Archive for the ‘networks’ Category
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007
SIX DEGREES OF PARTICIPATION
Tech guru Ross Mayfield has an important post “Social Technographics and a Power Law of Participation” that would be of interest to most serious bloggers. In it, Mayfield analyzes the results of a demographic study that examined the nature and degree of interactivity of participation on the Web, displayed in the visual hierarchy below:
A closer look at Mayfield’s visualization can be found here at Flickr
An excerpt:
“I still contend that a more ideal community is scale free in structure. What I wonder is if you could benchmark these levels of engagement against a power law — not just to test Forrester’s findings, but to help a given company realize — “we are under-weighted in critics!”
LOL! I agree. Try to love your critics. Even when they are dead wrong they are the ( sometimes irritating) guides toward truth.
On a personal level, I am a creator and a critic foremost, followed closely by spectator. I dip my toe in being a joiner and I am not a collector at all. I’m not sure why this is. I had a bloglines account and then a blogbridge aggregator and both fell into immediate disuse. I don’t subscribe to a single RSS feed and I’ve been told that mine malfunctions a lot. I don’t do digg or that delicious thing and I understand neither. Recently, eerie, the mistress of the group blog Aqoul indicated she kept track of about 240 blogs(!). My hat is off to her, I can’t muster that kind of interest.
How about you ?
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
SPEAKING OF UTILIZING “TRIBAL” FORMS
“Follow up on this vein of research suggests that as the task gets more complex, that decentralized networks actually do better than centralized. An interesting and relevant critique of this research, by Guetzkow and Simon (1955), was that all-channel networks can and do sometimes perform better than hub-spoke networks. That is, the performance of all channel networks was contingent on how they were used. The original Bavelas findings were based on the fact that they were usually used badly.”
– David Lazer
“Bavelas revisited: hub-spoke vs all-channel networks” at Complexity and Social Networks Blog
Sounds reasonable to me. If you have ever been part of a team that seemed to reach a moment of ” flow” where everyone was intuitively “in synch” in handling a creative or complicated performance task, then that dynamic probably “felt” much like the findings of the research described by Lazer.
Applicable, it seems to me, to any ” free play” group learning scenario – whether it be small unit combat, improv theater, team sports and many others.
Monday, April 30th, 2007
BRAVE NEW WAR
Brave New War by John Robb is a book that was really written for two audiences.
The first is the relatively small number of specialists in military affairs, serious students of geopolitics and bloggers who are already avid readers of Robb’s Global Guerillas site. For them, Brave New War is a systematic and footnoted exposition of the theories of conflict and “dangerous ideas” that Robb discusses daily on his blog. They will be entertained and challenged by the same analysis that makes them return again and again to Global Guerillas to debate John Robb and one another.
The second audience is composed of everyone else. Brave New War is simply going to blow them away.
Brave New War is a tightly written, fast-paced work on the emergent nature of warfare, conflict global society with a decidedly dystopian take. In a mixture of original ideas and synthesis of the works of other cutting edge “thought leaders”, Robb, a platform designer and former mission commander for USAF Counterterrorism operations, draws analogies from the tech world to explain changes in warfare in the age of globalization. Calling the Iraq War “ the modern equivalent of the Spanish Civil War” Robb highlights a robust number of critical concepts in Brave New War that are, in his view, altering international and subnational conflict, including:
Bazaar of Violence
Black Swans
Brittle Security
Dynamc Decentralized Resilience
Emergent Intelligence
Fourth Generation Warfare
Guerilla Entrepreneurs
Global Guerillas
Market-States
Minimalist Platforms
Open-Source Warfare
Plausible Promises
Primary Loyalties
Stigmergic Systems
Superempowered Groups
Systempunkt
The Long Tail of Warfare
Urban Takedowns
Some of these concepts are Robb’s, some belong to others and in Brave New War you will find citations for figures as diverse as William Lind, Chris Anderson, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Valdis Krebs, Eric S. Raymond, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Philip Bobbitt, Moises Naim and David A. Deptula. One of the great strengths of Brave New War is Robb’s capacity as an analyst and theorist to apply the revelations of research into network theory to warfare, and to conceptualize armed political conflict within the framework of platforms and ecosystems. This gives Robb’s arguments a degree of horizontal “interconnectedness” seldom seen in works on military affairs ( except, as Robb himself points out, in the work of his frequent online sparring partner, Thomas Barnett).
Robb is betting heavily on increasing levels of global instability and systemic breakdown as “feedback” from global guerillas overloads “the system” and disrupts globalization. It is this orientation toward discerning the worst-case scenarios and descent into entropy that will raise hackles amongst some readers, though Robb ultimately predicts a strengthening of systemic resilience and a burst of innovation as a result of these tribulations.
Brave New War is the must read book of 2007.
OTHER REVIEWS:
Saturday, April 14th, 2007
STELLAR FEEDBACK
Most bloggers are pleased when a post generates some decent traffic and an intelligent remark or two in their comments section or email box. Therefore, it was quite gratifying to see how many thoughtful and incisive thinkers took the time to critique “Modern Foreign Policy Execution” at Democracy Projectthe other day. ( I’d also like to thank Bruce Kesler for kicking my butt into gear).
While I keep email correspondence private unless the author indicates otherwise, I’ve gathered some excerpts of the rebuttals that have appeared online below:
Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye– “And Never the Twain Shall Meet“:
“Bureaucracies are not networks. And never the twain shall meet. Bureaucracies are hierarchical, rules-based, static, slow to adapt, and have a single, constant imperative: survival. Networks are flat, conventions-based, highly adaptable, and, consequently, varied. They can spring into existence when a need arises and vanish when the need has ended. Networks are a challenge and a rebuke to bureaucracies.
….I think that Mark’s proposal, while interesting, is doomed. The existing bureacracies will fight any change tooth and nail simply because it is a change, simultaneously insisting that any new institutions be subsumed into their own bureacratic structures, effectively strangling them at birth.”
Steve Schippert at Threatswatch -“Monolithic Foreign Policy Needs A Net-Centric Overhaul“
“ He continues to list the clear (and spot on) advantages that a flatter, net-centric approach affords over the ‘immovable objects’ of today’s bureaucracies. Those who have read Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy will have a jump-start and likely a fuller appreciation for his approach.
The crucial issue is the existing institutions’ inability to regularly interact and cooperate with any alacrity, consistency or theater-level effectiveness. As a prime example of the absence of synergy, consider the foreign policy turf war on display recently in Somalia
The apparent current search for a ‘Czar’ to address the same problems is not the solution. The current bureaucratic inefficiencies and ineffectiveness is akin to viewing State, Defense and other institutions as individual trains, bound to their own tracks and propelled by their own inherent inertia.
The solution, as Safranski ably elaborates, needs to be implemented at the 1,000 ft. to ground-level in respective regions and/or theaters. It cannot possibly be effectively employed in this manner from the 25,000 ft. level of a Washington, DC über-bureaucrat.”
Bill’s Bites’s
” Mark Safranski, below, writes a guest post for Democracy-Project readers which is MUST reading: …”
Cernig at NewsHog – “Good Theory, Shame About The Reality “:
“It sounds great – in theory – and in theory I’m right there with him on this.
But unfortunately, in practise the current administration would see such modular networks as an anathema to their rigid top-down heirarchy unless the whole process of creating these teams could be politically controlled and biased. Thus, team leaders would inevitably be cronies and yes men rather than actual experts. Or if experts at all would be hand-picked from the ranks of the neoconservative think-tankers favored by the likes of the Democracy Project who have made good use of the revolving door between those think tanks and the Bush administration to push their own failed ideology of American hegemony. “
John Burgess of Crossroads Arabia ( in Glittering Eye Comment section)
“A network of really smart people (I’m drawing a best-case here) can certainly come up with policies. But governance isn’t the same as finding the most efficient solution to a traveling salesman problem. It depends on politics and political will and that’s not just a matter of routing the salesman around a broken bridge. It’s also the matter of dealing with the salesman who won’t go over particular bridges because of factors non-essential to salesmanship, but vital for other reasons. It has to deal with the destination that simply won’t accept your salesmen or don’t want your product. When you try to figure out all the potential variables you simply run out of computing time.
I do think that networking as described can play a vital function within bureaucracies. Many–and I put State at the head of the list–are now dysfunctional due to their near-total top-down orientation”
More to come as the conversation develops.
