Open communication from the Director of the
BCNGroup.org
Sunday,
March 02, 2003
Distinguished
Scholars,
A free hand to business processes creates very specific
emergent systemic behavior. It is being
claimed that this behavior does, at time, inhibit a class of potential solutions
to some of the critical issues impacting our responses to asymmetric threats. An argument is presented using general
systems theory. The systemic aspect is
seen in the relationships between social institutions.
First, there is no claim that individuals are conspiring. Just so this is clear. We are suggesting that systemic behavior
leads to specific consequences. Social behavior is emergent, and thus
is not
controlled by individuals in a precise fashion. The claim is that the systemic consequence of some specific
processes are not allowing the development of a specific type of information
production system that could otherwise be developed and found useful. Thus the responsibly for consequences is not
assignable to an individual.
The recognition of emergent behavior of a social system is
exactly that type of recognition needed to protect the Nation against the
asymmetric threats.
http://www.bcngroup.org/area2/KnowledgeEcologies.htm
Natural science informs us that social behavior is manifest
in many ways. But there are root causes
to the function of any social behavior.
Social science allows one to look at these types of issues.
Let us observe some facts about ourselves.
Those who are the primary scientists whose work is
supposedly being implemented are told that they cannot see how the technology
is implemented, due to what is stated to be national security reasons.
A claim is made, by primary scientists, that there is no
intelligence vetting technology that has been developed by industry, the
government or individuals that fulfills the actual need to vet intelligence
within the defense communities, the medical science communities, or within
business communities. Of course one
might suppose this to be true, simply because the existence of such technology
would transform all types of social institutions. One sees no such transformation.
It is observed that many intelligence analysts do not find
the results of the current conversion of innovation to secret and proprietary products
acceptable. A polling instrument would verify
this observation. In fact the term
"impedance mismatch" was coined over a decade ago to discuss the
perceived failure of information technology procurement in intelligence
communities. There are then two
questions. What is causing this
impedance mismatch and what can be done about it?
Many are aware of, but most do not feel able to address, this
AS-IS model:
http://www.bcngroup.org/procurementModel/as-is.htm
The federal procurement process takes what might have been a
purely Darwinian random selection of winners and losers, and imposes a
Lamarckian utility function on a stratified process (Don Campbell, The
Cambridge Group's model of innovation adoption as technology).
The lower level of the process is the individual experience
(introspection) that has come upon some insight. The upper level, into which emergence is occurring, is also
constrained by the autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela, 1989) of incumbent social
systems whose structural coupling is actually often threaten by any new emergence
of something.
We think of this as the "marketplace".
But the marketplace of ideas (particularly about the nature
of human knowledge sharing) is not open to certain specific viewpoints. It is NOT open to holonomic theory of brain
function (as in the works of Karl Pribram and others), or to any stratification
theory. The marketplace, as we have it
today, is only open to a Newtonian and reductionist paradigm. Why this might be true is, conceived to be,
related to an economic reductionism that can be seen to dominate capitalization
and commercialization.
We are conjecturing that the incumbent system discriminates
systematically against stratification theory and does so using the economic
reward system.
But some of us see stratification theory as necessary if
society is to develop information production systems that rely strongly on
computer algorithms.
The TO-BE framework is as follows:
http://www.bcngroup.org/procurementModel/to-be.htm
(with links to stratified theory and a large number of
un-adopted and unfunded innovations).
To achieve the TO-BE, the community of natural scientists
may choose to stand up as a group and make this a political issue.
The BCNGroup.org is founded and organized for this purpose.
However, before there is a strong political movement to
displace an entrenched system, we are asking that the scholars reflect on this
issue. We as a community must look to a funding mechanism for the development
of both national defense intelligence technology and the development of an
improved health care system due to the creation of a federal enterprise
architecture. We are offering such a
mechanism in the form of a Knowledge Sharing
Foundation.
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