Though explicit social networking could be considered the hot new trend in software today, it is a solution without a context. Only by placing digital Identity, social networking and web services into a particular context – can their full potential be exploited.

Next generation on-line communities will combine all their predecessor’s features (message boards and blogging/RSS) with a timely relevance to individuals and particular groups of people.

What’s been missing from social networking up until now are the activities and transactions that should follow once people have found each other!

Nancy White pointed me to CommunityWiki's page, CommunityTiedToOneTechnology. Nancy and I had talked in the past about the potential power in building collaborative spaces using several integrated technologies, but as the Community Wiki discussion sez, "most of our internet communities appear to be tied predominantly to one technology or another." The wiki includes possible explanations like member inertia or low technical acumen, though maybe we just need more and better examples of integrated toolkits. There've been a few examples of successful integration of different modes and widgets, like the Emergent Democracy happenings that Joi Ito led. Another exception cited on the wiki: Open Source development teams use every technology for communicating and organizing that they can get their hands on. The future may be OneBigSoup (spun off as its on wiki converation here. (There's a #onebigsoup IRC chat room at Freenode, for those who think chat.) OneBigSoup discusses a potential Public Internet Communications architecture including

* PersonalServers
* LocalNameServers
* Group Servers
* Document Servers
* ThreadServers
* Blog Servers

These are explained as part of a trend from centralized coordination to decentralized coordination of a bunch of interoperable modules. Here's a comment from AlixPiranha:

yes. yes, yes, yes. decoupling. let me get away from applications and systems that try to make me use their specific way of doing things. i don't want a web browser with a built-in newsreader and MUA and editor. i want to plug all my favourites together. i want to be writing this text in emacs, not on a web form. i don't want to learn yet another way to mark-up a page; i want all of that to be transparent. and i definitely want control at the same time at which i want to make as much of my stuff as possible publicly available -- but i don't want to lose access to any of it when LiveJournal or any other large provider goes down; i want it ultimately all on my own server. and i want to look at everything that interests me out there in my own personalized aggregator where i can decide whether i want it threaded or not, sorted by subject, author, date, keyword, whatever.

History is a kind of indicator of the nearby presence of a transcendental object. And as we approach the transcendental object, history will become more and more hallucinatory, more and more dreamlike, more and more surreal--does this sound familiar to you? It's the neighborhood, right? [laughter] That's because we are so close now to this transcendental object, that is the inspiration for religion and vision and revelation, that all you have to do to connect up to it is close your eyes, smoke a bomber, take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, and the veil will be lifted, and you seen, then, the plan. You see what all these historical vectors have been pointing towards. You see the transcendental object at the end of time--a cross between your own soul and the flying saucer of cheap science fiction. I mean--the city of Revelations, hanging at the end of the Twentieth Century like a beacon. I really think that this is happening, and that what the-- It's as though we are boring through a mountain, towards someone else who is boring through that mountain, and there will be a handshake at a certain point in time. We are moving, literally, into the realm of the imagination. This is where the human future lies.

According to Andrew Cohen ... the most important question you can ask yourself is 'What would you do if you knew that you would die tomorrow?' The answer is that you would want to unburden yourself of feelings of guilt and shame. You would want to become transparent to loved ones and to god. And there are many cases of dying people doing this very movingly. The next question is 'why not start doing it now?' The ego hates the idea of doing this and will avoid it right up to the moment of physical death. And overcoming the ego is the only way to liberate the authentic self and experience the energy of evolutionary enlightenment.

Briefly: individual holons are holons with a subjective interior (prehension, awareness, consciousness); they have a defining pattern (code, agency, regime) that emerges spontaneously from within (autopoietic); and they have four drives (agency, communion, eros, agape). Examples of individual holons (or compound individuals) include quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms....

Social holons emerge when individual holons commune; they also have a defining pattern (agency or regime), but they do not have a subjective consciousness; instead, they have distributed or intersubjective consciousness. Examples include galaxies, planets, crystals, ecosystems, families, tribes, communities.... Both individual and social are holons, and they both follow the twenty tenets. Actually, individual and social holons are not different entities, but different aspects of all holons, since all holons have an interior and an exterior in singular and plural forms (the four quadrants), but they are indeed different aspects that cannot be merely equated.

For instance I recently asked myself whether a group of wise individual would emerge and act as a wise group. Or to put it in a more general frame, can a group benefit from the individual "social qualities" of its participants? My first reply was « yes », since we naturally advocate that if we want a group to have such or such quality, individuals need to get these qualities first. Then the second reply that came to my mind was: "maybe not"...

On a more practical perspective, is it possible to envision emerging properties as the result of the mastering of these properties at an individual level? Do these properties have to be value-oriented? Will a group of wise individuals turn into a wise group or can it turn in a global mess with umpredictable side effects?

• Emergence
• Flow
• Synergy
• Collective Intelligence
• Dialogue
• Synchronicity
• Paradigm Shifts
• Memes
• Self-Organization
• Smart Mobs
• Creativity
• Resonance
• Collaboration
• Evolution
• Ecology
• Life
• Consciousness
• Diversity
• Harmony

George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world.

He promised to "restore honor and integrity to the White House." Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon.

Honor? He decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, international treaties, the opinions of our allies, the role of Congress and the courts, or what Jefferson described as "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind." He did not honor the advice, experience and judgment of our military leaders in designing his invasion of Iraq. And now he will not honor our fallen dead by attending any funerals or even by permitting photos of their flag-draped coffins.

How did we get from September 12th , 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words "We Are All Americans Now" and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world -- to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib.

To begin with, from its earliest days in power, this administration sought to radically destroy the foreign policy consensus that had guided America since the end of World War II. The long successful strategy of containment was abandoned in favor of the new strategy of "preemption." And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral U.S. right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat. All that is required, in the view of Bush's team is the mere assertion of a possible, future threat - and the assertion need be made by only one person, the President.

More disturbing still was their frequent use of the word "dominance" to describe their strategic goal, because an American policy of dominance is as repugnant to the rest of the world as the ugly dominance of the helpless, naked Iraqi prisoners has been to the American people. Dominance is as dominance does.

Dominance is not really a strategic policy or political philosophy at all. It is a seductive illusion that tempts the powerful to satiate their hunger for more power still by striking a Faustian bargain. And as always happens - sooner or later - to those who shake hands with the devil, they find out too late that what they have given up in the bargain is their soul.

Jaques Barzun, author of the marvelous history of modernity From Dawn to Decadence (1500 - present), makes the point that the Catholic Church as a pan-European political force was done in by the Protestant Reformation, itself fueled by the printing press. Once the Church lost the ability to control the direct perception of scripture, thanks to the printing of (relatively) cheap bibles in languages other than Latin, their loss of political hegemony followed.

This is what we are seeing now relative to the military’s control of information. A year or so ago, someone in the DoD told me that the thing that would most affect the prosecution of the war in Iraq would be images of DAB’s — Dead American Bodies. The unplanned spread of photos of coffins, and now of torture victims, means that control of this part of the war is outside the military’s hands.

The spread of images from Iraq, both relatively plain ones like most of what’s on the YAFRO blogs to the horrifying images of torture and abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison are all part of the removal of bottlenecks that will change the political structure in ways we can’t predict.[...]

Now we are in a mirror world, where the newly free production and distrubution of images is the novelty. Hearing about DABs or torture victims is nothing like seeing them — I had to rip the cover of the Economist this week because my wife can’t stand to see the image of the man on the box with the electrodes in his hands.

New tools for spreading of the word are powerful, of course — witness the weblog explosion in all its complexity. But the spread of images is a different kind of thing, not least because images pass across linguistic borders like a lava flow. Now that production and distribution of images are in the hands of the laity, it’s a safe bet that we are entering a world of “That will kill this.” We just don’t know what parts of society “this” refers to yet.

“At its best, OSINT is the complete marriage of the proven process of intelligence, from requirements definition and collection management to timely analytics, with all — and I do mean all — legally and ethically available sources. It is important to emphasize the paucity of those endeavors that are limited to English or the main European languages. If one cannot work in 29 plus languages on a 24/7 basis — that is in real time and near real time, — one is not serious. Print and broadcast media are actually the smallest part of the open source universe. Untapped perceptions, oral histories, informal exchanges, limited edition local publications, pre-prints, and geospatial as well as imagery information of all kinds — including photos from cells phones with geospatial positioning system information — this is the larger open source universe.

Lest you might believe that the U.S. government does OSINT, but does not advertise, I will briefly highlight the fact that in August 1995, in an overnight exercise, I defeated the entire U.S. intelligence community — all agencies — in what is now known as the Burundi exercise. I did this with six telephone calls on my way to the airport. It was not a fair contest — if you believe that only secrets matter, then you will tend to not know where to go for the non-secrets. There has been no real change since then, despite the best intentions within the FBIS community and the federal research Division at the Library of Congress, because of persistent opposing mind-sets at the highest levels.” -From “THE NEW CRAFT OF OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE: HOW THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE SHOULD LEAD”