In Wake of Riots, British PM Proposes Social Media Ban, NYPD Forms a Social Unit

The current riots in London and those of two decades ago in LA provide us  with important mirrors within which we can think about how we are planning to engage social media and governance in times of transition.  As a society of individuals and groups committed to the health and human security of Americans and the resilience and sustainability of America's communities of interest globally, I assert that we want and need Web 3.0 intelligent social networks that enhance the public's trust and engagement in positive solutions.  This is the nature of Resilience Systems and Resilience Networks that are mission-driven, evidence-based, cloud computing-based, complex adaptive systems based on scientific evidence using capable knowledge management systems. These still nascent Resilience Systems enable our society's intelligent social networks to act constructively as unified complex adaptive systems in the face of severe and complex crises [severity level 3 crises (where hierarchical incident command systems can't address the scale and complexity of the event), severity level 4 events (when the plurality of the public is losing or has lost faith in their government and its leadership to face the strategic challenges of the day), and severity level 5 events (where the historic social ecology is collapsing and is no longer able to sustainably maintain the health and human security of the populations that are depending upon it for their livelihood)]. 

In order to stimulate discourse, I will argue that in Severity Level 3 -- but especially in Severity Level 4 and 5 crises -- Web 2.0 social networks (that are designed to create flocking behavior amongst large numbers of people that have insufficient context to understand the nature of the crises at hand and its potential solutions) are going to lead to rapid collapses in many institutions and governments.  We need to go beyond relationship-based, and short-text based Web 2.0 social networks alone in order to engage non-violent, positively self-directing and self-triggering smart swarms acting within a unity of effort.  This type of management and governance in times of crisis and strategic challenges obviously connotes a different type of leadership than was helpful in World War II and the Cold War, or even the actions of the War on Terrorism in the first decade of the 21st Century.  The United States now requires civil society-driven public/private consortia that have the ability to bring government, the private sector, the broader civil society, and citizens within their organic social networks into this unity of effort, fully capable of sense-making and converging resilient and sustainable solutions at all levels of our society.

The current dominant Web 2.0 social networks have a limited place in this process.  We have to realize that they may also be used to damage essential institutions and infrastructures, even to the point of collapse during certain types of social crises.  For this reason, I would argue that the U.S. Resilience System and all of its nest sub-systems at all levels of our global society, need to be ready to provide positive solutions sooner through whole of society initiatives than our bureaucracies alone can enable.  I recently asked a very senior representative of the U.S. government, who is in a crucial position to make decisions about the management of crises in our society why the public was turning to social networks for information instead of to government.  He was not able to answer the question even though he has been a strong advocate of Web 2.0 social media for emergency response.

What does "governance in times of transition" mean when the government requires retrospective data that takes a long time to gather and analyze before actions can be taken, when the social media provides direct, real time feeds from the source of a crisis that requires action now?  If the public is perceiving that the social media is enabling them and their communities to better anticipate and organize to better address the impacts of rapidly changing crises on the health and human security of their communities than does their government, I would argue that  we are already behind the curve in building the U.S. Resilience Systems and their nested Resilience Networks engaging whole society initiative.  If Resilience Systems have the potential of providing better solutions globally at a fraction of the cost of many bureaucracies that lack the focus, agility, and convergent capabilities to address our society's most strategic challenges in the months, years, and decades ahead, how should these systems interface with government?  Is it possible that an entirely new and different type of governance is needed under these circumstances?  Will we be able to engage it in time for the Arab Spring to enable sustainable, open society solutions, for example. Will these Web 3.0 intelligent social networks scale quickly enough to enable U.S. aspirations to assist other societies to attain resilience and sustainability in a lasting and meaningful "summer" for populations now willing to work collectively toward democratic institutions, health and human security within their societies, before the chill of events in more challenging times make unity of effort even more difficult?

Mike

Michael D. McDonald, Dr.P.H. 

President

Global Health Initiatives, Inc.

Coordinator

U.S. Resilience System