reason the convention was valuable to those of us who
participated was because it reduced the cost of access. The big
show was an excuse–or perhaps
better said–created a requirement for thousands of people show up in
one place at one time.
And these people had time on
their hands. The prime-time convention
assured that many people were deliciously available in the mornings through late lunch.
My most productive time overall was morning and early afternoon.
This time was best invested hanging out at a table on the patio
of the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, in conversation.
Bobby
One of the people I was able to spend some time on the patio with
is Bobby Muller. Bobby Muller won a Nobel Peace Prize for helping ban
landmines.
The prize itself–a handsome framed affair–sits on the floor
of his office in Washington, D.C. propped against a wall. Bobby
is
not much on ceremony.
Bobby is doing a new site you should know about, called “this is rumor
control.” Here is the address. For some reason it is difficult to
find the site in Google. Rebecca
Rebecca McKinnon has a site that is similar in spirit, but focused on
understanding North Korea. Her site does web-based intelligence
gathering and dissemination under the title North Korea Zone. Rebecca
formerly lead CNN’s Asia News Bureau, and is now at the Berkman
Center. Korea, a notoriously closed society, is in fact
penetrated routinely by travelers of all sorts. Rebecca
provides a safe and thoughtful service of interviewing people
when they come out, and putting together mosaic-style
a better picture of Korea than is available anywhere else.
Me and my friends
This Spring at BloggerCon Rebecca lead a session that focused on the
use of blogging to help understand parts of the world that are normally
hidden from us. Rebecca pointed out three things.
1. Most media attention is focused on a few geographic areas, and
under-reports vast parts of the globe (see Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent work
on media attention). 2. Many parts of the world want to shun
media attention. North Korea, Sudan, Burma and regions within states,
such as the mountains along the Afghanistan Pakistan border, have
leaders who want to maintain a closed stance to the rest of the
world. 3. It is in the interest of society at large to learn
about these closed areas and societies. 4. The internet might be
useful as a way to pull together information from a variety of
sources–especially from travelers entering forbidden zones for
awhile–and to frame that information and make it useful and
current for others.
Rebecca challenged those of us in her session to adopt a
part of the world, and focus attention on them. I chose
Sudan, and with friends began a site. Sudan is involved in a genocide that is getting worse by the day, so my site has adopted activism as well as information gathering and integration.
The new framing of world problems
Which brings me to a broader point. The normal framing of
world problems focuses on big states in developed parts of the world,
and ignores the fringes. This may be changing in the new
world. Thomas Barnett’s “The Pentagon’s
New Map”
argues that the new threats that the US military must face will be
largely in places like North Korea and Sudan, or in societies like
those of interest to Bobby’s group. We need a new framing
of problems, he argues, to see that these fringe areas that he calls
collective “the gap” need to be understood, and ultimately they
need to be helped to integrate into world society.
Open source intelligence
How can one understand these areas? By integrating a great deal of
information, generating organized knowledge, and finally establishing
perspective and wisdom and–hopefully–effective action plans.
This may be best done by distributed ad hoc
networks of informants, linked to editor/intregrators by the
web. Open source intelligence is one line of thinking that may help us design these projects.
