Decentralized, complex adaptive systems meet real politck and journalism. Finally.

[Tom Johnson]

A couple of articles have passed across our desk in recent days that
illustrate the impact -- and  importance of understanding -- decentralized
(or "distributed") systems and complex adaptive
systems<http://www.eas.asu.edu/%7Ekdooley/casopdef.html>
.

For starters, take a look at "Reinventing 911
How a swarm of networked ?citizens is building a better ?emergency broadcast
system."*
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/warning.html
*
Author Gary Wolf writes: "I've been talking with security experts about one
of the thorniest problems they face: How can we protect our complex society
from massive but unpredictable catastrophes? The homeland security
establishment has spent an immeasurable fortune vainly seeking an answer,
distributing useless, highly specialized equipment, and toggling its
multicolored Homeland Security Advisory System back and forth between
yellow, for elevated, and orange, for high. Now I've come [to Portland,
Oregon] to take a look at a different set of tools, constructed outside the
control of the federal government and based on the notion that the easier it
is for me to find out about a loose dog tying up traffic, the safer I am
from a terrorist attack.

"To understand the true nature of warnings, it helps to see them not as
single events, like an air-raid siren, but rather as swarms of messages
racing through overlapping social networks, like the buzz of gossip.
Residents of New Orleans didn't just need to know a hurricane was coming.
They also needed to be informed that floodwaters were threatening to breach
the levees, that not all neighborhoods would be inundated, that certain
roads would become impassible while alternative evacuation routes would
remain open, that buses were available for transport, and that the Superdome
was full.

"No central authority possessed this information. Knowledge was fragmentary,
parceled out among tens of thousands of people on the ground. There was no
way to gather all these observations and deliver them to where they were
needed. During Hurricane Katrina, public officials from top to bottom found
themselves locked within conventional channels, unable to receive, analyze,
or redistribute news from outside. In the most egregious example, Homeland
Security secretary Michael Chertoff said in a radio interview that he had
not heard that people at the New Orleans convention center were without food
or water. At that point they'd been stranded two days.
"By contrast, in the system Botterell created for California, warnings are
sucked up from an array of sources and sent automatically to users
throughout the state. Messages are squeezed into a standard format called
the Common Alerting Protocol, designed by Botterell in discussion with
scores of other disaster experts. CAP gives precise definitions to concepts
like *proximity, urgency,* and *certainty*. Using CAP, anyone who might
respond to an emergency can choose to get warnings for their own
neighborhood, for instance, or only the most urgent messages. Alerts can be
received by machines, filtered, and passed along. The model is simple and
elegant, and because warnings can be tagged with geographical coordinates,
users can customize their cell phones, pagers, BlackBerries, or other
devices to get only those relevant to their precise locale."

Second item of interest
I'm sure many of you noted Dexter Filkins Pg1 lead story in the NYT on
Friday, 2 Dec. 2005.  The online version headline is "Profusion of Rebel
Groups Helps Them Survive in
Iraq<http://analyticjournalism.blogharbor.com/SavedWebArticles/FilkinsProfusionOfRebelGroups.html>
."  That, unfortunately, lacks the truth and insight of the print version
headline:
"Loose Structure of Rebels Helps them Survive in Iraq -- While Al Qaeda
Gains Attention, Many Small Groups Attack on Their Own."

It seems that finally someone in the journalism community has figured out
that what's happening in Iraq -- and around the world -- is a decentralize,
CAS.  Too bad journalists -- journalism educators, students and
professionals -- haven't been exposed to the concepts and vocabulary to
really present the problem in all its, ahem, complexity.
------------------------------

--tj

==============================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c)                                 505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com               tom at jtjohnson.com

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
                                                   -- Buckminster Fuller
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