Cook’s Collaborative Edge

From the Architect and Economics of Ip Networks list this week,

Here is the final paragraph from an essay by John Kay titled
The Map is Not the Territory: An Essay on the State of Economics

“The preposterous claim that deviations from market efficiency were not only irrelevant to the recent crisis but could never be relevant is the product of an environment in which deduction has driven out induction and ideology has taken over from observation. The belief that models are not just useful tools but also are capable of yielding comprehensive and universal descriptions of the world has blinded its proponents to realities that have been staring them in the face. That blindness was an element in our present crisis, and conditions our still ineffectual responses. Economists – in government agencies as well as universities – were obsessively playing Grand Theft Auto while the world around them was falling apart.”

to which I responded

What we are up against

A refreshing reminder of the staid mechanistic approach of so-called market-efficient economics. Good for the status quo as used to explain to the world WHY the Masters of the universe are in charge. I’m not sure how many of the deans of business schools and Harvard economics professors are prime advocates. But I imagine a substantial amount remembering the interviews that Ferguson did in the documentary Inside Job. They get very well rewarded for being apologists for the current system.

But I would like to take off from this point and try 500,000 foot summary of some of the issues. I am not sure how many people really understand the nature and the reasons for our problems I have a stack of books on my porch more than 3 feet high that I’ve read since 2008 attempting to grasp it. It is only with the addition of the latest by Nicholas Shaxson called Treasure Islands Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens that I feel I have made really significant progress.

Whether it is possible for the occupy movements to create among their followers and the wider public at large an understanding of the situation, I’m not sure. But I suspect that short of violent revolution which has never been a positive accomplishment–the only way forward is to formulate this broader understanding.

I imagine that most of us have a pretty good grasp of the events that brought us to the current brink. But let me try to summarize where we stand 1st with the euro and only slightly less with an equally messy situation in the United States and likewise probably in China as well.

The “system” incents players to bet against it

With Greece on the verge of default, we do not precisely know which banks hold how much of Greece’s sovereign debt. This leads to a lack of trust within the European banking system, heightened with the bailouts of Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. And now Italian debt is under attack. Why? Because we have the insane unregulated system where hedge funds and shadow banking entities can along with so-called normal banks sell short this debt and have incentives to do so because like John Paulson with sub prime housing they can make literally billions of dollars from doing so. And of course by doing so they further undermine trust and confidence. Why? Because again there is no transparency in the system. No one has any insight as to reason for their action and with uncertainty you get a mob psychology.

With deregulation there appeared to be no real incentives for auditors to do a factual and transparent job. We get instead so-called private stress tests. But at the same time as speculators drive up the cost of borrowing within the European PIIGS. They create a panic situation forcing one country after another to plunge into austerity. This action strangles the economy, puts more people out of work, decreases capital spending and therefore demand and empowers the ongoing downward spiral which feeds on itself making matters worse.

It would appear that the amount of wealth has become so imbalanced that the top 1% has far more than they know what to do with and consequently with 0 interest rate costs, they engage in asset speculation or just sit there and keep money in the bank as with US corporate profits which are kept offshore and therefore tax-free further depriving the US economy of oxygen as it were. Austerity is another way of driving up government expense, keeping employment down and demand down, and perpetuating the current vicious circle.

The system is a black box – impenetrable to outsiders

The system has problems. Everyone acknowledges that. Because it is become utterly opaque no one can identify who has what assets and worse no one has the faintest idea of the various derivative pledges where I have read that American banks are selling European banks credit default swaps insuring European sovereign debt and bringing God knows how many hundreds of billions of dollars of liability to American shores and to the federal reserve where since the top five or ten Banks are way too big to fail will be automatically bailed out again. An ugly ugly situation.

Now what I had not heretofore grasped is the past 50 years long history of offshore banking and tax havens which now has moved onshore starting with the city of London in the 1970s and going full tilt after Thatcher’s Big Bang and 86. Involving the channel islands especially Jersey. The Caymans Bahamas, Bermuda, Hong Kong. And in the United States starting with Citibank’s move to South Dakota and then with Chases moved into Delaware and Nevada and Wyoming looking for revenue in racing everyone down the drain.

This has created a situation where with the rise of the euro dollar markets after Nixon’s closing of the gold window in 71 enabled American banks to establish offices in the City of London and in the Caymans and to open operations closed in complete secrecy enabling over time the huge cross-border money transfer flows estimated now I think at 2 or $3 trillion a day.

Offshore Banking and tax havens have corrupted the system

Yes this is been a part of globalization but look where it’s gotten us. Our politicians cheerfully take their orders from Wall Street which is set up to service those with wealth in whatever degree of anonymity or secrecy they request. And in a global race to the bottom that benefits the largest corporations and the 1% and is stripping the core structure from the rest of our society we have a situation where our largest corporations are incented to keep their profits offshore demanding a tax holiday to bring them back and in 2004 when they got the last one brought back about 350 billion and failed to do the investment in new jobs and new hiring that they promised. The net benefit was for the multimillionaires and the rest of us were left to pay the bill.

After 1980 Wall Street used its South Dakota and then Delaware wedge to effectively eliminate state caps on interest rates and with the other hand built up its profits by encouraging the credit card industry to convince the middle class whose income was stagnant since roughly 1972 load up on purchases and of course on credit. Finally that went beyond the ability of the banksters to keep the bubble inflated. As a result millions of families are decimated. I’ve read that 20 million mortgages in the United States are underwater. And of course about 5 or 6 million from the housing bubble roughly 2003 2 2007 were fraudulently issued and securitized and because the federal government has still kept its hands off there has not been a resolution to this situation. Which effectively means that the housing situation will not improve in the foreseeable future and may get much worse with foreclosed homes being moved into by drug gangs since Municipalities are slashing their Police Department’s.

Secrecy Renders Challenges impossible

To do something serious one needs to have the intent to challenge this new ruling class but it helps to have the ability also. And with the explosion of tax havens and secrecy in places like the Caymans and Jersey that has since moved into the United States where you can read that Nevada and Wyoming will happily incorporate you in 24 hours for a fee of a few thousand dollars and leave you with all the necessary papers where although your corporate entity has a name and it likely has a registered agent, any information as the to the owners, physical presence or kind of business engaged is no longer requested. The rules have been cooked such that any legal or taxing authority will never penetrate the lack of transparency. And this apparently is all quote legal”.

So how do you clean up something without really being able to identify what it is that you’re trying to clean up? Indeed Shaxson’s, Treasure Island’s has brought home to me how this is at least as much of a problem as all the malfeasance of the economic actors in the crash of 2008 and the coming crash of 2012.

To make matters worse there is now a hybrid form of incorporation. The Limited liability Corporation was created to enable it to go bankrupt without the assets of the directors being attached. The bargain was that it was expected to maintain auditable transparency for its business actions so that in the event of trouble the reasons for the trouble could be ascertained. The other form was the partnership. This is the legal basis of the investment banks until in the late 80s and early 90s, they started going public. It meant that if the action of the partner blew up the partnership, all partners had unlimited liability to repair the damage. In return the law granted the partnership the ability to keep its operations from public scrutiny. But now we have the limited liability partnership from the point of view of an ordinary citizen the worst of both worlds. Those running the business do not have to do it in daylight and also have limited liability should things go wrong. The system in other words is gamed on behalf of the 1%.

The so-called shadow banking system is still in existence and its extent I think is greater than almost anyone could have imagined. As long as this is not understood and universally attacked I don’t see any hope for change. And if we cannot educate and ensure employment for our youth can be said we have a civilization worthy of the name?

Do we want to live in a civilized society?

Shaxson, in his final chapter, which I so far have only scanned, talks about action which needs to be taken in 10 or so areas. And the final area and most important one he says is a change in our basic culture. I would submit that he is right. What does our society stand for? Do we have a society left? Or as John Robb says are we moving towards tribes?

I would submit that one reason that the Occupy movements must continue and should not prematurely come up with specific demands is that we should hope that the groups will engage in their own economic education and come to a detailed understanding of what is wrong and why. And with public debate there might be a chance of over coming the siren song of “New Jersey Shore” and “Desperate Housewives” and taking to the street to demand a total restructuring of the financial system which probably would be tantamount nationalization.

A huge huge task but the alternative is violence and likely prison camps — something we should struggle long and hard to avoid. What will our telecommunications businesses be worth if there is only social chaos in which to operate them?

and a good friend sent the following

That is a longer conversation Gordon. Very quickly, not everything is bad. LLC and LLP created a lot of good as well as bad. Our political system improved what came before it. Banking and international trade evolved for many reasons. What do the most sophisticated players look to? What do they track? Do they know human nature? Do they just bet there again and again?

I think what we find is that man made systems/tools are never ultimately good or bad in and of themselves; but rather it is the intent behind their creation and use that we find outcome determinative. If we are trapped in a system of imperfect consciousness that could make ill use of newer and more powerful tools, if the tools are secondary in power to the intent/consciousness that wields them, do we study the tools? How do we escape the system?

I replied

200 years ago our system may have been an improvement…it has now regressed …how to recapture situation where human has more right than corporation?

to which my friend concluded.

Just leave it behind. Create anew. It is how our country was founded. We withdrew our energy from the old and put it into a new creation. That job may be subtler this time around but we have more powerful tools available as well.

To my readers

How to create anew?

I have posted three full years of back issue pdfs to the PDF section of the COOK Report website

Via links at the page bottom, work from most recent content 2010 back through earlier content.

The executive summaries and table of contents of these issues have always been available at the Current Issues page where they have been accessed between an average of 2000 to 9000 times. These pages reach as far back as January 2006.

Summaries and pdfs of issues from 1993 through are found on the Issue Summary pages.

Donation highly appreciated.

Matt Larsen runs a large wisp in Nebraska that reaches into Wyoming as well. A post from Matt to my arch econ list shows what some of us back est see as the gravy train nature of the USDA awards

Today, the USDA announced $103 million in funding for 23 broadband projects in unserved and underserved communities. I cannot comment on the funding need for all of these projects, but I would like to focus on one that I am at least partially familiar with. As I scrolled down the list of recipients, I nearly fell out of my seat to find that Hemingford Cooperative Telephone Company was awarded an Infrastructure Loan for $10,280,000.

Folks that are not familiar with Western Nebraska might think that this looks perfectly normal, but in reality this stinks to high heaven of typical RLEC (Rural Local Exchange Carrier) politics. To put this loan award into perspective, that is $10,352 in loan proceeds for every man, woman and child in the entire town of Hemingford - or $27,560 for every household in Hemingford. But here is the punch line - the entire Hemingford Telephone Cooperative service area ALREADY HAS BROADBAND! Hemingford Telephone has been offering DSL across their entire service area - including the rural areas outside of Hemingford - for several years. Of all the towns in Nebraska, Hemingford is the LAST ONE that could possibly need any kind of broadband subsidy! [COOK Report note: the link above brings the requester to a page that says welcome to Hemingford Telephone’s Streaming Video Server. Referenced is Mobius Communications the local DSL supplier since apparently 2003 the data on which Google shows a link to the original page. According to Matt the infrastructure money is to subsidize Mobius to acquire bandwidth to compete against local wisps who lack access to Washington DC supplied capital.] Matt continues:

This is a perfect illustration of why I find the broadband loan and subsidy programs so abhorrent. In addition to the low interest infrastructure loans that HCTC receives, they also get access to USF subsidies. Is it any surprise that they also have a wholly owned, unregulated subsidiary (Mobius Communications) that competes with other providers outside of the HCTC service area? Or that they have 30+ people on staff between the two companies and a newly rebuilt central office? It takes a lot of people to fill out that government paperwork and keep two sets of books for the two companies!

I get especially frustrated by loan awards like this one because I have operated two ISPs that have had to compete directly with Mobius and did not have access to any federal grant or loan programs. The USDA Broadband and Loan programs are essentially only available to RLECs. When I made inquiries into the programs several years ago, I found that they would only loan to a single recipient in a region so that they were not funding competing projects. Guess who already had loans and grants in my region? Why HCTC of course! At the height of the dialup Internet days, I was paying $3000/month worth of USF fees - and that money was going into a program that was then subsidizing HCTC, which was sharing employees and resources with Mobius, which was then competing with my dialup service. That $3000/month was going right out of my bank account and into their pockets.

Even after the dialup days, I have still had to compete with HCTC. They used their government money to win an auction for 700mhz spectrum and are using it to deliver wireless broadband service in a big chunk of Western Nebraska. While my operation and the other five WISPs in Western Nebraska have to share unlicensed spectrum and fund our own operations, Mobius has licensed spectrum and a government subsidized wireline network to feed all of their towers. It is a great deal - for everyone except the taxpayers and the other providers that have to deal with this subsidized monster from the little town of Hemingford.

I kind of wonder what kind of broadband the people of Hemingford are going to get for $27,000 per household? Unfortunately, there is no information about what will be deployed, but for $27 large per person it must be pretty sweet! I’m pretty sure that I could deploy 12meg broadband to end users in and around Hemingford using fixed terrestrial wireless for about $10,000.

Last week at an Ag Issues event for Senator Johanns, I made the point that the USDA Broadband programs and USF should be the first programs on the chopping block when it comes to balancing the budget. I didn’t think that I would get my point made quite so quickly!

Michel Bauwens
27th May 2011

* Book / Report: Fast Thinking. a Research and Education Network Renaissance. Gordon Cook. Volume XIX, No.s 11-12, XX, No.s 1-5 February – August 2011

(To receive the URL for downloading the entire book,(twenty dollars US via paypal) fill out the request here)

Gordon Cook, who is the driver of a network of communications infrastructure experts via the Internet Cook Report, a mailing list and newsletter, has published a very in-depth overview of the “other internet”. This is the internet that is used to drive massive collaboration global innovation in science and technology. However, it is far from being a technical report, but poses all the important issues posed by an infrastructure for mass collaboration, and all the social and political issues that are involved in building it.

In our third and final serialization of the summary of this work, Gordon Cook links the major network initiatives, with the shift towards planetary cooperation, a vital need to solve a number of pressing issues. Please note the request for support at the end. Making sure that these global infrastructures benefit all of us, especially grassroots civil society, will require a conscious and sustained effort. If you want to support Gordon’s work, please buy the book, and email him for the next steps in pushing this agenda forward.

You can reach the author via cook@cookreport.com .

* Part V. A Future Goal — an interconnected Collaborative Civilization

What’s Happened and What is Possible

“Let’s recall what has happened. Physical highways still exist. However the globe has been encircled many times over with glass highways. The small band of men and women honored in this book have taken what they have learned about packet networking and applied it to fiber and the light paths that replace electron streams. Their doing so has banished the old world of bandwidth scarcity based on copper and dependent on all manner of electrically hungry equipment to shove bits down those relatively resistant copper pathways.

This book describes the collaborative research ecosystem that is emerging. It shows how they have woven together an intelligent canvas called by various names of “grid” or “e-grids”. This is a canvas that, right now from the individual user’s point-of-view, is more like a star network than a mesh network that the term “grid” calls to mind. It is however an environment that is unlike any environment on the commercial Internet today. This uniqueness is because, from the ground floor to the penthouse, it has been designed for collaboration and for social networking by facilitating the formation of groups of people with like interests gathered into virtual communities. It offers such groups a portal into a global community numbering probably hundreds of thousands if not millions.

The fortunate inhabitants of this new world can gain entry through authentication and authorization provided by their affiliated community. Once they join, they will have the opportunity to see the disciplinary grids offered by the organization. In talking with their local experts they may select one or more of these grids. They will be given then the proper instructions for accessing them. At the present moment, their access will be pointed to a physical server that is a part of the infrastructure of their home institution and country in which they live. However this does not always have to be true. In any case software, in what you might call their home node, speaks to many other nodes that are gathered together to assist researchers in this particular community. Furthermore, in the case of the LHC the offering is likely well into the hundreds of thousands of computing cores spread all over the world and linked by optical fiber at bitstream speeds so high that for most practical purposes they could all be in the same room. The grid fabric could be thought of as an organization – like a department store or a library – to be used as a foundation for the building of human knowledge. The basic idea is to take the grid software stack, whose various components are discussed throughout the chapters of this book, then to modify it in ways that enable individual users to work with versions tailored to their interests. Yet, the network technical folk are finding that they must do much more work in order to make these intelligent systems scale. It is easier said than done. That said, as has been shown by the organization of FTP repositories into the searchable World Wide Web, it can be done. Most importantly, it can be done in a variety of environments, such as University R and E communities or at the level of the US UCAN libraries.

Right now this global eco-system is in its beginning stages and requires a lot of manpower to make it work. Work is ongoing to develop a user interface that is more intelligent and needs much less mediation by people who are both computer and subject matter specialists. The goal is to refine it in such a way that it is much more amenable to questions from its users and can guide them to connecting the resources they need in the most expeditious way. Achieving this is the 21st century equivalent to the duties of a reference librarian in the 1980s.

The US UCAN “Grid” must give its user communities the means of organizing and networking on a social and intellectual level while being connected to the services they require. These services may range from those that focus on the sciences of the atomic and molecular level all the way up to the ecological level of the surrounding world and the global level of tectonic plates and weather patterns to the universal intergalactic level of radio telescopes. With access to instruments, they also have access to data collection into huge data stores measured in terabytes and petabytes. The system will enable them to catalogue these data stores, find them, retrieve some, send them where desired for the application of various forms of high-performance computing, retrieve the results, visualize the results, and finally discuss them in videoconferences – locally, regionally or globally. The are doing this on a grand global scale and with leadership can adopt to the needs of their localities.

In Whose Interest is the global collaborative OS?

At the R and E level the ability to do all of this exists right now. It is being worked out and refined in a self-organizing way that is fascinating to observe. At this level the movers and shakers not surprisingly have been the computer and network people. Scientists have been working alongside them to explain the abilities of the tools which they desire. But by now these abilities are reasonably well understood and a second and absolutely critical phase is beginning. This is one that is designed to reach out to entire scientific communities and show these communities what is available and how it is in their interest to begin to adopt them.

Of course this will involve some problems of training and serious fundamental issues of getting these research disciplines to adopt toolsets that will, in all likelihood, be mandatory both for enabling them to do what they need to do, and for solving the problems they need to solve. But at this point the innovators have no immediate proof. All they have is yet more tools and concepts for the rank and file researcher to master. Consequently the problems of adoption and transition are not small. In fact they are on the same level of importance as those encountered in the transition from hand-written books to the printing press. This is just one more set of devices that the human mind has developed to be able to use the information it acquires and make it into meaningful stores of knowledge.

Consequently what is happening is not well understood. Therefore in order to create appropriate evaluation and measurement criteria in setting priorities for the use of capital and resources, it is necessary to think about this in terms somewhat different from those of 20th century capitalism.

We are building a infrastructural system for the circulation of knowledge. We’ve all come to understand the infrastructure of highways, water and sewage services, and electric grids. Although there has been much discussion in the last 5 to 10 years of Internet as infrastructure, I submit that there is a new operational ecosystem described in this book. I consider it to be an enabling system for the continued creation of knowledge infrastructure.

I see this mechanism for building knowledge as something that is so basically uniform in what it does that it makes absolutely no sense to think of it ever becoming a private corporation. Would you try to make photosynthesis into some ones intellectual property? I would not. Lights, road systems, water systems, electric systems — you name them. They are all parts of a single global system of basic civilized infrastructure that cannot be isolated into the ownership of one company or group of people because basically they are natural monopolies. It is so basic and so uniform that it makes absolutely no sense to even try to define let alone think of a competing system. It would mean building something huge and expensive twice when doing it once is quite adequate. After all, humans may have two hemispheres but they possess only one brain.

We have the opportunity to create collaborative eco-systems of people who are working within their communities and with their colleagues to define and redefine on a community-by-community basis the necessary knowledge creation systems. It is imperative that we understand from community to community such systems are vital. But they are not mass produceable they are more like a living system that must be tailored to their different environments.

In the United States it is imperative that we seize the opportunity of US UCAN to bring these tools into their respective communities at a level where they are understood and developed by the community as infrastructure. They must not be thought of as new package of soon to be commercialized Internet services that would pump capital into corp[orate coffers outside the community. They are the glue that makes the community a community and they will be, in their own way, unique to the people and the values of their respective communities. These community infrastructures will be open and run on uniform interoperable standards that can be tailored to the preferences and needs of their local users.

What this book is talking about and what it is seeking to articulate is an understanding of the development and emergence of something much better thought of as a global collaborative operating system. This is an OS that can be embedded in the values and points of view and interests of each of its communities and in no way is defined as something that can be packaged and merchandised and sold and delivered top-down from any commercial organization to purchasers at the edge.

Can you imagine a world established by means of a communication mechanism that connected all its knowledge makers, its teachers and its curious citizens who wanted to understand more about their own environment into a learning system for research and discovery? How about a communications environment that has made possible a grid on which its inhabitants could self-organize to accomplish their tasks? This is what has been happening over the past 15 years or so in such a quiet a way that most people are entirely unaware of the significant changes and developments outlined in this book.

Becoming somewhat aware of what was happening, I wanted to understand it in its totality which, at the end of about two years of solid work, I now do. But I also believe that, outside the small circle of implementers, few people are aware of the significance of what has been done. It may have been the case in times of prosperity before 2008 that it served the cause well to fly under the radar. I would argue however that in the very different environment of 2011 with the global rush toward austerity it becomes vitally important, if this good work is to be kept alive and benefit all of us, for a much broader public to understand it, talk about it and help in its implementation and support. These goals were another reason for writing this book.

* Part VI. Summing Up and Request for Help

The Situation in Late May 2011

As I have pointed out, we now have a global set of largely open-source, collaborative tools running on high-end optical (photonic) networks that, while using IP, often are effectively circuit-switched at layer 2. These tools, over the last five years especially, have been designed to launch a global network of collaborative, data intensive, fourth-generation science that is available now to accredited researchers in perhaps 50 or 60 different nations in all the world’s continents save for Antarctica. Powerful projects ranging from the Large Hadron Collider, to radio astronomy, to global warming, and microbiology are fueled by these networks and are largely dependent on them.

All this exciting and inspirational material comes with one small problem. Most people are absolutely unaware that these networks, tools, or processes even exist because of the tools’ dependence on high bandwidth fiber in the “last mile” and because their users have never depended on out reach. Furthermore they are accessible to relatively few people right now. On a global basis, at some future point at most 20 million people, spread among not more than 500 universities.

No one knows the precise number because the networks, while growing, are changing all the time. This is a largely federated movement not centrally guided or directed. It is a movement that has never been explained before. I do so in this book because I’m convinced of its extraordinary potential power. Furthermore, when I say 20 million people in perhaps 500 universities, this is a potential audience. Right now I would guess that the global level directly involved is more like 20,000 people. The federated users of these tools realize that the justification for their existence depends on their outreach to a global community of scientists — many of whom are only just now learning how to use them in professions where their use is not yet strongly rewarded but where successful first-time users can achieve things that are otherwise impossible.

So, as with all new technology, we see a painful process of outreach, recognition, training, and bridge-building to researchers who can benefit but who also may be unaware or rather poorly informed of the potential gains and losses involved with their decision to devote sufficient time to adopt and embrace the tools. All this is underway. The questions are where and to what end?

The Position of the United States

It was only nine months ago that NTIA announced — as stimulus grants designed to bring broadband Internet to more Americans — some $1.5 billion involving a nationwide dedicated 100 Gb backbone and several dozen middle mile network builds for the creation of what is called the United States Unified Community Anchor Institution Network (US UCAN). This network is to connect, mostly by fiber some 200,000 so-called community anchor institutions to a state-of-the-art national network that – in concept at least – can become the first National public Internet as opposed to commercial internet that we have ever had.

The prospect of US UCAN is encouraging. It holds out the possibility of a very desirable paradigm shift in the way some of the most significant organizations of our society will be able to communicate with each other during a time of ever more rapid change and financial stress. The opportunity here, with appropriate education and outreach, is to connect schools and libraries and hospitals in such a way that they could enjoy state-of-the-art information flow and participation in everything “near and dear” to the users of the peer-to-peer foundation list, wiki and blog. Why make a fuss? Because a well executed US UCAN could be the circulatory system enabling resilient communities to function on their own when the next economic crisis hits.

But the problem is this $1.5 billion expenditure is a part of the Obama administration’s stimulus plan with strict guidelines that every penny must be spent within the next 24 months. We have something that could — with adequate planning and coordination — yield an outcome that could be very useful to our communities and strengthen our children’s education. But it is more likely something that US UCAN may become a prime target for chopping down to size and doing things the way they’ve always been done. Why? Because for a corporatized society, the latter is the way of least resistance.

Between January and June 2011 I have communicated with most leadership behind this effort and with many of them face-to-face an the Internet2 international meeting a month ago. However, I regret to say I see a unique opportunity very possibly being wasted because — for political reasons — the orders are just: get the money spent to build the networks you promised to build and we will figure out how to pay for and how to operate them — later. Once they’re built, we will think a little bit about how to train potential users what they’re good for. All of it is haphazard and slapdash to a potentially tragic degree.

Basic hypothesis – With Internet2 and US UCAN, one possible tool set is there for us to use in solving our problems. However because of the enormous complexity, the demand for speed on the part of the US government as well as the insularity of Internet 2, the outcome may be poor. But all eggs are not in the US UCAN basket. That is good. There are also two other programs getting underway. Neither of these involve internet2. One known informally as Gig U is completely private sector and involves setting up a buying consortium where as many as fifty universities may buy bandwidth from carriers and use that bandwidth to provide high speed connectivity for their entire surrounding communities. The other is US Ignite where OSTP and NSF are aligning forces and are suggesting that high bandwidth applications may materialize if one creates a testbed where communities like Lafayette, Louisiana; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Cleveland Ohio and one or two more places are connected via a high speed R and E backbone. The situation in the USA is not good but it is encouraging that there are many talented people who in the presence of many obstacles refuse to give up.

Some of the Builders of the Global OS Tell Me That Given Vision it Could also Run On US UCAN

I have described in detail the global, University-based what I chose to call “collaborative operating system”. One month ago at the Internet 2 meeting as part of separate 30 to 45 minute conversations with three of the key builders, I asked three major questions. First I outlined verbally my understanding of the global, optical network based, and grid computing based ecosystem they have launched and said to each of the three people “do I understand correctly what this is and how it works?” All three of them said “yes you do.”

And then I said “what you appear to be focused on over the next five years or so is to make it more user-friendly so that your average scientist can use it as easily as he would use Microsoft Office e-mail and the web.” They agreed and I continued that: you are also “extending the operation of all of this into a high-speed wireless cloud that will incorporate user mobility as well as all manner of sensor networks.” They affirmed that that was also correct. The final question was “is there anything that were an effort to be made would prevent the use of this ecosystem of collaborative tools by the hugely larger community of those 200,000 community anchor institutions?”

They said it “would take a conscious effort but that with training in the fiber-based infrastructure being built for US UCAN that there was nothing of a technology nature standing in the way.”

So there you are — a huge opportunity that will be lucky to live up to 1% of its potential. Why? Because it’s being built in the dark while people are basically asleep — although if you know where to look it’s being built very openly. But the people who can benefit from it may well not because they don’t know it exists.

Achieving an operational infrastructure based on any kind of common understanding of the potential good that can be offered by this networked collaboration is at this point not very likely. Why? Because at this point the command is “just get the damn thing built and we will think about what to do with it later.”

So what do I want to do right now? Undertaking the necessary editing and publication to revise this 440 page encyclopedia in the way that it can create the broadest possible understanding of the potential gains. And then to market, educate and do outreach that otherwise will not be done. A foundation could be helpful here as well as money from the same or perhaps a different foundation to put together at least one proposal and carry it out to validate the ideas and concepts that I have explained in my book “Fast thinking a Research and Education Network Renaissance. ”

Perhaps there are other things that need to be done? With this in mind I would like to use the p2p blog to submit my work to the collective intelligence of this group. Please help me in the fine-tuning these ideas and in getting access groups of like-minded people with the necessary support so I can gather together a group of people, sharpen and focus the agenda, and go out and make sure this opportunity is positively and well-fulfilled.

However, I have done what I have so far largely pro-bono. Without monetary support, I cannot afford to continue. Ideas, suggestions and introductions will be appreciated … as will suggestions on where I may find an affordable editing service for the book. While a strategy needs to be shaped, a significant part of the problem is that there is an expectation – especially among the most wealthy – that if it is published on Internet, it should be free. This is one reason why, for those who would like to read the entire volume, I have created a URL at the front of this entry where, for a PayPal donation of $20, I will send you the URL that downloads the entire volume. “

(To receive the URL for downloading the entire book,(twenty dollars US via paypal) fill out the request here)

Michel Bauwens
25th May 2011

* Book / Report: Fast Thinking. a Research and Education Network Renaissance. Gordon Cook. Volume XIX, No.s 11-12, XX, No.s 1-5 February – August 2011

(To receive the URL for downloading the entire book,(twenty dollars US via paypal) fill out the request here)

Gordon Cook, who is the driver of a network of communications infrastructure experts via the Internet Cook Report, a mailing list and newsletter, has published a very in-depth overview of the “other internet”. This is the internet that is used to drive massive collaboration global innovation in science and technology. However, it is far from being a technical report, but poses all the important issues posed by an infrastructure for mass collaboration, and all the social and political issues that are involved in building it.

In our second serialization of the summary of this work, we focus on the two middle sections. Gordon describes the US UCAN network, a huge federal project, and how local institutions and communities that serve the public good, can or should benefit from it.

* Part III. Leaving the Ivory Tower: The R&E Networks Married to Political Reality

“Faced with the destructive and largely unpunished corruption of Goldman Sachs and its Wall Street siblings, many may decide to question any national concept of justice, and to focus on their own local economy. When doing that, they should give the US UCAN network (as a concept at least) a good strong look — and perhaps an investment of their own time. As the corporate nation state is, as far as the rest of us are concerned, hollowed out, political and legal power is swinging back toward state control. If you are not part of the plutocracy, you are on your own. Good luck. Therefore grassroots progressives who are Internet savvy and peer-to-peer savvy and who see nothing wrong with hard work and self-reliance have little choice but to regroup into focusing on strengthening their local economies and making the places where they live as resilient as possible. Any and all of us who are involved with our local schools, our libraries, our hospitals, our local government or cultural institutions will have a stake in US UCAN.

The global R&E network collaboration system in many respects can be thought of as a replacement for the old government-sponsored Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA). Driven by the emphasis on short-term profits that has resulted from the financialization of our economy, only a relatively small handful of highly complex technology giants maintain meaningful R&D facilities on their own. The government gives universities the money. They do the research and the results are immediately privatized.

But we are at a tipping point. Our university system with its tuition priced increasingly out of reach can choose to downsize and exist only for the elite in the United States. Or with the emergence of US UCAN, it can make a decision to work with a broader range of grassroots progressives to showcase the amazing achievements of the research and education network community. In doing so, it must focus on showing the 200,000 community anchor institutions what the best of this as-yet poorly-understood, collaboration-based, global operating system can do.

As readers should imagine, all this is evolving rapidly. Fast Thinking – published on April 25th 2011 covered as much information on US UCAN as I could get by April 23. In the one month since then it has become clear to me that Internet 2 is not interested in outside input. It is huge, rigid, insular and bureaucratic. Nevertheless the Feds are spending approximately 1.5 billion dollars on US UCAN and its infrastructure. Right or wrong, the money is being spent. Activists need to be aware of what is happening and, since the top down pathways are not open to outsiders, activists need to engage with it bottom up from within their own communities. The schools, libraries, hospitals and so on are their community institutions – in theory US UCAN is being built to serve these community institutions. The reality appears to be that within the next 12 to 24 months, US UCAN — depending on where activists happen to live — will be done. Bottom up activity must happen NOW before US UCAN reaches your neighborhood.

I have written Fast Thinking from the point of view of the kind of US UCAN I would build were I in charge. Of course I am NOT in charge and there are many many other issues such as the operational business model that have the potential to affect the recipients of the federal largesse. The first steps of the business model process are may be found here. A major issue is how to pay for the costs of operation once everything is in place. That is something that those who are interested in living in resilient communities should pay careful attention to because US UCAN, done right, can be a key enabler of resilient communities. This is my contention in Fast Thinking and it remains so today.

Ask Yourself Where You Stand

The choice will define our future. Ask yourself where you stand. As for myself, I would like to see these technologies given a decentralized and grassroots greenfield on which to grow. The most critical question is to ascertain whether they can be used to strengthen local economies. Such local economies must begin to grow in order to replace the discredited global financial system and the kind of capitalism based on the end of endless production of goods backed by merchandising marketing and an environmentally destructive, throwaway culture.

Our option is to unlock all sorts of hitherto unimagined possibilities in education, in complex systems modeling and in the understanding needed to cope with ecological change and the ability to micro-manufacture in one’s local community and potentially reverse the worst effects of two centuries of industrialization.

I want to spread an awareness and understanding of what these new cooperative, collaborative tools can bring to several thousands of otherwise isolated communities. To pretend that the Washington Wall Street “Nexus” will be able to endlessly engage in grabbing more and more wealth for two or three per cent of the entire population without an upheaval occurring sooner or later, is outstanding foolishness. What is left of the American middle class understands that something is wrong. I am looking to ally with a thoughtful and empathic group of people many of whom have now grown up with the Internet and are very creatively using it to establish a critique of what capitalism has become and try to build a more sound sustainable society themselves.

For local communities to become self sustaining, access to this network infrastructure and to this emerging collaborative tool set as a viable operating system is critical. The next critical question I see is how many of these tools can be copied by users of the US UCAN network who are interested in the economic development within what they call the open knowledge commons?

How Many of the High End Tools Can be Copied in US UCAN Connected Communities

We shall not get a good answer to this question without being informed. I hope that this book provides the basic information to start that process. When the next meltdown hits, we better hope that US UCAN is in place. Our communities will need it and there will be rafts of unemployed and under employed people that find strategic direction from the peer-to-peer movement which has, I contend, a much more sound agenda that the Washington, Wall Street Military Complex that some are beginning to speak of as a “nexus.” This “nexus” which in its unreconstructed Cold War guise seems to demand an enemy from which it has to protect us. We have now a half century of the military industrial complex against which Eisenhower warned us. Moloch like, it demands to be fed and, if one enemy disappears, it finds a new one. After all it took less than ten years for fear of Communists to be replaced by fear of radical Islam. There is no strategy, no national narrative. In looking at the opportunity of US UCAN, that absence of strategy needs to be fixed.

In 1913 a warning shot against the triumph of industrial era finance

Charles A. Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution was published in 1913, the year of the founding of the Federal Reserve that, for the first time, established a central banking system in the US. In retrospect this marked the triumph of the Hamiltonian, one government, one currency, one bank system, the ground work for which was established in 1787 and perhaps served us well through industrialization. But one may now argue – post industrialization, that a swing in the Jeffersonian direction is long over due.

A Hamiltonian world is not sustainable. This is a decision and realization that we shall have to reach on a community-by-community basis. Beard’s 1913 work offers an argument with an overtone familiar to the framing of post 2008 meltdown discussions. First, in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) and then in An Economic Interpretation of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915) he extended an earlier hypothesis in terms of class conflict. In these two books Beard examined American history from the 1776 Revolution to the election of Jefferson in 1800. To Beard, the Constitution was a counter-revolution, set up by rich bond holders (bonds were “personal property”), in opposition to the farmers and planters (land was “real property.”) The Constitution, Beard argued, was designed to reverse the radical democratic tendencies unleashed by the Revolution among the common people, especially farmers and debtors (people who owed money to the rich). In 1800, said Beard, the farmers and debtors, led by plantation slave owners, overthrew the capitalists and established Jeffersonian democracy.

See An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.

It is clear now however that power is moving from a discredited Washington DC back to the states. From the center to the edge and it is the edge which the internet is so well set up to serve. But let me add that the global cooperative operating system that this book describes will function best applied to the problems of ecology and climate change, alternative energy, life sciences — in short the huge global problems that most seriously are bearing down on us. This ethos and culture of collaboration and cooperation is what is needed – yea demanded by the future.

* Part IV. Needed – a US UCAN Strategy

The Current System Does not Value What is worthy of Value

As long as the US continues its current course, the affordability of education at the research universities for any but the children of elite comes into question. And as John Seely Brown points out in his emerging trilogy, the increased speed of continued technology change demands reform of education. The collaborative systems outlined here must become the foundation of future education. The Ivy league offers scarcity of degree and not necessarily a difference in quality. Kevin Carson who writes his books from northwestern Arkansas on a dial up connection — books worthy of a PhD from any Ivy League school. US UCAN must put a firm foundation under the Kevin Carsons of America.

I further argue that the most critical part of the future of US UCAN are our public libraries that must become the environments used by local scholars, small businesses, and local “makers” and “fabers” who for example will need the ability to ship designs larger than ten megabits to 3d printers. The commercial ISPs (telcos and cable cos) are incapable of understanding this new world. And that is just fine. But I also argue that, if the libraries don’t get it, they shall put themselves out of business by not getting it.

Inevitably there will be the: ”this is ready for privatization and commercialization” cry. The schools and especially the libraries must have a sustainable funding model but they also must never give in to the privatizers. The minute this were to happen I argue that the whole raison d’etre of US UCAN would be destroyed because the legal duty of the corporation is to suck money as profits for shareholder out of every community robbing them all of the ability to be sustainable an resilient in the face of the next collapse of the Central Banks and Wall Street. Public libraries were founded to serve their local communities and NOT the Barons of private equity.

Obama’s home town of Chicago sold its parking meters to a private company that now gets the cash flow, some of which it shares with the city, but the bargain is treacherous because, if the city ever wants to close a street for a street fair, it is in the contract that the city must pay the absentee owners for the missed revenue. If the library community doesn’t get the business model right in each community, it will one day soon be invited to commercialize and it will find something like a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs that puts a parking meter on each US UCAN terminal and predator like will continually raise rates to keep the bond holders at bay. They will do this while automating the facilities with VOIP to India to replace American librarians with workers less capable but cheaper on behalf of the absent corporate masters.

What Might the Real US UCANN Strategy Be?

When the Wall Street crashed and Obama was elected, he persuaded Congress to approve the stimulus plan and obtained authorization to spend billions via the ARRA act to put people back to work. Almost seven billion was allocated to telecom. NTIA and RUS were charged to do something about broadband. But what? The White House didn’t know precisely because other fires were burning. It was not until late December 2009 and early January 2010 that the White House OSTP was contacted via the broadband plan commission and said: why not let Internet 2 and NLR know that they should work directly together on a proposal for a backbone for a United States Community Anchor Institution Network. If we got fiber a lot closer to schools and libraries, we could get more bang-for-the-buck with the annual subsidy they get through the schools and library program of the Universal Service Fund. Hmmmm. Wouldn’t you know?

It is conceivable that the basic premise behind US UCAN is nothing more profound that this. Carry on as before with the subsidies for the telcos. What might the real strategy be? All that is overtly clear is a panicked “here is some money – quick go spend it.” It is urgent that Internet 2, as they roll out US UCAN, think big and recognize the potential that I have outlined. Potential that I doubt the White House was aware of. Of course US UCAN must get built as specified, but built with a broad strategic vision.

Instead of submitting to eventual commercialization, public libraries under US UCAN should choose to become community invested gateways to self-reliance. These institutions, instead of drawling people to the big cities, should show every town how to use the internet not for its commercial web and porn but rather to show what is available throughout the nation and the world in the way of knowledge and learning. The US UCAN libraries must use this network to give their communities access to science, and to the arts in a world where the size of the window is not dictated by demands stockholder scarcity. We are now in the very decade when a century ago most of the Carnegie libraries were built The self-service stacks pioneered by these libraries should be copied a century later with librarians as mentors to users and then working in learning teams in a manner analogous to the ideas of John Seely Brown in his book, A New Culture of Learning.

Give the towns something that the telcos and cablecos could have given had their profit oriented horizons been capable of seeing more than 90 days into the future. Enable each community to discover what is in its own interest. Encourage communities to compete in terms of interdependence and sustainability. Do not allow distant corporations who, absent government money showed no interest, to come in and exploit them.

An inflection point stands not far down the road. We must realize that it is there and unite in our local communities to send the message “Don’t Tread on Me” to the distant predators. The message of self-reliance and independence should be that which occupies the packet flows of US UCAN. This tech is not that hard. If we understand its value — and the weekend Democracy Camps can help with that — we can and must take control of the technology and use it on behalf of each US UCAN community.

In October 2010 Steve Wolff, now the newly appointed interim CTO for Internet2, gave the major presentation. He called it “Reflections on the Pickle We’re In.” Steve said that “commercializing the NSFnet was a great idea,” but that “privatizing it was not.” As Steve put it “the NSF should’ve believed in itself” and “realized that as R&E became an ever smaller fraction of the business, it would have an ever diminishing voice in the service it received.” Trying to be upbeat Steve concluded that “the good news is we are not alone. Expanded role for the NRENs is becoming common.” Then (in a statement that I cannot overemphasize how strongly I agree with) he concludes “that it is easier to hold a centrally funded not-for-profit to its social obligations than to subvert the investor focus of a Corporation.”

(To receive the URL for downloading the entire book,(twenty dollars US via paypal) fill out the request here)

Originally posted at P2P Foundation blog on 23rd May 2011

As a more ambitious goal, I am seeking to establish whether or not there can be a community-of-interest between the high-end research groups and a rapidly growing grassroots “edge”. These are efforts of small communities of mostly younger people located currently at the edges of twentieth century, large, corporate-based society.

* Book / Report: Fast Thinking. a Research and Education Network Renaissance. Gordon Cook. Volume XIX, No.s 11-12, XX, No.s 1-5 February – August 2011

(To receive the URL for downloading the entire book,(twenty dollars US via paypal) fill out the request here)

Gordon Cook, who is the driver of a network of communications infrastructure experts via the Internet Cook Report, a mailing list and newsletter, has published a very in-depth overview of the “other internet”. This is the internet that is used to drive massive collaboration global innovation in science and technology. However, it is far from being a technical report, but poses all the important issues posed by an infrastructure for mass collaboration, and all the social and political issues that are involved in building it.

In our first serialization of the summary of this work, we focus on the first two sections of this remarkable report, which should be of interest not just to technical experts, but also to policy makers and the p2p-oriented open infrastructure movement.

* Preface

By Gordon Cook:

“Globally, a small group of people use Internetworked computers for purposes far more profound than than electronic mail and web browsing. They are developing what I call a globally connected, collaborative operating system for scientific research. Few people are aware of the implications of what they have done. I have written Fast Thinking — a Research and Education Network Renaissance to explain and celebrate their achievements. The purpose of this six-part summary is to relate what they have done and get readers to think how it might be applied to the social, economic and political problems that threaten our society today.

Part I. A Global Collaborative Operating System and Infrastructure as a Foundation for a Different Internet

Fast Thinking — a Research and Education Network Renaissance portrays the development of what I choose to call “a global collaborative operating system” based on optical networks which are lit and managed by their Research and Education owners. This federated system of NREN-lit optical networks is becoming a global infrastructure that I contend may emerge as the circulatory system holding civilizations together on all the continents much is the sea lanes provided the opportunity to do so in the four centuries between the Renaissance and the replacement of those sea lanes by airways as a part of the global industrial system in the 20th century.

In 2011 the global collaborative OS is in an early operational stage. Fast Thinking describes its multiple layers and protocols at a technical level as well as from the operational point of view, where national research networks are beginning to release collaboration interfaces for their users and to refine the connective glue offered by the virtual organizations of various grids that enable researchers to plug into the resources they need to do their work.

Fast Thinking takes a broader view of the global ecosystem than what its architects may have intended. The new application tools that I describe are a means to enhance communication and collaboration among researchers and networked communities as well as social groups. These groups are all trying, in independent and yet parallel ways, to bring cooperation and collaboration into research, teaching, and economic activity as a whole.

The new OS invites its users to create the new knowledge that others write about and Google helps still others to find.

The work the Research and Education Network architects are doing is designed to raise the productivity of their university based customers. However, observing what is happening and trying to make sense of it all as it happens, is rather like riding the crest of a breaking wave and trying to figure out how the currents will arrange themselves. Nevertheless, the effort is one that I believe should be undertaken with the hope that it will further a more widely-held understanding of the kind of civilized future in which we should all want to be investing. We all need to become “customers” of the R and E Network designers.

To understand this new world it is necessary to grasp what a full-fledged, optical-network-based, research and collaboration network ecosystem looks like. This book describes the Netherlands version in detail. With continued build outs by Internet2, ESnet and US UCAN, it also shows what it could look like in the USA. In this context, it becomes important to make more people aware of what is happening and the possibilities inherent within SURFnet, the GLIF and, in the United States, Internet2.

In my judgement describing just the technology without examining its possible impact on the world to which it is applied makes no sense. Therefore the beginning and the end of this work, that is the Preface and Chapter 1 and Chapters 17, 18 and 19 contain a political and economic framing for the global optical collaborative infrastructure.

The Global R and E Infrastructure

A group known as the Global Lambda Integrated Facility has evolved to the point where it meets twice a year to coordinate the interconnection of most of the world’s research and education networks. A national R&E network cannot stop at a national boundary. Therefore the GLIF exists to ensure the inter connection by means of lightpaths of the world’s R & E networks. What I call a “global cooperative operating system” has been overlaid on top of photonic networks that is “lightpath” networks. These photonic (lightpath) networks operate at layer 1 and 2 and connect to layer 3 on an as-needed basis. The primary thing being done within the GLIF is the provisioning of large optical links of 1 Gb and above to members on an as needed basis.

The Research and Education Networks of North America, Europe, and Asia are building an overlay infrastructure designed to facilitate globally diverse research projects that lie across all disciplines of learning. However not surprisingly, these are ones that start out needing high-end instruments like radio telescopes or the Large Hadron Collider and large amounts of computational power to be applied to massive acquisition of data. Consequently, the research and education network operators in each country are doing two things in parallel. First they are providing what they call collaboration infrastructure systems. Named coManage in the case of Internet2 and conNext in the case of SURFnet. These systems are designed as an organizational infrastructure to take the eligible research and education populations of each country and provide the mechanisms for authenticated connection and authorized use of the R&E networks. These collaboration infrastructure systems are covered in Chapters 2, 3 and 4.

Processing power, storage facilities and access to instruments

In parallel to this, each national research and education network offers its authorized users an entire ecosystem of computational and storage facilities. These facilities range from a small computational cluster of two or three machines in a single university department; to groups of clusters connected together in such a way as to form computing grids and finally to a smaller but still vital network of supercomputers ranked at national and global levels. Grid applications form the vital glue that holds together access to instruments computing power and storage resources in such a way as to enable first dozens and then hundreds of smaller more specialized researchers to access the shared network computational and storage facilities needed to do their own specialized research.

These grids –- described in Chapters 5 through 9 — are organized through various national and transnational grid projects. This resulting optical network infrastructure is making possible entirely new approaches to what is known as fourth paradigm or data-intensive science. “Toolsets” often referred to as e-science– are being developed to be applied by researchers within their respective grid infrastructures to make massive data extraction and manipulation with respect to the scientific discipline at hand possible in ways that could never before be attempted. Right now the grids require a considerable amount of intercession by researchers who are skilled at both in the specific discipline and in the networking and computational aspects needed to apply high-performance computing tools to the discipline.

Most researchers access this global optical infrastructure via their national collaboration infrastructure to gain access to the network and to the appropriate tools. They form a range of “virtual organizations.” The result might range from creating of a small group of a half-dozen or dozen researchers to an existing international group numbering in the thousands. For example, consider the high-energy physicists involved in Large Hadron Collider Private Optical Network, a virtual organization making up a global grid.

In every case efforts are underway to make the connection of researchers to the network tools as seamless as possible with the analogy that it be rather like transitioning from the early disk operating system to them much more user-friendly Macintosh OS X graphical user interface. The ultimate idea is that the scientist needs to know little, indeed almost nothing about the network tools underneath that make possible research approaches such as climate modeling at a level of detail that could only have been dreamt about a few years ago.

Chapters 10 through 15 are discipline-specific case studies of grid-based scientific networks. The topics range from genomics in molecular biology to bird migration studies. Chapter 13 covers the humanities and social sciences in the UK. Chapter 14 explains the Global LHC Grid. Meanwhile, Chapter 12 relates to Brian Hanley’s experience in microbiology at the University of California Davis. (This link takes you to a May 20, 2011 Washington Post article on problems faced by recent American microbiology Ph.D’s. It also references KAUST University in Saudi Arabia having a $10 billion endowment. What it does not mention is that Tom De Fanti (one of the top 5 people in the world of Fast Thinking) has a contract with KAUST. As a result of using a ten g-bit optical link to KAUST, a professor at UCSD can demonstrate totally immersive protein folding in real-time to students in Saudi Arabia. Chapter 16 describes an interview with the new CEO of Internet2 focusing on Internet2’s role building the USUCAN network.

Part II The Global High End Infrastructure in the United States has an Opportunity to be Extended to US Community Anchor Institutions

In contrast to my earlier work Building a National Knowledge Infrastructure, Fast Thinking summarizes what is being done in the United States as well as elsewhere in the world. It provides a over view of the late 2010 awards to Internet2 and to the middle mile networks of many states that for the first time will extend the benefits of these optical collaborative networks outwards to Community Anchor Institutions in the United States. These institutions are being defined as schools, libraries, hospitals, public safety, museums, performing arts organizations and the like. This is a major step in the right direction. However, since it has never been attempted in this country before, it need will need a great deal of inclusive effort that Internet 2 is not well equipped to provide.

What is most significant is that scarcity model of bandwidth has the potential to vanish in this new world in which the high end, university-based center could transfer its technology to the local economies via circulatory system of US UCAN.

I have covered the organization known as the GLIF [Global Lambda Integrated Facility] in great detail because the GLIF is both a skillfully constructed federation of interests that makes it possible for independent national networks to develop so as to inter-operate with each other as completely as possible. The mutually-agreed-on goal of the resulting virtual organization is that the participants can cooperatively shape and then use a rapidly spreading global system of interoperable lightpaths. These networks are creating an infrastructure that will enhance the ability of members to communicate, cooperate, and assist each other other not only in their research but also to do this in difficult political and economic circumstances.

I show in some detail how these new systems will work. Federated mechanisms of identity management will connect ultimately millions of users with software and tools that they are authorized to use. They will be enabled to set up and tear down globally based virtual organizations to accomplish their agreed-upon tasks.

Building a Community of Interest between the High End and Grass Roots Edge

As a more ambitious goal, I am seeking to establish whether or not there can be a community-of-interest between the high-end research groups and a rapidly growing grassroots “edge”. These are efforts of small communities of mostly younger people located currently at the edges of twentieth century, large, corporate-based society. The viability of this worn out corporatist center is being challenged by Deloitte’s Center for the Study of the Edge that finds a 65% decline in Return on Equity of the nation’s largest publicly owned corporations since 1965 and by Douglass Rushkoff in Life Inc. How Corporatism Conquered the World. Umair Haque in his The New Capitalist Manifesto points out that corporations need to create “thick value” and Chris Hedges in his 2009 Empire of Illusion shows how corporatism is transforming the middle class in the US into a class of serfs. I begin this discussion with my Preface and Chapter 1 where I explore the undermining of the political and social infrastructure of the United States, Europe and most of the developed world by largely corrupt financial elites.

To do this I use the analysis of John Robb and his blog Global Guerrillas, as well as the broad community-of-thought represented by Michel Bauwens in his Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, which seeks to organize a globally-based effort on behalf of the open-source knowledge-commons. Increased awareness of the impact of these new technologies has spread in such a way as to place the future locus of economic and political sustainability within local communities rather than where they are currently located namely in the capitals of what Robb calls the “hollowed-out nation states.”

These are states where the political classes have given in to the interests of globally based corporations and a global banking system. Both banking and corporate and military-industrial sectors — One need only read Chalmers Johnsons’ last four books on the military — exist to increase the wealth of their executives and shareholders at the expense of the society on which they depend. The banks, by capturing the political system within the boundaries of each state, have, with the collapse they brought about in 2008, made it no longer possible to maintain the economic and social safety-net by which their respective governments have established their legitimacy among their respective peoples. It seems likely that the enormous debt buildup within these states will lead to breakdowns of their central authority and may leave the world fragmented in such a way that long-term sustainability may be found only in what many thinkers are beginning to call “resilient communities.”

Such local communities may well come to depend on what they can provide, build, and provision for their own members. It is here that I suggest that a confluence of interest may exist between the university-based researchers and their high-end networks and what programs such as the United States Unified Community Anchor Institution Network will offer locally on a much more widespread basis. Will the offering be a foundation for schools, libraries and local civic institutions that can move local self-reliance away from the increasingly bankrupt and hierarchical, political, and corporate sectors into the hands of local communities having their own self-interests at heart? This seems to me to be the most critical question we face going forward.

The critical question: can the edge-based low-end and university-based higher-end can establish a mutually beneficial dialogue whereby the people can work with each other to build a more humane and sustainable civilization?

As Kevin Carson – author of The Home Brew Industrial Revolution asked me: “Might we have the means for establishing a society where exchange of CAD/CAM files, teleconferencing, etc., replaces most of the physical movement of goods and people?” Kevin continued “In general, I think most of the solution will be automatic, as this is a sort of perfect storm given the crisis conditions of capitalism. People are becoming underemployed and being thrown back on the informal economy, looking for means of self-provisioning through networking with their neighbors, etc, at the very same time that we’re experiencing a singularity in the possibilities of low-cost small-scale production technology. So networked local micro-manufacturing economies will emerge from this “time of troubles” because it’s the only solution possible given the tools at hand.”

See the scribd version of the table of contents here:

Beginning last October and continuing through May I wrote a book part 1 and part 2 in which I have tried to examine Research and Education networks globally but with the primary emphasis on The Netherlands, Europe and the US as exemplified by Internet2. These networks are morphing into a platform for the conduct of collaborative science and present a potentially compelling alternative to commercial internet. These are taking shape into what could be a powerful alternative network based economy.

This January, when I saw US UCAN described in the abstract I became very enthusiastic about it a potential morphing into a national public internet for supporting John Robbsian Resilliant Communities. While Internet 2 finally got a much needed dose of new leadership i found that its Washington DC grant oriented minimum risk taking culture has not changed significantly.

At 140,000 words I realized in May I needed and introduction and summary for my book. I wrote one a a contribution to the Peer to Peer Foundation Wiki. That may be read here.

Unfortunately given the austerity kick under way there is no support for outreach and i am beginning in frustration to go back to the the run of the mill commercial internet. However Michell Bauwens did present my summaries on the P2P foundation blog.

I will post updates of those as follow ups to this.

I’ve become a big fan of John Seely Brown’s for the past six years or so. Today brought quite a surprise in the context of something I thought was already familiar and well-known. About six weeks ago JSB sent me up copy of his new book A New Culture of Learning. I was appropriately flattered and did read it. But I came away somewhat disappointed with the feeling that compared to the Power of Pull that I have gone deeply into six months before there was not too much new here.

But I was wrong, at least if JSB’s late June 2010 concluding keynote to the New-media convention is a good tool for judgment. For today Jaap van Till a scholar friend in the Netherlands sent a pointer to the video to my mail list asking if the mail list was a study group? The mail-list response was–perhaps? Well sort of? Why the uncertainty? Because not many had looked at the video. When I did Jaap’s labeling was obviously correct.

I watched the video and listened. And I’ve just done it a second time. To my pleasant surprise although there is definitely continuity between the video and JSB’s recent work in the Power of Pull; there is also at least for me, some very key new takeaways.

Only about 6 minutes in JSB talks about the familiar world of constant change. We know we collaborate in a world of constant flux that is invested knowledge “flows” not in the more static 20th century term of knowledge “stocks.” He then drops the phrase: in a world of constant flux a person who is not curious is screwed. Bang! Indeed. I’ve been musing to myself about my own curiosity. Forty years ago I wanted to understand the Russians and their way of viewing the world. This curiousity led to a doctorate in Russian history. Currently, my curiousity is focused on wanting to understand the organization and further more the ramifications of the evolving global system of lightpath-based Research and Education Networks in facilitating global collaborative research among scientists.

I suppose this represents a kind of extremely leveraged way of using the Internet. But the people doing it are so busy with what they’re doing that by and large they have not stopped to talk to anyone else outside their inner circles about what they’re doing. As a part of my curiosity and newsletter reporting and fortuitous circumstance — two years ago in Austin Texas at Supercomputing 2008 I was able to get my feet inside this group. Understanding what they are about is an effort which I have been pursuing ever since. I have right now a 174 page manuscript to which within about six weeks I will likely add another 174 pages and produce the book explaining what is happening.

In the past eight weeks as I have become more familiar with Internet2’s award to build a backbone to connect upwards of 200,000 unified community anchor institutions into a national network and have put this knowledge alongside that of the peer to peer open knowledge resource Commons represented by Michel Bauwens, I had a gut feeling that somehow someway there is a connection yearning to be made between these two very disparate groups. There is nothing overly obvious in my construct. It is just a tacit feeling that there is a huge potential here.

One thing that I observed from listening to the lecture that I did not get out of the book is that there are ever evolving ways of interpreting one’s surroundings and what is happening. JSB used the same two examples of self-taught surfers in Hawaii and World of Warcraft generation of knowledge that he did in his April 2010 Power of Pull lecture. But by late June 2010 he had evolved these concepts in new interesting and refreshing ways. One point in the lecture that was quite critical indeed was the concept of study groups in the learning 21st-century terms as opposed to education the 19th century term. Success now is found to be dependent to a very large extent on one’s ability to form study groups and that these groups could enable a self-motivated socialized learning experience that a more solitary approach to some rigid curriculum could not. And of course in the world of constant technology change the idea of a rigid curriculum is found wanting.

JSB describes the way groups of immersed problem solvers use the Internet as a tool to approach their problems creatively. Shifting now to my own personal agenda: Finally I have gotten to a point where I believe I have my hands wrapped around something that is new and important and is virtually unknown and not understood by those outside immediate circles of the people doing it. And two weeks ago for the first time I publicly explained according to my current best understanding what it is I’m trying to do and asked for help on the Open Source Knowledge Commons mail list where I know that the people to whom I would like to bridge congregate and BOOM within a few days I’ve had personal inquiries from Douglas Rushkoff, Robert Steele, and Venessa Miemis- people whom I did not know before but people who in their own right are important writers and thinkers.

So finally this confluence of events leads me to believe that I’m on to something. The feeling that is strongly reinforced by listening to and reflecting on John Seely Brown’s continued trailblazing is designed to better understand and shove gently in more progressive directions what otherwise might seem to be the chaos around us.

February -April 2011 COOK Report

This issue — about research and education networks — marks the beginning of a process by which I’m trying to do several things. The first goal is to bring out the complex story of the application layer that is being added to the physical layers of the optical networks in Europe that I described a year ago. This application layer is now also being added to optical networks in the United States. The building of this new layer it is taking place in parallel efforts by key networks in Europe and the United States; as well as some of their counterparts in Asia.

I take in this book a broader view of it than what its architects may have intended. I see the new application tools as a means to enhance communication and collaboration among researchers and networked communities as well as social groups. These groups are all trying, in independent and yet parallel ways, to bring cooperation and collaboration into research, teaching, and economic activity as a whole. I believe that, from their point of view, the work the research and education network architects are doing is designed to raise the productivity of their researchers in the most powerful and cost effective manner. However, I hold a a some what different point of view. I believe that what they are doing has the potential to mitigate the most undesirable directions of the solely profit-oriented capitalism of the past century. But proving this will be a challenge. For observing what is happening and trying to make sense of it all, is rather like riding the crest of a breaking wave and trying to figure out how the currents will arrange themselves. Nevertheless, the effort is one that I believe should be undertaken with the hope that it will further a more widely-held understanding of the kind of civilized future in which we should all want to be investing.

One of the threads that I have developed in these first five chapters, and will continue to develop over the next several months with the remaining chapters is an understanding of what a full-fledged optical network based information and communication technologies ecosystem looks like in the Netherlands and should look like in the USA. It is time to make more people aware of what is happening and the possibilities inherent in what it can enable within SURFnet and the GLIF and by Internet2 in the United States.

Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 are dedicated to this effort. Also chapters 6 through 12 are dedicated to further elaborations of this point. For the first time I have made a great deal of effort to summarize what is being done in the United States as well as elsewhere in the world.

Internet 2 and the US UCAN grants

There is a lot more going on in the US than I realized. I provide a lot of information about the brand-new awards to Internet2 and to the middle mile networks of many states that for the first time will extend the benefits of these optical collaborative networks outwards to Community Anchor Institutions in the United States. These institutions are being defined as schools, libraries, hospitals, city government, museums, performing arts organizations and the like. I’m very much in favor of this although, since it has not really been done in this country before, it undoubtedly will need and I hope will receive a great deal of conscientious effort.

In the context of reporting on the technology developments going on both in the US and in Europe, it is important to note that major effort is being put in to establishing web-based user-controlled dynamic light paths that may be set up and torn down by end-users in the manner of pre-Internet circuit-switched networks but which will have a huge advantage of making unparalleled amounts of bandwidth available at very reasonable prices for collaborative work in science, education and many other activities unimagined at this point.

I have covered the organization known as the GLIF [Global Lambda Integrated Facility] in more depth here than I think it has ever been covered elsewhere. I do so because the organization is both a skillfully constructed and federated version of interests that exists in order to make it possible for otherwise independent national movements to develop in such a way that their optical networks will interoperate with each other as completely and fully as possible. The mutually-agreed-on goal of the resulting virtual organization is that the participants can cooperatively shape and then use and benefit from a rapidly spreading global system of interoperable lightpaths. The networks are creating an infrastructure by means of which it is to be hoped will enhance the ability of members to communicate, cooperate, and assist each other in difficult political and economic environments with which the post-economic-collapse global civilization is currently faced.

I show in some detail how these new systems will work. Federated mechanisms of identity management will connect ultimately millions of users with software and tools that they are authorized to use. They will be enabled to set up and tear down globally based virtual organizations to accomplish their agreed-upon tasks. Speaking for myself, I hope that by use of these unprecedentedly powerful networks and the largely open source software and tools built into the infrastructure, to the extent possible, they will tear down political and corporate silos. These are the silos whose previous economic raison d’être seems to have been designed to inhibit the widespread inter-organization collaboration necessary to resolve the problems facing their respective societies.

I also address a more ambitious goal. I am seeking to establish whether or not there is, or can be, a community-of-interest between the high-end research groups and a rapidly growing grassroots “edge”. These are efforts of small communities of mostly younger people located currently at the edges of 20th century large corporate-based capitalism. This is an archaic capitalism that is being challenged on all levels and is very likely unsustainable for many reasons – political, economic, resource-based, ecological, and a general inability to manage the emergence of new networked technologies that undermine the sustainability of the old centrally-based, hierarchical, corporate mechanism. I begin this discussion with my Preface and Chapter 1 which point out, in language that a decade ago would have been unthinkable, the capture and corruption by financial elites of the political and social structure of especially the United States, and only to a somewhat lesser extent Europe and most of the developed world.

To do this I use the analysis of John Robb and his blog Global Guerrillas, as well as the broad community-of-thought represented by Michel Bauwens in his Peer-to-Peer Foundation that seeks to organize a globally-based effort on behalf of the open-source knowledge -commons. Increased awareness of these new technologies has spread in such a way as to place the future locus of economic and political sustainability in local communities and cities rather than where they are currently located namely in the capitals of what Robb calls the “hollowed-out nation states.”

These are states where the political classes have given in to the interests of globally based corporations and a global banking system. A year ago I would not have said this but I do say it now: Both banking and corporate and military-industrial sectors (one need only read Chalmers Johnsons’ last four books on the military) exist primarily to increase the wealth of their executives and shareholders. The banks, by capturing the political system within the boundaries of each state, have, with the collapse they brought about in 2008, made it no longer possible to maintain the economic and social safety-net by which their respective governments have established their legitimacy among their respective peoples. It seems likely that the enormous debt buildup within these states will lead to breakdowns of their central authority and may leave the world fragmented in such a way that long-term sustainability may be found only in what many thinkers are beginning to call “resilient communities.”

Such local communities may well come to depend on what they can provide, build, and provision for their own members. It is here that I suggest that a confluence of interest may exist between the university-based researchers and their high-end networks and what programs such as the United States Unified Community Anchor Institution Network will offer locally on a much more widespread basis. Will the offering be a foundation for schools libraries and local civic institutions that can move local self-reliance away from the increasingly bankrupt hierarchical, political, and corporate sectors into the hands of local communities having their own self-interests at heart? This seems to me to be the most critical question.

I would hope that in the end it will not turn out to be so depressingly apocalyptic, but rather that it turns out that the edge-based low-end and university-based higher-end can establish a mutually beneficial dialogue whereby the people, rather than the self-aggrandizing large corporate elites and their captured government handmaidens, can work with each other to build a more humane and sustainable civilization.

An important request –

I have had two lengthy conversations with Kevin A. Carson, author the Home Brew Revolution: A Low Cost Manifesto. This extraordinary work should earn him a PhD were he to ever want one. More important though for my purposes is my hope that he, Michel Bauwens and others will assist me in connecting with the folks who are building these local alternatives. I have the high end expertise. One critical thing that at the moment I lack are bridges to local “tribal” leaders along with feedback telling me what they think of the information that I am trying to convey, as well as how to do this job more effectively. Kevin who has been reading a draft of this publication told me today:

“My main reaction so far is that this is a more reliable and secure specific mechanism for guaranteeing the communications prerequisites for the kind of phyle or resilient community network Robb describes, and in general for a society where exchange of CAD/CAM files, teleconferencing, etc., replaces most of the physical movement of goods and people”.

“In general, I think most of the solution will be automatic, as this is a sort of perfect storm given the crisis conditions of capitalism. People are becoming underemployed and being thrown back on the informal economy, looking for means of self-provisioning through networking with their neighbors, etc, at the very same time that we’re experiencing a singularity in the possibilities of low-cost small-scale production technology.  So networked local micro-manufacturing economies will emerge from this “time of troubles” because it’s the only solution possible given the tools to hand.”

To Kevin: warm thanks and to my readers: Please help me build these bridges.

The Digital Photography Workflow Handbook From Import to Output
By Juergen Gulbins, Uwe Steinmueller
Publisher: Rocky Nook
Released: October 2010
Pages: 552
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781933952710

This is a wonderful volume. I am an avid but amateur photographer. In the past few years I have been scanning thousands of color negatives. The last film I shot was 2003 and I have had a digital SLR since 2007 – a Sigma 14. Love the Foveon CCD but hate the miserable Sigma software. Most recently a Nikon D90. Terrific software but the Bayer CCD is wretched. My photography is mostly travel and architecture and mountains. I have almost 4400 images on a site called Giph. http://pix.giph.com/main.php?g2_itemId=46 However because I’m still involved full-time in producing the Cook Report, I do not have the time that I would like to have to explore all the digital photography tools.

That having been said — the new Digital Photography Workflow Handbook from the Rocky Nook publishers distributed by O’Reilly is truly outstanding. I received my copy earlier today and I’ve been eagerly looking through it and learning. I’ve learned what workflow is in a very random fashion. I wish I had had this book five years ago. The way that it organizes workflow concepts from use of histograms, to white balance, to shooting in RAW is absolutely outstanding. One of the things I learned - albeit very elementary – is that I realize for the first time why my Nikon D90 images looked so dark on import to Lightroom.

The information that you can create raw import settings and values suited to your camera and your tastes was new and valuable. The use of workflow ideas to give a structure to one’s process of acquiring and manipulating images is highly useful, as for example on page 47, they make clear the kind of processing and image data that can be done and is probably useful to do in RAW before moving on to Photoshop or Lightroom. They break down these operations within RAW into categories of basic optimization and fine-tuning. It is also used in every step that can usefully be broken down into smaller steps. Because the tools are so huge and potentially complex and that this fine tuning of organizing a process helps the mind to understand and deal with the possibilities.

A section of resources, beginning on page 513, is also extremely useful. These pages give the reader the basic facts but also the URLs that will take the reader to the appropriate website or, for the first 27 resources, to the appropriate book. iMost of the resources listed are software tools that appear in the text in brackets at the places where information about them is appropriate.

Charts such as figure 2-11 on page 52 showing possible tool sets for use with digital workflow are also highly useful as well as comparisons of what software tools to what is the explanation of profiles for color management display and printing in Chapter 3 is very clear and explained it better than I have ever seen it before.

Moving on to image processing basics, issues like differences between Photoshop CS -3 and 4 for as well as quite new CS 5 are quite useful and one thing that I noticed way later in the book that I’m extremely intrigued by among many avdanced Photoshop techniques in chapter 8 are perspective corrections on page 298 and the section beginning page 302 on correcting lens errors. On pages on 306 and 307 are auto lens correction in CS five have me extremely intrigued. What I saw is enough to make me consider buying the upgrade.

It explains and shows in comparative photographs how it is possible to correct for image distortion in wide-angle shots and to do this with auto corrections profiles specific to your camera and lens that come with Photoshop. Another intriguing feature of Photoshop 5 on page 340 as the content aware of Phil where you can take the Spot healing brush amongst other things and draw over the telephone wire that you wish to remove or on page 341 something like the foot of a mother goat that intrudes into the picture of her babies.

Chapter 12 explains Photoshop plug-ins ranging from filter plug-ins, to automation plug-ins, to automation scripts. Thern the installation of some plug-ins for white balance and color correction and ones for reducing noise without losing detail as well as third-party sharpening tools and tonality tools.

This book is like a beautifully arranged and well ordered encyclopedia. I would recommend that especially for someone new to the field as a purchase that is well worth the $50 price because it could easily enable the book’s owner to avoid having to purchase a small library of other more details subject oriented books

The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression http://www.barnbaum.com/Home.html
By Bruce Barnbaum
Publisher: Rocky Nook
Released: November 2010
Pages: 364

Description
“This is an updated and newly revised edition of the classic book The Art of Photography (originally published in 1994), which has often been described as the most readable, understandable, and complete textbook on photography.” Direct quotation from http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781933952680
Anyone with a serious interest in photography needs to be aware are a small family of books that focus on the art and creativity behind personal expression in well-chosen and well thought out images. Bruce Barnes’ the art of photography and approach to personal expression is clearly a classic and it’s one that belongs with the more encyclopedic how-to approach of the Digital Photography Workflow Handbook. This Rocky Nook book is an updated version of the basic philosophical work published a good many years ago by the author who started out as a UCLA trained mathematician and programmer of guided missile systems. Bruce went on to a camping trip in the Sierra Nevada mountains and in the early 1970s sold some of his resulting photographs to the New York Times. When he recognize that he could get paid for engaging in creative fun he turned his back on programming.

As he says on page 5, it “has long struck me that people who attend creative work of any type without feeling any enthusiasm for that have no chance at success” is very very true. And as he says on page 17 “good composition is the artist’s way of directing the viewer’s vision in a planned de- randomized fashion. When the photograph is well composed, viewers first see the elements that the artist wants them to see most prominently and remember longest… With good composition the artist leads viewers through the photograph in a controlled manner .”

This is expressed as the idea is that I realize I need to incorporate into my own work, if I can ever slow down to a more measured pace in my tendency to take as many travel photographs as possible. Having thought about this over the past several years, I’m coming to realize that the kind of communication art that is possible and will depend much more on a deliberate pace of expression. One must give thought to the light, composition and colors found by the eye. Only then can one embrace all the possibilities that make up a freshly viewed landscape or objects of any kind of which one wishes to capture a portrait in light.

Bruce has a great deal to say about composition and on page 44, figure 3-13 and figure 314 there is a quite extraordinary image made while crawling underneath a cottonwood branch in an unnamed Canyon. As he says “after the first photograph, I realized the real dynamic was missing: the low camera position was wrong moving the camera to high level and a foot closer to the branch created greater dynamism that was my goal. The log explodes toward the viewer confronting the viewer directly. The only difference between the two images was camera position.” Indeed this is an outstanding illustration of the need to think about placement of the camera especially in a situation that is somewhat abstract

He has many awesome abstract images taken in Antelope Canyon and similar canyons into which as he write, he developed a habit of rapelling into “before it was fashionable.”

The callouts are quite useful as he writes on page 45 “when you encounter a scene that grabs you, it is imperative that you respond instantly and spontaneously to the impulse. That doesn’t mean you instantly shoot the scene but that you immediately investigate it.”

Another interesting example of his work is its use of light and shadow with swirling geometric forms from which he has extracted stunning examples in places like Antelope Canyon and in a very different way from places like English cathedrals. Finally one of his most attractive images is figure 9–six a four-story spiral stairway at Château Mouraine in Provence, France that is, as he puts it much like an Escher drawing looking almost the same upside down as right side up. It is truly hard to imagine this with words let alone to describe it but looking at the image on page 157 he is certainly correct. I regret that I don’t have the time at this point to really dive into the book as much as I would like.

Let me say in conclusion that his writing in the last chapters 16 17 and 18 on creativity is some of the best I’ve seen — subtle without being boring.,

Let me close by recommending still one more book from Rocky Nook press “Wildlife Photography” which is worth the purchase price strictly for the magnificent photographs of the African animals. It is something that were I to be able to go on any kind of photographic safari I would dive into the utmost pleasure.

This paragraph from O’Reilly says it all “Photographer and environmentalist Uwe Skrzypczak wrote Wildlife Photography (Rocky Nook, $39.95 USD) with several goals in mind—to teach the technical aspects and the workflow of digital wildlife photography; to show the beauty of East Africa and his beloved Serengeti National Park, and to educate about its habitat; and to provide a guide for the photographer who is planning to go on an African photo safari and wants to be prepared to capture the finest possible images.” http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/2591

If you find this material on my blog quickly don’t hesitate to rush out and put it under your favorite Christmas tree – Amazing books and well worth the prices.