Nov 17 NSSI Meeting: Occupy Everywhere & Use of Social Media -- U.S. Resilience System Considerations

                                                                    Social Media and Governance in Times of Transition 

Symposium Series

 Focus of the November 17 Meeting:

10 AM to noon: Social Media Use in Occupy Wall Street

noon to 1 PM: Jenny’s Asian Fusion for Lunch

1 PM to 4 PM: Web 3.0 Intelligent Social Networks & U.S. Resilience Systems

 The “Symposium on Social Media and Governance in Times of Transition” working group will meet next at 10 AM on Thursday, November 17 at the Capital Yacht Club.  Eighteen Symposium members can join in person.  Provisions will be made for remote access by others. Please RSVP by rsending an email to mdmcdonald through the US Resilience System.  You can click on "mdmcdonald" in this posting after "Submiitted by ..." under the title of this posting to send an email to Dr. Michael D. McDonald.

 The November 17 meeting will look specifically at how Occupy Wall Street (and the Occupy Everywhere movement) is gaining millions of supporters using the social media to organize “occupations” and large street protests in cities around the world.  The Symposium series participants will explore how the social media is being used by the Occupy movement to create flocking behavior (amassing large crowds from simple messages often resonant with the Victim-Villain-Hero template), but without the context and science base to provide positive solutions to the challenges the protesters and other Americans are concerned about. 

 Goal of the Symposium Series

 Discuss the nature of the social media and governance challenges facing the United States as a global society in a time of rapidly emerging strategic challenges affecting the health and human security of Americans.

 Background:  Emerging Strategic Challenges and U.S. Resilience Systems

 Over the past few years, the world has witnessed the emergence and extraordinary growth of social media applied to many purposes – including organizing massive protests and social change.  Over the past year or so, the use of web 2.0 social media has been used to cause revolutions in government, most strikingly in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.  The global reach of civil disobedience and other movements -- focused on destroying public and private sector institutions -- continues to escalate.  

 Whether the social media was essential to these revolutions has been thoroughly debated.  The current focus of our current discourse is whether the social media is inherently disruptive, or does it also hold potential for positive transformation, with elevating the risks of catalyzing social crisis as well.

 One argument has been that the “Arab Spring” revolutions were unique to long-standing undemocratic regimes, and that the destructive catalytic tendencies of web 2.0 social media are simply the result of the rapid release of democratic processes.  However, since the late spring of 2011, examples of the disruptive power of the social media for social upheaval can be found in the London riots, the “indignant” protests in Spain, clashes with police in Greece over EU and IMF imposed cutbacks of social services, Occupy Wall Street, and now Occupy movements in hundreds of cities in 80 plus countries.  Now, the Oakland Occupy movement is calling for a general strike in the city of Oakland and the shutting down of the City of Oakland and its port on November 2.   

 An alternate hypothesis being advanced in the Symposium series on Social Media and Governance in Times of Transition is that the U.S. will need a more advanced form of intelligent social networks with positively transformative web 3.0 capabilities of sufficient scale and complexity to address emerging social crises and other emergencies without the inherent risks of web 2.0 technology.  Special attention is being paid to recent White House, DHS, HHS, DOD, and other governmental, private sector, and broader civil society actions and opportunities that are moving toward the use of more advanced social media capable of enhancing resilience for Americans and their communities of interest globally, with less likelihood of downside risks.   Unity of effort, whole society initiative and the use of complex adaptive systems are being described as fundamental attributes of these more advanced web 3.0 systems.

 We will look carefully at the hypothesis that emerging U.S. Resilience Systems have the fundamental capacities of managing emergencies, as well as maintaining the health and human security of Americans under conditions of economic decline and energy descent.   Although vastly under resourced today, U.S. Resilience Systems appear to have the inherent capacity to rapidly scale and flexibly extend functionality to help meet the strategic challenges of the United States in the short-term and in the years ahead, with less down side risk.

 Currently, without meaningful employment, millions of American youth and other disaffected populations have no viable mechanism to engage constructively in building positive solution sets for a better America under rapidly changing conditions.  That clearly is not as a result of either the absence of natural or human resources in the United States.  Without Resilience Systems to converge their intellectual resources and energy in a positively transformative unity of effort, millions of disaffected and disenfranchised Americans are now rapidly and flexibly engaging in social media efforts that only have the capacity of neutral or counter-productive social interaction, flocking behavior, and mass disruption. 

 The law enforcement community and governments domestically and internationally are beginning to understand the power of the social media, but in many cities are still provoking far larger protests by trying to use old and ineffective methods of violent suppression of large non-violent smart mobs. Predictably negative results are emerging in far too many circumstances further galvanizing local, nation-wide and globally resonant protests and “occupations.”  The U.S. emergency response community is beginning to understanding the web 2.0 technologies, but still has little understanding of the nature of governance and management under emergency conditions using web 3.0 technologies incorporating integrative power capable of anticipating emerging strategic challenges, let alone preventing and resolving mission critical gaps in existing, escalating social crises.  As a result, the U.S. is witnessing the failure of command and control systems in complex crises, escalating public distrust in our institutions, and the collapse of large and important American social ecologies, such as Detroit and Flint, Michigan. 

 Emerging Challenge Proposals: Developing US Resilience Systems

 If there is now a societal requirement for the development of U.S Resilience Systems that utilize new web 3.0 intelligent social network platforms, how will they be catalyzed and scaled.  They will need to transcend the inherent limitations and proclivities of today’s Web 2.0 social media, as they converge unity of effort through information sharing environments with knowledge management systems of increasing depth and breadth.  These U.S. Resilience Systems must have semantic web capabilities, be inherently mission-driven, context deep with a strong science base, and have a strong evidence base.  To tie U.S. Resilience Systems’ cybernetic capabilities to agile, physical operational response, cloud computing capabilities enabling distributed smart grid capabilities will be an essential and cost-effective approach to rapidly enabling sustainable 21^st century capabilities.

 Prototypes of Resilience Systems have been tested over the past decade.  However, they now need to be refined and scaled at the biome, local, state, and regional levels throughout the United States and globally to address the health and human security of Americans, as well as the resilience and sustainability of their communities of interest worldwide.  These web 3.0 intelligent social networks have an opportunity to move public sentiment toward a solution orientation.  With appropriate architectures and memetics, they can help overcome the inherent weaknesses in web 2.0 social media that tend to amass unproductive relationships and flocking behavior that waste socially-valuable human resources and trend toward anti-institutional collective actions at mass scale.

 Come and join us at 10 AM on November 17 at the Capital Yacht Club.  The morning will be focused on the nature of Occupy Wall Street.  The afternoon will focus on the use of innocentives (challenge grants) to develop Web 3.0 intelligent social networks with a special focus on U.S. Resilience Systems.   Only 18 people will be able to join onsite.  However, provisions will be made for remote access.  RSVP by November 8 for in-person participation and November 14 for remote participation. 

Please send your RSVP by clicking on "mdmcdonald" under the title of this posting.