From: Bruce Schuman
Type: Forum
Group: Alliance Plenary
Subject: What does 'the network' do?
Date: September 7, 2014
I've been looking at network science all my life. Many years ago, it seemed clear to me that network-based collaborative/co-creative approaches to the critical problems of global (and local/regional/national) civilization were almost certainly the answer.
NETWORK SCIENCE AND COLLABORATION
No one person has the answers. No one perspective on complex multi-faceted issues is good enough. We need to look at "all sides of all questions" -- and that illumination should come from people who see that particular perspective, and that point of view should be brought into an integral context where it can be compared and correlated with every other point of view on that question. Years and years ago, I called this process "Vision of the Network" -- and compared it to the "All Seeing Eye of God" (what Starr* and others here might call "AYN").
Understood this way -- if God can see all sides of everything -- and "human beings are the hands and feet of God in action" -- and also the eyes -- then maybe God needs human eyes.
VISION OF THE NETWORK
This can be understood lots of ways, and this is just a suggestive metaphor. The big issue today -- is social fragmentation and destructive bickering -- on just about every point or issue imaginable. The human community is moving through a huge transition from "myopic localism" (ie, short-sighted "can't see past my own borders" smallness of thinking) into an expanded realization that "We are all in this together and we gotta make it work -- and not only that, but maybe that guy or girl over there knows more about this stuff than I do, so maybe I ought to try listening to them..."
That's the transition in a nutshell, that's what the great visionaries today are telling us, and accommodating and supporting this process is "what the network is supposed to do" --
BRING IT INTO BALANCE THROUGH FACILITATED DIALOGUE
It's a process of "dialogue". It's a hugely complex process of negotiation and mediation and facilitation that leads to informed and balanced collective decisions on everything.
So, the network design issues that emerge around us -- about how we can do this stuff on purpose -- or, as I think Nirmalan put it, "What must be done will be done and the only choice is between doing it consciously with full awareness or being unconsciously swept along with the tide" -- has to do with our vision of current capacity, and the ideal/best way to use this capacity to solve the tremendously complex problem of human interaction that today threatens life all over this planet (Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, Iraq, Ferguson Missouri USA, you name it).
We have tremendous talent and skills as mediators and negotiators. We do know how to produce "win/win" solutions for people in highly complex and high-tension situations.
We have huge information-processing capacity. We DO have the capacity to more or less "take on everything". It's just there, waiting for people with the vision and the design skills to get these applications out there, tested, dialed in, and moving.
THE PEOPLE'S CONGRESS
We have an amazing capacity to localize things. This "google-map" thing is absolutely stunning. It is astoundingly powerful -- right now, this second. All you need to locate something in particular in the world is an unambiguous physical address. Those things we are "locating" could include absolutely every "issue" that is coming up for the human community, at any level of regional relevance, presented from every motivated point of view anybody wants to show up and represent. This is a stunningly transformative option for a new network-based kind of people's democracy. It's there. Just get a clue, get off your localism and myopic skepticism and Luddite doubting, and get with the program....
LOCAL / REGIONAL / GLOBAL
But so, ok, yes, we gotta work out some design issues. HOW do we do this, exactly?
For me, working recently in the context of NCDD discussions and Transpartisanship -- it's been interesting to work creatively in the context of their community of 2000 "process facilitators" -- people who know how to convene groups -- large and small, face-to-face or in any other way -- and many of whom are interested in the solution to broad social problems and the challenge of putting this kind of work together "at scale" -- ie, at a massive level.
The design that is suddenly emerging for me is "tag cloud coalescence".
The issue is -- bandwidth and feasibility. How do we process and assimilate vast amounts of input coming from everywhere all at the same time? That's not going to happen by email, or "comments". It's got to be tabular -- stuff you can click, yes, no, maybe, how much on a scale from 1 to 10.
That's why this little graphic seems so potent.
MANY-TO-ONE -- UPSTREAM CORRELATION
This "bridge" graphic shows the upstream data compilation that starts at the local or immediate level -- maybe, as shown in this picture, from a "face to face" context, where people are actually gathered in a room, getting their ideas up like post-it notes into a common framework -- and then entering that tabular data into a massive upstream interface that can receive it all at high speed, and correlate it all under mathematical processing that is looking for common factors and synthesizing unity by sheer algebra.
So think about this for a minute. This is a potent design key. Figure out how we're going to do this, and get it moving -- this becomes a framework for "interreligious dialogue" (converging towards a common ethic) AND for political discussions (taking on every issue out there at any level of scale, maybe guided by that common ethic) -- take your choice, it's starting to look like one-size-fits-all...
Because, like Dr. Ashok Gangadean -- and many others, including the Network Science professor at the University of Michigan -- have reminded us -- "everything is connected to everything else".
That's the image of wholeness. That's the model for synthesis of primal unity -- as the Many fuse into the One through resonant statistical convergence. This is "how to make the dream come true" -- the dream of wholeness-in-the-world being held in the hearts and minds of many sweet-spirited people today all over the world.
https://www.coursera.org/course/sna
And here's NCDD. You guys should know about this stuff.
http://ncdd.org
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Birth 2012, Ashok Gangadean
GLOBAL DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE
In the Course of Events, as our ongoing Evolutionary Drama unfolds, it has become clear that We the People have entered an unprecedented Global Age. With the intensified encounters and growing awareness of the living realities of our diverse cultures, worldviews, religions, ideologies and diverse forms of life on a planetary scale and in the marketplace of our Global Village we are able to open ourselves as never before and listen deeply to our Other, and tap the enormous endowment of our Global Wisdom through the ages.
It is clearer now that our diverse Wisdom and Spiritual Traditions concur that the heart of our Human Reason is global, ecumenical and lights up beyond local ideologies and dogmas. It is clearer now in our evolving Global Age that this Global Light of Reason is the funding source of our diverse cultures, worldviews and forms of life, and is the original source of our diverse global self evident truths.
Further, in this Global Light of Reason it is self evident that we humans co-originate from a Common Source which is the ground of our individual dignity, the sanctity of our personal space, our inalienable right to Life, Freedom and Well Being.
This Light of Reason shining through our Collective Wisdom further reveals that in our boundless sacred diversity we are nevertheless woven together in a Primal Unity which is the self evident truth of E Pluribus Unum. Thus our Personal Space and Shared Commons, our Polis, are both primary and co-constituted.
Our Planetary Wisdom further reveals that We are as we Mind, that we co-create our living realities through the conduct of our mind, our level of literacy, our mental patterns of making our selves, cultures, worlds and our experience. And in the evolutionary course of events it has become unmistakably clear that when we humans are lodged or entrenched in monocentric or egomental patterns of self making and culture making this level of literacy and development produces fragmentation, polarization, alienation, de-humanization and boundless forms of personal and cultural dysfunctions. Our Personal, Cultural and Ecological crises trace to such mental practices.
In this Light it is self evident that when we Humans mature beyond this monocentric “I--It” pattern of life to a more evolved Dialogic “I--Thou” form of life, literacy and culture making we shift from monologue to Dialogue, from ”I--It” to “I--Thou” Ethos which lifts us to our higher Human Form and opens sacred space for We the People.
Furthermore, it is now evident in the Global Light that our entrance into our evolved Global Age urgently calls on us, Individually and Collectively, to declare our Independence from all personal, inter-personal, and cultural patterns of self governance that eclipse, suppress, repress, compromise or violate our Sacred Right to Life, Dignity, Freedom and Well Being, at the Personal and Collective sanctified spaces.
Finally, the Ecumenical Light of Reason teaches that Diversity-in-Unity is sacred, and that all Persons are Equal across Gender, Ethnic, Racial, Religious, Ideological, Political, Economic and Generational lines, and, as such, are entitled to the highest degree of Life, Freedom and Well Being.
Accordingly, We the People, rising now together into our Global Age, beyond all artificial borders, leaving behind Personal and Collective dysfunctions, now acknowledge and affirm that our Democracy is Ecumenical and Global in origin, scope and power, beyond ideology, dogma and egomental patterns of life.
We hereby recognize that We Humans are and always have been intricately interwoven together in the Fabric of Life, in the Dialogic “I==Thou” Commons of Personal and Civic Space, Interdependent with each other, with all life and with Sacred Nature and Earth.
Thus, in Light of the above, and in the Presence of the Light of Global Reason, we hereby acknowledge and Declare our Sacred Interdependence and hereby resolve to do all in our power, and with highest urgency, to collaborate across all borders, to co-create mindfully, nurture and bring forth our more evolved Shared Form of Life wherein our planetary Human Family may flourish together, individually and collectively, with our Sacred Earth
Written by Ashok Gangadean, November 22, 2012
First presented 12/1/2012, Haverford College, Department of Philosophy, Haverford, Pennsylvania
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