Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

>I’ve not been posting here as much as I’d like, because of working on
the human rights site Passion of the Present.  Here, at the site,
is a very important piece by Ruth Messenger, on Jews, the holocaust,
and the genocide in Sudan. 
http://platform.blogs.com/passionofthepresent/2004/11/the_graves_of_s.html

>Also from Passion: 

>As the late Dr. Martin Luther King said: “Man’s inhumanity to man
is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad.
It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.”

Ruminations:

I’ve been banging my head against a wall for several years, involved in
web and blog campaigns that have not succeeded at their highest level
objectives:  stopping the invasion of Iraq, electing Howard Dean
president, and stopping the genocide in Sudan.  By campaigns, I
mean not just the high traffic blogs that are often
highlighted, but the entire community movement, blogs at all traffic
levels working together.

I’m not alone, these campaigns engaged millions of people in caring about and becoming active to try to achieve these goals.

So I keep wondering: Did we fail, or succeed? Or more subtly–how did we do either, and what are the lessons?

My hypothesis today is that we succeeded at establishing new memes and
new meme-based worldwide communities–and that to the extent our memes
were picked up and “established” as topics in the major worldwide
media, as well as continuously supported in the blogosphere, we
actually made successful social change.

We did not make social change to the extent we hoped, but we did establish important beachheads that can now be built upon.

Perhaps change takes at least these
stages:  1.  create shared awareness of the problem, and
pressure for action, 2. demonstrate the lack of responsiveness in
established institutions, 3.  create such shared awareness of the
lack of responsiveness in established institutions that there is
pressure for institutional change, 4.  support true reform
movements, as well as creative competition, and start to change the
status quo, 5.  build shared support–super buzz–for the new
developments planted in #4, such that these become realities on the
world stage.

Perhaps a major value of the blog
campaigns for Iraq, Dean, and Sudan was to put problems on the
table  The stop-the-invasion-of-Iraq campaign, the Dean for
America campaign, and the stop the Sudanese Genocide campaign all took
issues that had a constituency but little voice, and created a larger,
activated at-critical-mass-constituency, and lots of VOICE.

At the start of each of these web campaigns. there was little
integrated voice for the community.  With time,  the blog
community achieved much more than voice, and establish particular memes
that became a central part of the media landscape.  The campaign
against the Invasion took the nation FROM a one-sided jingoistic rush
to war, abetted by established members of the Democratic party TO a
nation with–at least–a dialogue about the wisdom of the war. 
The Dean campaign made it exciting and authentic to be a Democrat and a
Liberal again, and helped people experience their own grassroots
political power.  The campaign for Sudan took a little-noted far
away genocide and put it in the front of our consciousness, and has
also helped to highlight the problems of the UN, to those who might
previously have been inclined to  give that organization the
benefit of the doubt.

These campaigns accomplished stage 1
and 2 of the change process.  We do have the power.  The
worst thing we can conclude from our work is that it did not
help.  I think it did help.  The people developed
voice.  The fact that we did not get farther is simply that–we
did not, yet, get farther.

Now we need to find ways to move to stage 3–demonstrate lack of
responsiveness in established organizations–and stage 4–support
creative new initiative.

In addition, there are other memes that we can use our power and
knowledge to put on the table–that should be given the stage 1 and 2
treatment.

Indeed, one of the ways we can be
successful as a meta-campaign is for the blogosphere to begin to
develop four or five or six major memes to put on the table, so we
start to change the meme landscape.

One I think warrents such a campaign is China’s sphere of influence,
and its support for governments that enslave their people and abuse
human rights:  Sudan is a Chinese client state–supplying oil to
China.  Burma is, as well.  And you wonder how these nations
thrive despite “international” sanctions? Because China–the world’s
fastest growing trading state–supports them.

And note that China is expanding its relationships in Southeast Asia,
the Middle East (”hey, Saudis, if you don’t want to be dependent on the
US, how about hooking up with us, China?”), Africa, and South America.

This IS the new red tide.  Not communism, this time, but
genocidal, human rights abusing state capitalism write large. 
This is the new Chinese economic ecosystem, ecosphere.  Hmmmmm.

Zephyr Teachout was by far the most influential philosopher of the Dean
campaign–and the least sung.  She continues to work quietly on
important things.  Here are Zephyr’s reflections on Campaign (and World) and the Internet 2004..a must read, the most thoughtful I’ve read yet..

thanks to Casadelogo

here is the link to DNC committee member names and addresses.  Have fun!

style=”font-weight: normal;”>The front page of today’s
New York Times (Nov 13, 2004) describes a feeding frenzy among big high
tech companies and defense contractors to build a “world wide web for
the wars of the future.”  The new system is called the Global Information Grid and aims to implement a concept called “network-centric warfare.”

Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation,
the nation’s biggest military contractor, said he envisioned a “highly
secure Internet in which military and intelligence activities are
fused,” shaping 21st-century warfare in the way that nuclear weapons
shaped the cold war. Every member of the military would have “a picture
of the battle space, a God’s-eye view,” he said. “And that’s real
power.”

Hmmm. I’m fairly sure this is not how God sees a war–but that is a conversation for another time. 

Where did this idea of the Global Information Grid and its
philosophical basis, “network-centric warfare” come from?  From
applying high tech industry structure ideas to warmaking.  What
ideas? “Business ecosystems,” an idea I pioneered in the early 1990s,
figures prominently.  This gives me pause.  Part of me is
proud of this influence but, as I will explain later, another deeper
part shudders at the megalomania that appears to be stalking the
program described in the Times.

In 1998 Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski, U.S. Navy, and John J. Garstka wrote a seminal article called Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future.  Here is an excerpt from their discussion:

Network-centric warfare and all of its associated
revolutions in military affairs grow out of and
draw their power from the fundamental changes
in American society. These changes have been dominated
by the co-evolution of economics, information
technology, and business processes and organizations,
and they are linked by three themes:

• The shift in focus from the platform to the
  network
• The shift from viewing actors as independent
  to viewing them as part of a continuously adapting
  ecosystem
• The importance of making strategic choices
  to adapt or even survive in such changing ecosystems³

In 2000 I was contacted by the authors of “Network Centric Warfare:
Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority,” a book published by
the CCRP–which I found out is the US Department of Defense C41SR
Cooperative Research Program which “has the mission of improving DoD’s
understanding of the national security implications of the Information
Age.

This book introduced the concept of the “warfighting ecosystem” based on the ideas of business ecosystems,

What you read here are concepts taken from ecosystems, swarms, emergent
order and information advantages applied to the coordination of people
in war.  In a sense. the model is Open Source warfare, where the
troops find ways to plug in and collaborate from the bottom-up as well
as from the top-down.

Now, I must say that I think that much of this is very good thinking.
If one is going to make war, risk and take many lives for presumably a
just cause, it is important to be as effective as possible in
organization and communication and leadership.  And I do believe
that many of the network-centric strategic ideas that have been
developed in the high tech world are highly generalizable.

On the other hand, the current instantiation of these ideas, at least
as reported in the New York Times, seems to take these ideas far from
their original spirit–and leaves me quite concerned.  In the book
Network Centric Warfare the authors were cautious in their
claims.  They seem to care more about knowledge, learning, and
leadership paradigms than large procurement programs.  By
contrast, the Times article describes the current situation as follows:

Military contractors - and information-technology creators not
usually associated with weapons systems - formed a consortium to
develop the war net on Sept. 28. The group includes an A-list of
military contractors and technology powerhouses: Boeing; Cisco Systems; Factiva, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters; General Dynamics; Hewlett-Packard; Honeywell; I.B.M.; Lockheed Martin; Microsoft; Northrop Grumman; Oracle; Raytheon; and Sun Microsystems. They are working to weave weapons, intelligence and communications into a seamless web.

The Pentagon has tried this twice before.

Its
Worldwide Military Command and Control System, built in the 1960’s,
often failed in crises. A $25 billion successor, Milstar, was completed
in 2003 after two decades of work. Pentagon officials say it is already
outdated: more switchboard than server, more dial-up than broadband, it
cannot support 21st-century technology.

The Pentagon’s
scientists and engineers, starting four decades ago, invented the
systems that became the Internet. Throughout the cold war, their
computer power ran far ahead of the rest of the world.

Then the
world eclipsed them. The nation’s military and intelligence services
started falling behind when the Internet exploded onto the commercial
scene a decade ago. The war net is “an attempt to catch up,” Mr. Cerf
said.

It has been slowly evolving for at least six years. In
1999, Pentagon officials told Congress that “this monumental task will
span a quarter-century or more.” This year, the vision gained focus,
and Pentagon officials started explaining it in some detail to Congress.

Its scope was described in July by the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog agency for Congress.

Many
new multibillion-dollar weapons and satellites are “critically
dependent on the future network,” the agency reported. “Despite
enormous challenges and risks - many of which have not been
successfully overcome in smaller-scale efforts” like missile defense,
“the Pentagon is depending on the GIG to enable a fundamental
transformation in the way military operations are conducted.”

According
to Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon’s Office of Force
Transformation, “What we are really talking about is a new theory of
war.”

Linton Wells II, the chief information officer at the
Defense Department, said net-centric principles were becoming “the
center of gravity” for war planners.

While our old friend Admiral Cebrowski is talking about ideas and
theories and paradigm shifts, others seem focused on the billions of
dollars of technology to be purchased.

I’m concerned that the good ideas may get lost in the massive implementation..

More profoundly, I am concerned that in making this idea such a
centerpiece of military thinking,  we are missing the important
lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan and, yes, even Sudan: Waging war is
hard–waging peace harder yet.  Making war is difficult, but
preventing war or establishing viable societies after war sometimes
seems almost impossible.  This is a main point of Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map, for example–which describes work also led by Admiral Cebrowski.

As I have written before, and will again, I’d like to see much much
more effort go into “network-centric peacemaking.”  If Barnett is
correct, we need about ten times the effort on peacemaking and nation
building that we put into war-making.  Let’s get started.

—————————————-

Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War

 By TIM WEINER

Published: November 13, 2004

he Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military’s world wide web for the wars of the future.

The
goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of
all foreign enemies and threats - “a God’s-eye view” of battle.

This
“Internet in the sky,” Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force,
told Congress, would allow “marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in
the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery”
from a spy satellite, and “get it downloaded within seconds.”

The
Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information Grid, or GIG.
Conceived six years ago, its first connections were laid six weeks ago.
It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build
the new war net and its components.

Skeptics say the costs are staggering and the technological hurdles huge.

Vint
Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and a Pentagon consultant on
the war net, said he wondered if the military’s dream was realistic. “I
want to make sure what we realize is vision and not hallucination,” Mr.
Cerf said.

“This is sort of like Star Wars, where the policy
was, ‘Let’s go out and build this system,’ and technology lagged far
behind,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with having ambitious goals.
You just need to temper them with physics and reality.”

Advocates
say networked computers will be the most powerful weapon in the
American arsenal. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence and soldiers in a
global network - what they call net-centric warfare - will, they say,
change the military in the way the Internet has changed business and
culture.

“Possibly the single most transforming thing in our
force,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, “will not be a
weapons system, but a set of interconnections.”

The American
military, built to fight nations and armies, now faces stateless
enemies without jets, tanks, ships or central headquarters. Sending
secret intelligence and stratagems instantly to soldiers in battle
would, in theory, make the military a faster, fiercer force against a
faceless foe.

Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation,
the nation’s biggest military contractor, said he envisioned a “highly
secure Internet in which military and intelligence activities are
fused,” shaping 21st-century warfare in the way that nuclear weapons
shaped the cold war.

Every member of the military would have “a picture of the battle space, a God’s-eye view,” he said. “And that’s real power.”

Pentagon
traditionalists, however, ask if net-centric warfare is nothing more
than an expensive fad. They point to the street fighting in Falluja and
Baghdad, saying firepower and armor still mean more than fiber optic
cables and wireless connections.

But the biggest challenge in
building a war net may be the military bureaucracy. For decades, the
Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have built their own weapons and
traditions. A network, advocates say, would cut through those old ways.

The
ideals of this new warfare are driving many of the Pentagon’s spending
plans for the next 10 to 15 years. Some costs are secret, but billions
have already been spent.

Providing the connections to run the
war net will cost at least $24 billion over the next five years - more
than the cost, in today’s dollars, of the Manhattan Project to build
the atomic bomb. Beyond that, encrypting data will be a $5 billion
project.

Hundreds of thousands of new radios are likely to cost
$25 billion. Satellite systems for intelligence, surveillance,
reconnaissance and communications will be tens of billions more. The
Army’s program for a war net alone has a $120 billion price tag.

Over
all, Pentagon documents suggest, $200 billion or more may go for the
war net’s hardware and software in the next decade or so. “The question
is one of cost and technology,” said John Hamre, a former deputy
secretary of defense, now president of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington.

“We want to know all things
at all times everywhere in the world? Fine,” Mr. Hamre said. “Do we
know what this staring, all-seeing eye is that we’re going to put in
space is? Hell, no.”

News item: Bush administration orders review of studies showing decline of fisheries, to “see if there is anything to it.”

Photo from presentation last night at the Harvard Museum of
Comparative Zoology by Professor Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography and the Smithsonian Tropical Research
Institute.  The other main presenter was noted
ecologish E.O. Wilson, immediately at left,  with discussion by
several other members of the Harvard biology faculty (Harvard Provost Steven Hyman,
Peter Ashton, Noel Michele “Missy” Holbrook, James Hanken, Paul
Moorcroft).  Disturbing
presentation, to say the least.

As Steven Hyman said, “Got any good recipes for jellyfish and e coli?”

This article in the Washington Post announcing Paul Otellini as the new CEO of Intel includes some telling cultural detail on an important company.

Intel is going through a new phase in its own institutional
development, facing the challenge of being more than a building block
supplier.  The fact that an excellent article on Intel is
prominent in the Washington Post today is testimony to this fact. 
Intel is now a pillar of the world economy, which makes
its existence a fact of business life and thus at one level secure, but
that also
makes Intel a standing target for new entrants, and a company that can
only continue to grow if it succeeds in helping the entire world
economy grow.  These are tall institutional and creative
challenges.  The company has been wrestling this year with planned
cultural change, in order to grow into a new institutional form. 

It will be fascinating to watch Intel as it reinvents its leadership, strategy, organization, incentives and culture once again.

Intel over the years has
had a profound impact on the evolution of the
technology sector.  Intel has used business ecosystem strategy
making for many years, recognizing that for it to succeed others must
thrive as well. Intel further recognized that companies who supply core
building blocks make very high profits, and incur the means and the
obligation to
invest some of their returns in less inherently profitable sectors of
the ecosystem, in order to make the whole thrive.  Intel was the
major corporate backer of Linux and Open Source movement during the
early days, and for example quietly invested
many millions of venture capital dollars in the early Linux
companies. 
Prior to that Intel worked hard to help get various versions of Unix
running on mass market chips–its own chips, of course, but nonetheless
quite accessible chips when compare to the IBM, Sun Sparc and DEC chip
sets of the time.  I hope that Intel will continue to recognize
the enormous value of its contributions to the accessibility of
computing and to “the commons” of freely available software–as it
reinvents its ways of competing for its next phase of life.  Best
wishes, Paul!

It can be instructive to look at the ecology of websights devoted
to one particular problem. The movement to stop the Genocide in Sudan
provides several active sites that work closely together in
complementary ways.

1. Sudan: The Passion of the Present is a site whose purpose is to
use open source methods, an information community and the daily
responsiveness of blog campaigning to inform and stimulate the
movement. This site is by design edgy and personal, with several
editors who work from the US and the UK, and post 24/7.

http://passionofthepresent.org

2. The Save Darfur Coalition is a broad coalition of major religious
and humanitarian organizations. It’s site is closely associated with
Sudan: The Passion of the Present serves a different function and has a
contrasting design. Save Darfur’s site is the online educational center
of a coalition and speaks with a more measured and consciously
authoritative voice.

http://savedarfur.org

3. Fight or Die is an example of a grassroots organizing site that anchors daily direct action in the streets of New York.

http://www.fightordie.org

4. My Sister’s Keeper is a grassroots organization that advocates in
the Boston area for the people of Sudan, as well as sponsors
face-to-face spiritual, pschological, and development work in a region
of Southern Sudan.

http://msk.blogs.com

5.  iAbolish brings attention to slavery in Sudan, assists
refugees and especially former slaves, and acts as a coordinator for
the American Anti-Slavery Movement.

http://iabolish.org

6. The United States Holocaust Museum Commitee on Conscience is
charged with preventing and stopping genocides. It has a very powerful
institutional site that focuses on Sudan–and it’s staff works closely
with leaders of the other initiatives.

http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/sudan/darfur/index.php

7. Darfur Genocide raises money to put on highly visible media events and public demonstrations.

http://www.darfurgenocide.org

8. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International sites provide in-depth reports.

http://hrw.org

http://aiusa.org

9. Sudan: The Passion of the Present has an Activists Workstation
that provides instant access to a panel of realtime news aggregation
services ranging from Google News/Sudan to Sudan.net and the Sudan
Tribune, to the very anti-US Islam Online.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&q=sudan&btnG=Search+News

http://sudan.net/news.shtml

http://www.sudantribune.com

http://www.islamonline.net/english/index.shtml

10. Sometimes you can create a powerful site simply by executing a
search on a commercial e-commerce site. Here, also from Passion, is a disturbing sub-site
created by a search for Sudan genocide humor on the political cartoon
e-commerce site Artizans:

http://zone.artizans.com/browse.htm?subject=54308

Hi Jim,
 
You may be interested in my group’s efforts as it relates to building
the strength of the second superpower.  We are using US labor laws
to gain access to our corporate intranet.  There’s a good
non-biased article about us here: 
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/9883567.htm.
 
Multinational corporations are a superpower of their own, but the
people within them enable all of their actions.  I work with
global teams (Scotland, US, Japan, India, and China) to develop new
products and launch them into production in Malaysia.  I do not
harbor any bad will to the Malaysians, but their sub-standard quality
of life is lowering the advanced nations’ quality of life.  I
believe that employee associations can stop the exploitation of workers
in developing nations, and improve everyone’s quality of life. 
Without the willingness of people like myself to continue to develop
and create products for multinational corporation, they cannot continue
this pattern
 
Best regards,
 
John Rose
http://www.agilepeople.org

Why is Howard the right person for the DNC now?

He is fresh and bold, and will attract other fresh bold people–which is what we need now in this early rebuilding stage.

He is substantive, with a caring, thoughtful, deep interest in 
health care, in children and families, and in how government can give
poor families and families in crisis a helping hand when they need
it.  This topic–how to support families–is important and
relevant and uniting–and requires bold solutions.

He is honest and direct, and people out in the country know this. 
He is our John McCain–authentic and real, whether you agree or
disagree with him.  And authenticity is something people crave.

He is the strongest, most inclusive “brand name” in the Democratic
Party right now.   He is seen, interestingly, as a “winner.”

OK, so here is an outline of the campaign for Howard, which is also a campaign for new Democrats and a new America:

1.  Find out who is on the Democratic National Committee. 
Call and visit them — they are local to you — and tell them you
support Howard.

2. Write to Howard at DFA and ask him to run.

3.  Consider pledging money to the DNC IF Howard is the
leader.  Make clear that if he is not chosen, you will give it to
another organization that reflects your values–such as DFA.

4.  If Howard is chosen to head the DNC, pull together to make the DNC OUR organization!

5.  If Howard is not chosen, consider forming an alternative to the DNC that we can ask Howard to become the head of.