Distributed Decision Making
David Stephenson is a very knowledgeable consultant on disaster management, homeland security, and Web 2.0. A few notes from his keynote at the "Decisions 2.0: Distributed Decision-making" seminar at the Santa Fe Institute last week...
...because disasters require innovation and ability to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances, disaster response is perhaps the best example to date in human society of the "emergent behavior" phenomenon. Based on observation of social insects, scientists have found that groups — including human ones — can generate collective behavior far more sophisticated and advanced than could have been predicted from the individual participants’ abilities and experience. The phenomenon is sometimes referred to as "the wisdom of crowds."
He concentrated on a more recent disaster, last Fall’s San Diego wildfires, saying it was one of the first in which a wide range of Web 2.0 applications, such as the Twitter social networking application (which limits users to terse 140-character instant messages), camera phone pictures posted to Flickr, and Google mash-ups tracking the fire’s spread, instantly transformed individuals into vital sources of "situational awareness" that meshed seamlessly with official information.
