Cyberspace Community: Yours, Mine or Ours?

by Carl Hunt

Perhaps the biggest source of both gratification and aggravation in the growth of cyberspace is innovation…continuous, emergent innovation: it constantly surprises us!  What we ultimately observe in human, technological and cultural interactions often does not resemble the original purposes we had in mind when we built and deployed cyberspace realizations of our great ideas.  The communities within cyberspace just seem to take over and something new emerges.

Whose communities are these that change our intents and purposes?  Why don’t we have better control over our ideas and creations?  Just who owns cyberspace in the first place and do “they” control these communities?  Why do these emergences keep happening?

We have spoken about emergence in past blogs (here and here, for example), but we haven’t yet discussed it in terms of community, an all-important concept for cyberspace dwellers to accept and adopt.  People, interacting with other people and our technologies, show us routinely how adaptive and often unpredictable we truly are, particularly when we start forming the connected collectives we call community.

Whether these collectives and communities are in the virtual worlds of cyberspace or in the real world (whatever the differences are anymore), who owns them and who governs them?  Do we as humans own cyberspace or does it ultimately own us within the communities we build and occupy?  Could we at least suggest models of how these things work together?

One thing we have seen is that cyberspace is a breeding ground for adaptation and innovation, accelerating the processes of ecological coevolution as we have discussed in the past.  And since we can in fact begin to build models of these interactions, we can see that the outcomes of these adaptations and exchanges are truly emergences.  We can also see that these emergences apply to communities, as well.

SENDS is about leveraging these outcomes of emergence in the context of biological, sociological and technological events.  Emergent behaviors, products or processes are outcomes that are greater than the sums of their parts: the very nature and richness of the interactions that bind together to produce novelty and innovation ensure the amplification of the essential qualities of cyberspace.  Oh yes, emergence is something more than a simple sum of parts.

Cyberspace communities accommodate and reflect emergence in ways that we as humans have simply not been able to visualize before.  Technological innovations are mashed up to produce products not originally conceived, enabling new opportunities and processes for their uses and new communities to embrace and propagate them, and the cycle begins again.  New communities then form and so it goes, on and on…this is emergence in action!

Emergence is empowered by the connectivity of cyberspace in ways no other environment or domain of existence has ever done before, and we can indeed begin to model it, as we suggested (here and here).  But, communities and the dynamism they represent start to really add complexity to the models.  That’s why it’s so hard to say whose community is whose and who really occupies or controls it.

It’s worth trying to struggle with the concept of community within cyberspace, and we are going to do it in these blogs.  We’re going to leverage the insights we gain from the calls for assistance from contributor Bob Schapiro, for example, and find ways to express cyberspace as community, embracing emergence as a concept that reveals rather than obscures. 

We may not answer all the questions raised in this blog today but we’ll answer some of them.  And in keeping with good science, we’ll raise even better and more focused questions that help us explain and predict just what is happening in cyberspace and in community.  We may even reach some level of community sensibility!

Editor's Note: We want to thank Atlantic Magazine correspondent James Fallows for mentioning SENDS and the SENDS blog in a recent piece (noted in the right margin of this blog).  Jim's work in helping people understand the effects of cyberspace and the applications of modern technology have been terrific over the years.  Thanks, Jim!

Graphical Languages in the Cyberspace Ecospace

by Sandy Klausner

editor’s note: Sandy Klausner is the founder and CEO of CoreTalk Corporation, the designer of the Cubicon programming language, described at http://www.coretalk.net/.  The opinions and concepts proposed by Sandy reflect his thinking about new types of programming languages, and web-based architectures including Cubicon.  SENDS does not endorse any specific product, but seeks to ensure members and guests of the Private-Public partnership of the SENDS Consortium are aware of novel thinking proposed by those associated with the Consortium and its efforts.

As reflected throughout the SENDS Blog (here and  here, for example), the SENDS Project seeks to understand the nature of cyberspace as a complex adaptive system (CAS) as well as reflectively thinking about cyberspace itself as a meta-system.  Not only is cyberspace characterized as such a CAS, but increasingly the computer architectures and programming languages that support cyberspace-based communications must also support these levels of functionality.

This functionality, discussed previously, includes the processes of exchange, self-organization and emergence.  Let’s look at each of these through the lens of computer network architecture.

Exchange – The exchange of concepts and information requires a semantic basis to enable software agents to infer relationships and manage content and services without human intervention.  This machine processing requires unprecedented levels of automation to support massive exchanges between billions of people and information transactions around the world.  New graphical languages must enable domain experts to create, share and execute software agents that process knowledge, transact services and enable social networking to evolve to new levels of collective intelligence.

Self-organization – People, systems and information need the ability to self-organize through cyberspace.  Such capability mandates a new computer science, infused with the inspirations of complexity science, where software artifacts are inherently recombinant to energize self-organization.  This first principle science will enable unprecedented levels of interactions and interoperability that can be visualized as dynamic system models.

Emergence – As noted in Carl Hunt’s earlier blog, this self-organization process is the transmission that moves exchange into emergence.  Emergence of novel behaviors, fresh opportunities and new organizational structures must be simulated in new graphical languages that support cyberspace evolution, providing insights into complex cyberspace realms.  These visual simulations will be easily shared across domains, providing novel ways to understand complex systems and provide continuous dynamic feedback to all participants in knowledge evolution.

Knowledge Processing

Borrowing from the SENDS blog on “Ecospace”, Figure 1, below, helps to visualize the major interactions that take place to create both the opportunity and the requirements for coevolution within cyberspace and its interacting elements.  Service exchanges and knowledge processing are at the heart of this interaction.  The figure also depicts several categories of emergence that are both ingredients and products of the coevolving world of massive interconnectivity that cyberspace enables.

There are two basic forms of systems that coevolve with each other through exchanges and processing that compose cyberspace: human systems and machine systems (together they accommodate the production of something useful).  Emergent characteristics from human and machine behaviors, technologies, cultures and governances all synergize to produce what we recognize as cyberspace.

The services that we introduce to make the network valuable as well as the threats to those services are also part of the coevolving landscapes.  Just as in predator-prey models of ecosystems, the threat is an integral consideration of a holistic perspective of cyberspace.  Finally, both natural and artificial adaptations take place that ensure cyberspace is a constantly changing, coevolving environment that truly requires the augmentation of more modern architectures and graphical programming languages.

Figure 1 - The Programming Language-Architecture View of the Cyberspace Ecology (courtesy CoreTalk Corp.)

New Software Paradigm will Manage Systems Complexity

The gap between generational advances in hardware (Moore’s Law), users’ application demands, and software’s ability to productively utilize both continues to expand … with no end in sight.  This gap can only be closed by greatly automating the software life cycle that can effectively overcome complexity bottlenecks.

A new software paradigm must address seven fundamental cyberspace complexity challenges that can be characterized in the following ways:

Semantic Web – As RDF & OWL remain underutilized, a graphical language must provide the required formalization of ‘context’ and ‘community’ architecture to fully support a global semantic substrate across cyberspace

Service-oriented Architecture – As SOA remains too ad hoc, new approaches must provide the requisite technology for machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions to truly scale across billions of devices

Smart Grid – As hard real-time environments are difficult to encode, a graphical language and a contextualized infrastructure must provide the following capabilities for a National “Smart Grid” to be realized sooner:

- ability to create and evolve interoperable standards

- mediation of services between disparate devices in a community

- execution environment that deterministically processes events in real time

“Manycore” processing – As threading is failing to scale, a fused software/hardware architecture must provide an effective parallel programming mechanism that can harness the power of emerging “manycore” processors

Software re-use – As current programming language ecosystems lack componentry architecture, a recombinant technology must enable a fertile exchange of high value intellectual property assets

Malware – As current immunization technologies are increasingly less effective, next generation programming must prevent malware infiltration through a robust ‘whitelist’ security model for all software components and apps

IP (intellectual property) tracking & licensing – As the Open Source model lacks a viable business model, a graphical language must ultimately support the ‘Open Design’ software model that provides direct compensation/recognition for authors based on virtual supply chains

Conclusions

As a proponent of what the SENDS Project calls “Open-Source Science,” these discussions about new, exchange-based programming languages and architectures are an important augmentation not only to a science-based approach to understanding cyberspace, but to spur greater innovation in the development of these capabilities.

I think the Cubicon programming language that CoreTalk has designed is consistent with the principles SENDS initially proposes for architecture and language development.  As is the case with all open-source evolution, however, the market and its users will decide.  In the meantime, the public-private partnership SENDS seeks to leverage is a viable path forward to doing good science in cyberspace and generating more secure environments for national and global prosperity.



Cyberspace as "EcoSpace"

By Craig Harm and Carl Hunt

One of the ways we look at Cyberspace from a scientific perspective is to think of it as both a host for complex adaptive systems (CAS) and a massive complex adaptive system of its own. Today we talk about the latter. Cyberspace is complex in that it is a set of dynamic networks of interactions and relationships rather than a mere aggregation of static entities. It is adaptive in that its individual and collective behaviors change (coevolve) as a result of experience. Three key processes come from the studies of complex adaptive systems, also called complexity science. As we’ve noted elsewhere in the SENDS Blogs, these processes include exchange, self-organization and emergence.

In today’s blog we’ll build on previous articles to convey these same concepts within the context of a CAS. One of the key characteristics of a complex adaptive system is its dynamism. Complex systems operate under far from equilibrium conditions requiring a constant flow of energy to maintain the organization of the system. This constant flow of energy is created by agents (e.g., users and machines) within the system all involved in the process of exchange, self-organization and emergence.

The massive complex adaptive system that is cyberspace requires better understanding of both its benefits and its challenges to human individual and cultural evolution. Thinking about cyberspace in terms of emergence and the exchange-based interactions that drive emergence allows us to better visualize the changes we experience both individually and collectively as we navigate within cyberspace. Another recent invention that cyberspace has enabled, advanced computational modeling and simulation (such as agent-based modeling), are the keys to better visualizing the actual and possible changes evident within the environment.

The figure below helps to visualize the major interactions that take place to create both the opportunity and the requirements for exchange-based coevolution within cyberspace and its interacting elements. Exchange is at the heart of this interaction. The diagram (click to enlarge) also depicts several categories of emergence that are both products and components of the coevolving world of massive interconnectivity that cyberspace enables. There is continuous feedback, another component of CAS.

There are two basic forms of networks that coevolve with each other through exchange and emergence that compose cyberspace: the physical network and the social network that accommodate the production of something useful to humans. Emergences from human and machine behaviors, culture, governance and technological characteristics all synergize to produce what we recognize as the social and physical media of cyberspace: the network.

The services that we introduce to make cyberspace valuable and the threats to those services and accesses are also part of the coevolving landscapes that compose cyberspace. Finally, both natural and artificial (e.g., man-made) adaptations and coevolution take place that ensure cyberspace is a dynamic environment that truly requires scientific methods to study and understand.

The figure above should also serve to demonstrate how these interactions are more than interesting features of cyberspace, they are also codependent, coevolving consequences of cyberspace! They are the interacting parts of the ecology of cyberspace that compose the essence of the environment of cyberspace, including the threat. All of these things are not only present, they are required for cyberspace to be meaningful to humans. We must understand them both in the context of our physical worlds and in the virtual worlds that emerge from these interactions.

As an example using the diagram above, we can follow the scenario set forth for the first iteration of SENDSim. For the SENDSim scenario, agent-based representations of people and machines are engaged in exchange and are connected through: 1) a specific characterized intranet connected to the internet; and 2) customized user behavior based on interviews of a selected user population. As users interact with the network we find the first level of exchange. This exchange is further expanded by the principal influencers (Threats and Services, from the model above).

In the initial instantiation of SENDSim the threat is the conficker malware, and services are the basic and increased tasks performed by users, thus creating a second, more complex level of exchange (following the hierarchical nature of emergence as part of CAS). As a complex adaptive system, the exchanges in a cyberspace ecosystem generate “emergents”. In the case of cyberspace these emergents are depicted by resultant emergents that include Behavior, Culture, Governance and Technology.

The process of these complex exchanges occurring in cyberspace produces currently unpredictable results (but inferable through models). Just as natural evolution occurs in a biological ecosystem, cyberspace evolution occurs as a result of adaptations to the principle agents of users and networks. Resultant adaptations (Natural and Network) are generated which coevolve with the two principle exchange agents. This process of coevolution is occurring naturally as an attempt to bring the entire system to equilibrium. However, as a massive CAS, cyberspace is fluid with a constant flow of energy producing continual change in an enduring attempt to reach a final equilibrium that will never come to pass.

In considering cyberspace as a complex adaptive system, it is logical to compare it to nature’s massive complex adaptive system, a biological ecosystem. In this context, we could think of the ecology of cyberspace as an "EcoSpace", as the title of this blog suggests. Using terms from complexity science, the evolution of cyberspace can then be thought of as a similar type ecosystem: coevolving while constantly striving for equilibrium.

SENDS and the Wicked Problem Resolution Approach

By Carl Hunt

From the earliest versions of the SENDS White Papers and the SENDS Science of Cyberspace White Papers, we have proposed the study and adoption of the concepts related to Wicked Problem Resolution (WPR) in trying to understand and tackle issues related to the phenomenon of cyberspace and cyberspace security. In fact, several in SENDS Consortium meetings have confidently asserted that cyberspace security is a wicked problem. For that reason, the major SENDS papers have discussed WP in some detail, although to date we have not talked much about how to integrate WPR and the Science of Cyberspace. We begin to do that here.

Earlier this year, Australian academics/authors Valerie Brown, John Harris and Jacqueline Russell published a volume of essays they edited and co-wrote titled Tackling Wicked Problems through the Transdisciplinary Imagination (Earthscan, London, 2010). The principles embodied in the text reflect much of what is considered as complexity science: the multidisciplinary body of research that embraces challenges from diverse research perspectives (see for example: Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, Touchstone, 1992; Kaufmann, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford, 1996; and Miller and Page, Complex Adaptive Systems, Princeton University Press, 2007).

Transdisciplinary approaches differ from the multidisciplinary perspectives of complexity science in the following way: transdisciplinary thinking is the “collective understanding of an issue…created by including the personal, the local, and the strategic, as well as specialized contributions to knowledge,” note the co-authors in the Introduction to Tackling Wicked Problems. They go on to write that such “open” thinking includes not only the scientific disciplines, but also includes “all validated constructions of knowledge and their worldviews and methods of inquiry” (p. 4). As documented throughout the book, imaginative inquiry is at the heart of resolving WP.

It’s also important to note that we don’t try to “solve” WP, but rather to resolve them due to their complex and dynamic nature. Resolving problems is a different tactic than solving them: "resolving" speaks to an iterative process in which there is a recognition that there is no final or "right" solution, whereas problem "solving" looks for the "right" or ultimate answer. Leveraging the power of cyberspace to accomplish resolution will be a powerful contribution that our budding Science of Cyberspace can make.

There’s much more to discuss when it comes to WPR and the Science of Cyberspace, and we will continue to present those observations right here in this blog. At this point, it’s important to set the stage and seek the beauty of convergence and synergy by identifying imaginative ways to proceed in dealing with wicked problems, harnessing the connectivity of cyberspace.

It’s not about being wrong or right, either, as the academic definitions of the WP literature tell us: “Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong, simply ‘better,’ ‘worse,’ ‘good enough,’ or ‘not good enough.’” (Rittel, Horst and Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, Elsevier, 1973 (this is the ground-breaking paper that began to formalize thinking about WP)).

The convergence of WPR literature, creative and imaginative inquiry, complexity science and a better understanding of cyberspace are all at the root of harnessing the power of mass interconnectivity to identify and better deal with the very hard problems we face now and in the future. Humanity is only beginning to see the benefits and the pitfalls of globalization and the connective power that is emerging from new technologies and social science-based understanding of these environments.

Here’s the closing point: the study of WP in the light of Complexity Science tells us that humans can be simply right or that we can be simply wrong, but we can’t be complexly right or complexly wrong. To appreciate this assertion, it helps to know how complexity science works (including exchange, self-organization and emergence), and it really helps to understand cyberspace theories (which we are only now exploring). The bottom line, however, is that WP are real and they’re tough to tackle because they are complex by their very nature, and the power of cyberspace (and cyberspace sciences) may present the best way to approach WPR.

Exchange and Emergence, Part 2

By Carl Hunt

What of emergence? We posit that emergence is an outcome based on processes and interactions between local nodes (particularly within a social context as it applies to cyberspace), and that this emergence can only be observed in the results of interactions. In hierarchical terms, an emergence is observed “one (approximately) level” above the interacting nodes or components. Biologist Harold Morowitz notes that emergence is manifested in “novel behaviors,” based on properties of the system or whole. “They are novelties that follow from the system rules but cannot be predicted from properties of the components that make up the system,” Morowitz writes (The Emergence of Everything, Oxford, NY, 2002).

In nature, Morowitz continues, emergence is a pruning action leading to the rise of the actual from the possible, and that these rules of nature that accommodate emergence are among the least understood of any science, but will in fact “be a major feature of the science of the future.” To reach its full potential, the Science of Cyberspace will have to make progress in helping us understand emergence and how we might better “predict” it. For that reason alone, emergence must be considered one of the two critical components to explore in this new discipline. The role that self-organizing criticality plays in these emergences is also important to consider, particularly in the massive connecting environment of cyberspace.

Individuals and collectives are connected more deeply, synchronously and asynchronously, and capable of generating more shared knowledge than at any point in the past. Consequently, the processes of exchange have evolved through the maturing of a set of rules and the interactions between “local” socio-technical “nodes” increasingly accommodated by connectivity that cyberspace now makes possible. In emergence, local nodes interact according to their own rules to create a global behavior, where such behaviors are typically very difficult to predict as explained by Morowitz.

Exchanges of information, goods and services take place more rapidly and through more connections than thought possible even a generation ago. A significant consequence of this new level of connectedness is that we lack an understanding of what this exchange-based “social” nature of cyberspace means to our recent history and all other forms of science and technology – we simply have not sufficiently studied cyberspace and the hyper-connectivity it empowers.

Connected collectivity, a concept dated to at least the early studies of physics and biology, changes things and produces cascading effects in many aspects of life we do not yet appreciate. It took decades and centuries to work out the sciences of the physical environments as we understand them today and we expect it will take many years to do the same for cyberspace.

Connected collectivity describes a characteristic of cyberspace related to shaping the environment through relevant network connections (people and organizational networks vice computer networks). As an example, cyberspace enables emergent “basins of attraction” that pull relevant thought or key people in potentially desired directions without human intent or interaction – it can be very subdued in appearance.

Stuart Kauffman described the interactive essence and outcome of this notion of collected connectivity. In Kauffman’s model, visualize randomly picking up two buttons and connecting them with a thread. Continue to randomly pick up buttons and connect them, and eventually buttons will surface that are already connected to one or more buttons. Before long, the majority of buttons are connected in one large “collective” and around the ratio of 0.5 threads to buttons, a phase transition occurs in which there is a single, very large connected collective of buttons.

Through these random processes of connecting (that could just as easily take place through exchanges), emergent structure forms through simple rules.

One of this larger collective’s dynamics is to connect and enable exchange and interactions that were not possible before the phase transition began, thus the emergent structure of the connectedness itself is a significant feature of connected collectivity. This is a powerful concept that drives much of the work in contemporary network (e.g., graph) theory (see for example, Barabasi, Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else, Penguin, NY, 2003).

The study and modeling of emergence will be essential to understand connected collectivity because its structure can be so transparent as to be invisible to conventional network thinking.
If emergence can ever be controlled and thus predicted, it likely will be through better understanding and articulation of the rules of exchange and the interconnecting frameworks that empower the process of exchange and self-organizing criticality. The effects of these rules on emergence are filtered through many other factors within cyberspace that may or may not be controllable (or even knowable), but the rules we could uncover and with which we could experiment are primarily man-made or natural laws and thus potentially observable and capable of contributing to a better understanding of emergence.

The observance of emergence must be a fundamental object of study within this new science. Bak said that emergence is essentially the outcome of interactions where the results “are not observable consequences of the underlying dynamical rules.” Put another way by Morowitz: “Emergence is the opposite of reduction. The latter tries to move from the whole to the parts…The former tried to generate the properties of the whole from an understanding of parts.” Exchanges, self-organization and emergence thus offer us insightful clues as to what we should seek to explain and predict in this new science of cyberspace.

This is thus an important driving factor behind why we should do SENDS and why we so greatly need a “Science of Cyberspace.” Look for a graphic depiction of these concepts soon, right here in these blogs…

Exchange and Emergence, Part 1

By Carl Hunt

In the last few months, we have enhanced the SENDS draft paper “Beginning a Science of Cyberspace” (available elsewhere in the SENDS Substrate) with more refinements about several key processes and outcomes that cyberspace empowers through social interaction. These key processes come from the studies of complex adaptive systems, also called complexity science. The processes include exchange, self-organization and emergence.

Thinking about cyberspace in terms of emergence and the exchange-based interactions that drive emergence allows us to better visualize the changes we experience both individually and collectively as we navigate the future within cyberspace. The concept of self-organization is important because it empowers innovation and new forms of connectivity we could not predict. Part 1 of this blog entry on Exchange and Emergence will focus on exchange and self-organization, while Part 2 will tie these concepts together looking towards emergent behavior.

Let’s start with exchange. To better picture exchange in the age of cyberspace, think about it as follows:

Each node or player within a connected environment such as cyberspace resides on a matrix, although a web would be more appropriate in the age of the Internet; in fact, it is useful to think of the matrix as residing on an underlying web. The matrix accommodates hierarchical form and a position, while the underlying, interconnected web allows the nodes on the matrix virtually unlimited connectivity to any other node. The matrix simply allows us to better visualize the context of the node. Down the vertical axis of this web-enabled matrix, there is a category such as avocation or profession. Across the horizontal axis, there is another category such as age or national origins.

No category will be completely discrete due to the interconnectedness of the web of cyberspace, as well as the widely varying interests of each player (interconnecting node in this example), but the matrix also helps to visualize the process of exchange in cyberspace. Any player in the matrix (due to the underlying web) can interact with any other; new goods, services or information sources may be exchanged among two adjacent, interacting nodes or across interacting nodes elsewhere on the matrix or even to another matrix connected by the same web.

The potential for massive, open-ended exchange is a prime characteristic of cyberspace in terms of interconnectivity that has not existed before. This example does not imply that exchange is a linear relationship between a “buyer” and a “seller.” In fact, exchange is often nonlinear because the value of the outcome is so dependent on individual perceptions and factors external to the exchange. The roles the participants of the exchange are playing during the process are also important.

Since we define exchange simply as giving something in trade for something else, the process itself can hardly be simpler; but the implications can be quite complex. Its simplicity helps to favor its evolutionary success as playing a major function in propagating life both individually and collectively.

The process of exchange that results in the outcome of emergence also enjoys the benefit of another process. Exchange, whether of information, goods or services, provides the fuel for emergence through what is known as self-organized criticality.

Systems that are at the point of self-organized criticality demonstrate emergent behaviors, as documented by complexity scientists Stuart Kauffman and Per Bak (At Home in the Universe: the Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford, NY, 1995 and How Nature Works: the Science of Self-Organized Criticality, Copernicus, NY, 1996, respectively). In fact, cyberspace acts simultaneously as a medium and a catalyst for self-organization of people and systems, as well as emergence and exchange in ways never before possible.

In Part 2 of this blog on Exchange and Emergence, we’ll look at how emergence itself pulls all of these localized, self-organizing behaviors into a more global, emergent behavior that manifests itself in typically unpredictable ways and what that means in terms of the connectivity cyberspace enables.

SENDS: Defining the Mission

By Carl Hunt

The rationale for SENDS appears in both the public and protected parts of the SENDS Substrate, so I won’t dwell on that here. The purpose of this initial blog entry is to try to concisely define the mission of the project consistent with discussions we’ve recently had with our government sponsors. We want to make sure all of us who support SENDS have a common mission statement in mind when we think about where SENDS is now and where it needs to go.

As we all know in military, government and business, it’s important to be clear about the challenges we face and the objectives we set before ourselves to overcome those challenges. That’s also a great tactic in applying the value of transdisciplinary perspectives that the study of Wicked Problems (WP) advises for us. More on applying those WP perspectives in upcoming blogs, however…

We proposed at the initiation of the Pilot Project in June, 2010, that Scientific Enhancements to Networked Domains and Secure Social Spaces (SENDS3, or interchangeably, SENDS) enhances cyberspace operations and defense through a collaborative, multidisciplinary, interagency approach that enforces the principles of science at its very core across the entire enterprise. This statement articulates the main ingredients of the mission, but it’s admittedly tough to “inspire the troops” with these kinds of words (and equally difficult to remember, as well!). We need something easy to say and easy to recall that reflects the core mission. In keeping with the real requirement of accomplishing the mission, we’ve started to say something like the following that gets the point across quickly (that is still open to refinement, by the way: feel free to help):

Harness the power of the cyberspace medium to orient users and developers to the challenges of cyberspace to produce a common understanding of the environment for maximum, harmonious exploitation of its connective potential.

There are many underlying requirements (often thought of as goals and objectives) that will support the accomplishment of this mission and we will discuss, argue and build on those requirements within the pages of the SENDS Substrate in coming months. Right now, it’s most important to state what we are trying to do and what the outcome of our efforts should look like. Plus, you can say this in an elevator and it fits easily on a cocktail napkin!

I should also add one point about the term “exploitation”. Unfortunately, because of the military setting in which both cyberspace and SENDS have originated, the word exploitation raises eyebrows, particularly among those familiar with military information operations (IO) disciplines. IO speaks to something called computer network operations that includes defense, exploitation and attack of adversary computer networks (spelled out in DoD’s Joint Publication 3-13). Exploitation in that sense includes tactics such as actions or intelligence collection techniques that gather and examine data from target or adversary information systems or networks. That is not what we mean in the context of defining the mission of SENDS.

SENDS is rooted in better understanding the complexity of networks, including social networks as empowered by computer-based systems. In complex systems theory, we talk about the differences between exploring complex systems and exploiting them. These are the images you should have in mind when we talk about “exploitation of (cyberspace’s) connective potential,” not the military definition related to computer network exploitation. Axelrod and Cohen in their fine book, Harnessing Complexity (Free Press, 1999), offer a detailed discussion of both exploration and exploitation in complex adaptive systems.

In SENDS, we want to emphasize the notion of maximizing the payoffs of what has already been learned in the exploration phase of searching for solutions (or resolutions in the sense of Wicked Problem theory). We intend to emphasize the value of both exploration and exploitation, but it is in the exploitation phase that we see the return on investments from our explorations.

So, we have the beginning of a mission statement, not without some controversy already, which helps us focus on what SENDS is and what we want to do with it. Welcome to the SENDS Substrate: stay tuned for more!