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The Weakest Link: Notes
Gather and Broadcast
Everyone has useful knowledge and information. Crowdsourcing, citizens journalism,
user generated content and most of Web 2.0 provide very useful tools and initiatives
to support information gathering and broadcast, which are fine for information contributions
requiring broadcast. But some simple examples may help highlight many issues that
still need to be resolved, for effective collaboration.
Security
Imagine, for example, that you are working for an information or security agency that
is part of a wide collaboration network, using crowdsourcing and Web 2.0, for example
again, and that in some of your work and research, you learn that a group of individuals
are learning to fly airplanes and do not seem interested in learning to land. Should
you share that knowledge and if so, why, when, where, who with, and how? How validated
is that information? what would happen if the public media had the information? Would
it jeopardize any further investigation? Create assumptions? Trigger rage, or panic,
or mockery, or indifference? They could be preparing terrorists, or students on an
experiment, or pranksters looking for fame. So what sharing should be done and how
would you control it? The current responsible and legal answer is that the information
should not be shared because inadequately sharing it could cause irreparable damages,
probably worse than the potential risk. On the other hand, if the information could
be shared adequately with all the required expertise, support, and control, then,
it may be possible to validate, investigate, track, as well as also prevent disaster,
crisis, wars, and costs.
Privacy
The case is not much different if I learn that my neighbor's house is not earthquake
proof, should I share that information on the public earthquake collaboration group's
crowdsourcing site? Would that help anyone? On the other hand, with an adequate sharing
platform, we could possibly get some support to help him remedy the situation, without
destroying the value of his house and his reputation.
Context, Time, and Place
Information broadcast is good but respect and consideration are better and the best
is when it all works properly together. Every piece of information and knowledge has
its sources as well has its effective targets, at different points in time, space,
and context. Once we have fixed the neighbor's house, the same information could be
ready for a larger target audience, as well as provide a new collaboration model,
but it is essential that sharing is done adequately and that the knowledge owners
and responsible entities control that sharing.
Components
The keys to effective collaboration include:
- Information gathering and broadcasting technologies (e.g. crowdsourcing, citizens
journalism, user generated content, Web 2.0)
- Integrated resilient networking, for all
- Knowledge entitlement, management, modeling, and sharing framework and professional
services
- A solid knowledge architecture paradigm
- Integrated knowledge classification
- Human and machine readable, streamable, and transformable knowledge representation
(e.g. based on XML)
Knowledge Infrastructure
Giving everything to all, forever, might be good, if we could, but I believe that
even then, entitlement would still be an issue. Any realistic case of giving, still
requires answering questions including what, when, how, why, to whom, still requiring
entitlement. Effective sharing is even much more specific and constrained. In fact,
entitlement is a fundamental structural natural knowledge management principle. We
typically know it intuitively in our everyday lives (e.g. if I lend my car to a friend
for an event, I assume that the car will be returned properly), but now, with these
new powerful open knowledge and information sharing networks and applications, we
also require the infrastructure to support classification, entitlement, and tracking.
Collaboration
Building on knowledge sharing, based on entitlement, collaboration is the greatest
productivity factor. Let's enable it for the information age and economy.
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