Anthony D. Williams

For those of you already worrying about $200 barrels of oil, you may want to stop reading now. The New Scientist recently released an interactive graphic of the world’s oil flows and chokepoints that highlights just how vulnerable the world’s oil supply is to conflict, terrorism, natural disasters, and other factors beyond our control.

In a related article in the NYTimes, Clifford Krauss focuses on the effects of high gasoline prices on rural areas in the U.S., where people are reeling under the triple strike of low incomes, fuel-inefficient vehicles, and long commutes to work. Here are a few highlights:

People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And drivers are running out of gas more often, leaving their cars by the side of the road until they can scrape together gas money. . .

The extra dollars spent at the pump mean electric bills are going unpaid and macaroni is replacing meat at supper. Donations to church are being put off, and video rentals are now unaffordable. . .

Local fried chicken restaurants are closing because people are eating out less. At the hardware store here, sales have plummeted to $30 a day from $250 a day a month ago.

Local governments are leaving grass high along the roads and doing fewer road repairs to save on fuel costs. . . Politicians are even considering replacing sanitation workers with prison inmates on some shifts to conserve money for fuel

This article also comes with it’s own graphics — this one illustrating the varying effects of gasoline prices across the country.

He’s mobilized youth to previously unprecedented levels, shattered fund-raising records with an Internet-enabled army of small-dollar donors, and made many impassioned calls for sweeping changes in Washington. But can Obama really transform the cynical, self-interested, and frequently factious nature of politics, while bringing new levels of transparency and participation to the process?

Three recent articles in the NYTimes cast some doubt on Obama’s ability to can adequately distance himself and his campaign from the worst elements of big-money politics , let alone change the broader equation.

The first article describes Obama’s about face on Bush’s domestic wiretapping scandal. After denouncing the wiretapping program during his primary campaign, Obama is now supporting legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration to eavesdrop on citizens without warrants. Critics see it as evidence that Obama is now making the same Washington-style compromises that he campaigned vehemently against. Supporters, meanwhile, are asking themselves what happened to the “change we can believe in.” In fact, some 16,000 supporters have organized a protest on Obama’s own homepage, asking him to revisit his stance on FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)–evidence, at least, that when it comes to providing an open forum for debate and dissent, Obama has lived up to his principles.

The second article discusses Obama’s decision to bypass public financing for the general election and thus free himself to seek out more lucrative sources of private funding. The decision marks another reversal of policy and is perhaps a further indication that Obama is having a hard time resisting the intoxicating lure of big-money politics as the realities of Washington set in.

The Obama campaign cites the record sums raised from a broad base of small-dollar donors as justification for the decision. But campaign finance experts see it as evidence that Obama is gearing up to embark on a spree of pricey fund-raising events across the country–events that will tap the resources of the large, deep-pocketed donors who have traditionally supported the Democratic party. It turns out that as the intensity of the primaries died off, so too did the long tail of political contributions.

The third article concerns Obama’s recent ambivalence over the withdrawal of troops from Iraq after visiting with commanders on the ground. Having initially promised to withdraw troops within 16 months of taking office, his timetable now seems a great deal more flexible. His steadfast opposition to the war has been a central component of his candidacy, so supporters are naturally suspicious of what appears to be yet another retreat from his principles.

What does it all mean?

For optimists, Obama still represents America’s best hope in over a generation to elect a candidate with the vision and willpower to usher in a more transparent, inclusive and participatory breed of politics. For cynics, his campaign antics are at best naive and at worst disingenuous. Naive if he really believes that as president he can do much reverse the long historical trend that has seen organized interest groups hold increasing sway over the political process and disingenuous for selling false hope while knowing all-too-well that the Washington’s political machinery will not be easily or quickly dismantled.

Which camp are you in? Are you optimistic about the prospects for change or are you cynical? Are Obama’s recent compromises ultimately pragmatic and justifiable, or do they represent a bretayal of the political principles that he has championed?

I’ve written a fair amount about Intellipedia on this blog (see here for example). Many people see it as one of the premier examples of enterprise 2.0 innovation. Not many people realize, however, that Intellipedia is not just the CIA’s wiki.

What makes Intellipedia interesting and important is the fact that it takes a dysfunctional collection of 16 disparate intelligence agencies and offers up the opportunity to work as a single coherent entity with a shared knowledge bases and shared capabilities. With 50,000 users and growing, Intellipedia has some way to go. But it’s probably the intelligence community’s best option to date for migrating away from the old model where information moves vertically up the 16 organizational “stove pipes” to a new model where intelligence flows horizontally across agencies via topical and functional communities of practice.

I raise all this simply because I learned something new today about how Intellipedia came to be. Apparently (Intellipedians feel free to correct me), the whole conversation got started with a essay contest and an eclectic researcher, Dr. Andrus Calvin. Calvin won the the Intelligence Community’s 2004 Galileo Award for his paper, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.” He argued that web 2.0 technologies such as wikis and blogs should play a central role in enabling a more nimble and networked intelligence field force–a distributed network of policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers that is continuously learning and adapting to changing circumstances. Note that he argued this in 2004 (pretty perceptive!). Here’s the abstract:

US policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers now operate in a real-time worldwide decision and implementation environment. The rapidly changing circumstances in which they operate take on lives of their own, which are difficult or impossible to anticipate or predict. The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own. We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes.

Recent theoretical developments in the philosophy of science that matured in the 1990’s, collectively known as Complexity Theory, suggest changes the community should make to meet this challenge. These changes include allowing our officers more autonomy in the context of improved tradecraft and information sharing. In addition, several new technologies will facilitate this transformation. Two examples are self-organizing knowledge websites, known as Wikis, and information sharing websites known as Blogs. Allowing Intelligence Officers and our non-intelligence National Security colleagues access to these technologies on SIPRNet, will provide a critical mass to begin the transformation.

Calvin now works for an internal “startup” called iD8 (ideate) within the CIA. You can read his paper here.

How will policy-makers keep pace with today’s rapidly changing world and bring greater agility and dynamism to public responses to monumental challenges like climate change, food scarcity and the spread of infectious disease? How can citizens and others stakeholders feed their knowledge and experience into the policy cycle and how can policy-makers tap the collective ingenuity of society? Can we leverage the immense stores of increasingly granular and immediate data to build models and simulations that will accurately forecast the social and economic impacts of various policy options?

These are some of the issues that a group of experts and EU commissioners gathered to discuss in Brussels at the end of May. I was fortunate to be among the people that were selected to brief the European Commission, along with Andy Mulholland, CTO of CapGemini, Jeremy Millard of the Danish Technological Institute, and several others (I’m pictured below with Andy of CapGemini)

Anthony at EC

I came to deliver the gospel of wikinomics as it applies to the challenges of governance in the 21st century, but I think it’s fair to say that wikinomics had already significantly influenced their thinking. Here’s how David Broster, the EC’s head of e-government, described the policy-modelling challenge in his briefing paper:

It is now recognised that on-line collaborations have the potential to trigger and shape significant changes in the way future societies will function. Extrapolation of the present exponential growth leads to scenarios where very large percentages of populations could, if equipped with the right tools, simultaneously voice opinions and views on major and minor societal challenges, and thereby herald the transition to a different form of dynamically participative “eSociety”. While such scenarios are readily imaginable, it must be recognised that we currently do not have appropriate governance models, process flows, or analytical tools with which to properly understand, interpret, visualise and harness the forces that can be unleashed.

Much of the discussion focused on the tools and technologies that will be required to enable individuals, groups or society as a whole to forecast and understand the possible outcomes of government proposals, decisions and legislation. These tools include real-time opinion visualisation and simulation solutions based on modelling, simulation, visualization and mixed reality technologies, data and opinion mining, filtering and aggregation. They will also include translation technologies capable of enabling multi-lingual conversations in real-time.

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As I argued in my presentation, however, the biggest challenges in building a participative e-Society will be political, not technological.

Public agencies can no longer act as isolated policy-units in a world where complex transboundary issues will overwhelm their capacity to develop meaningful responses in a timely manner. Agencies will need an organizational disposition to seek out external ideas, skills and innovations and they will need to coordinate their efforts across jurisdictions and sectors. In other words, they need to embrace mass collaboration.
The one-way broadcast model of political communications will need to be replaced by communications strategies that emphasize inclusion and outreach. Our highly educated and connected populations may be increasingly time-constrained, but I am fairly convinced that citizens can offer a great deal of insight if they are asked the right questions (e.g., they are selected to engage in issues areas where they have interest and expertise) and provided with appropriate tools that make it easy to contribute.
Policy consultations will need clear targets and timing and must offer a genuine opportunity for influence. We should never ask the public to merely rubber stamp a preconceived plan.
Engagements will also need trusted and inclusive public spaces — venues where citizens from diverse backgrounds and political persuasions can engage in dialogue. Digitally-enabled engagement should not merely amplify the voices and vested interests that are already overly-represented in policy-making. It will be the responsibility of elected officials to ensure that the principles of representative government are embodied in new forms of digital deliberation and decision-making.
Finally, there are a host of non-governmental actors who wield increasing power and influence in today’s world and there is an argument that they too should be subject to greater democracy. A participative e-Society should arguably extend democratic principles into civil society, the markets, and international organizations.

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The variable impact of oil prices on everyday life and our increasing vulnerability

July 4th, 2008

The Obama file: can he really deliver change?

July 4th, 2008

Toward a complex adaptive intelligence community

June 23rd, 2008

Enabling the e-Society

June 8th, 2008