White paper eu complexity research-an integrated approach-the peoples toolkit v13

White Paper-EU Complexity Research-an integrated approach-THE PEOPLES TOOLKIT draft V11

Author: John Sutcliffe‐Braithwaite, PublicComputing BV Page 1 © S‐GAIA Consortium

“Towards a sustainable World: holistic, symbiotic, creative and survivable”

WHITEPAPERdiscussionon:

Governance,Policy,Standards:SupportforComplexityintheRealWorld

EUResearch–Integratingourwayoutofsilos:purposefulFederation

ComplexityScience&Society;EUCalls:CAPS;FIScience/FInES/FIRE;GlobalSystems;(alsoCOSI‐ICT;DyM‐CS;FOCAS;FuturICT)

Society:people,purpose&complexbehaviourmodelling(simulation&dissimulation)

ThePeoples’Toolkit:ComputationalSocio‐Geonomics/Metaloger(CSG/M)

ICT‐AnewKondratievShift:OnComputableSociety

SOCIO‐TECHNOLOGY

.

Author John Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, PublicComputing BV

Email [email protected]

Tel: +44 (0)7973 31-51-77



Computational Socio‐geonomics and GAIA

Wikipedia: James Lovelock: GAIA Theory

“an ecological hypothesis proposing that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth are closely

integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on

Earth in a preferred homeostasis”. Except that society perturbs that homeostasis beyond its adaptive range.

DISORDERED COMPLEXITY ORGANISES

AT THE POINT OF MAXIMUM ENTROPY

Society’s role is to be purposeful,

active, and productive and chooses its

end‐goals: it cannot avoid the GAIA Pending the bleak hypothetical end to our

world and life implied by the above, our

Mission is to prevent waste:

“Taguchi quality is inversely proportional to the

sum total of the loss ...”

The objective is to keep recycling energy and work to fulfil our destiny

expressed as optimum development of our World. The metaphysical

question of destiny is outside the scope of this. All other choices, actions and

responsibility for them are imperatives for FuturIcT. (But not The Tragedy of the Commons – a misnamed metaphor leading to simplistic/erroneous ‘solutions’)

FLUX

FLUX

The WORLD SOCIETY MODELLER (S‐GAIA) is a computer‐human confluent modelling environment used to model

Society including its relationship to the World ecology. It is the applied socio‐geonomics computational

platform. It will be pervasive across society’s systems in use, processing their dynamics and thus giving the

capacity to model and build a joined‐up GAIA view of the World, from a Society perspective.

Frontispiece: Global Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) is about SMART SOCIETY heeding the Gaia hypothesis



CONTENTS

1 White Paper-EU Complexity Research-an integrated approach-THE PEOPLES TOOLKIT ........................................... 5

1.1 Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................................... 5

1.2 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................... 5

1.3 THESIS ......................................................................................................................................................................... 6

1.3.1 Governance, Policy, Standards (GPS): Support for Complexity in the Real World (CRW) ....................................... 6

1.3.2 EU Research – Integrating our way out of silos: purposeful Federation ................................................................... 9

1.3.3 Complexity Science & Society; EU Calls: CAPS; FI Science/FInES/FIRE; Global Systems; (also COSI-ICT; DyM-CS; FOCAS; FuturICT) ........................................................................................................................................ 10

1.3.4 Society: people, purpose & complex behaviour modelling (simulation & dissimulation) ......................................... 12

1.3.5 The Peoples’ Toolkit: Computational Socio-Geonomics/Metaloger (CSG/M) ......................................................... 13

1.3.6 ICT - A new Kondratiev Shift: On Computable Society ........................................................................................... 15

1.4 SOCIO-TECHNOLOGY .............................................................................................................................................. 17

1.4.1 Scope ...................................................................................................................................................................... 17

1.4.2 Outline Computable Society Systems Requirements ............................................................................................. 17

1.4.3 Dimensioning The Problem ‘space’ - micro level ................................................................................................... 17

1.4.4 Dimensioning The Problem ‘space’ - macro level .................................................................................................. 18

1.4.5 Dimensioning The Solution ‘space’ - a meso level enquiry .................................................................................... 19

1.4.6 Dimensioning The Solution ‘space’ - the micro level .............................................................................................. 20

1.5 Disruptive Change, tipping points, decision & action: Closing the ‘Gap’ ..................................................................... 21

1.6 Core Concepts of the People’s Toolkit Socio-Technology Engineering ...................................................................... 22

1.7 Summary: Conclusions ............................................................................................................................................... 25

2 ANNEXES ............................................................................................................................................................................ 34

2.1 Extended extract from the DYM-CS Submission ......................................................................................................... 35

2.2 An R & D Perspective for Computational Socio-Geonomics/Metaloger(CSG/M) ...................................................... 43

FIGURES

Frontispiece: Global Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) is about SMART SOCIETY heeding the Gaia hypothesis

Fig.1 Complexity Theory: Information-process-Structure-Perturbation-Morphogenesis

Fig 2 The Science Computational Socio-Geonomics, the platform for World Society Modeller

Fig.3 The (CAS)2 World of Problem Solving, Optimisation, Purpose, Decision-making & Action – Assemblages of people, things, ideas, happenings, meaningful patterns

Figure 4 FOCAS WORK PACKAGE STRUCTURE

Figure 5 “The Social Group Paradigm” points to personal psychological factors driving social groups & needing to be part of the Socionome

Figure 6 – S-GAIA Strategic FuturICT Federation to build the Paradigm Change called ‘Computable Society’



Science of complex systems + SocioTechnology + Emergence + ecologies + People:

IS ‘SMART SOCIETY’ DYNAMICS

VALUES ARE THE NEW GAME IN TOWN

The science is Computational Socio-Geonomics

(STEeP) a proposal for federation between Future Internet Science/FInES & CAPS to design, deliver, and deploy an affordance called

THE PEOPLES’ TOOLKIT whose rationale is:

SMART SOCIETY sustainable world ecology The dynamics of society are the result of Abstract values perturbing the CAS called Society

SMART SOCIETY is the continuous Living Lab of life, an in-vivo expression of the complex game of living using the entire range of tools that we can devise to generate a better world

Figure Zero

Abstract



1 WhitePaper‐EUComplexityResearch‐anintegratedapproach‐THEPEOPLESTOOLKIT

1.1 Abstract

The proposition of this White Paper is shown in about 100 words in Figure zero, Abstract, above. The seven topics of this Paper are all crucially interconnected in achieving EU Complexity Research-an integrated approach-THE PEOPLES TOOLKIT.

1.2 Introduction

This White Paper follows on from the ECCS’12 Policy Satellite, (or Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) Workshop, as I will refer to it in this Paper), addressing the wider agenda of EU Complexity research. Complexity research is a Big Topic, embracing such a wide field of scientific enquiry, of technology and methodology, of experts, players and practitioners that it it seems to disappear into a black-hole of the un-doable. Dialogue is needed with a view to sharing our thinking and getting it to the stage (sic) of a coherent field of enquiry and action – so that complexity seems as natural as Darwinian evolution does today. The starting position is a hypothesis that ‘complexity’ is entirely a man-made concept and phenomenon, that bridges the ‘old’ sciences, and the humanities; more startlingly and significantly it is a discipline that is the first theoretical framework able to give a coherent and actionable basis for study of the human condition (up to now the province of culture, the Arts, and play). Ironically the aspect of complexity that seemingly involves the natural world is simply the result of man-made interference with that world (as it has been since homo-sapiens ‘emerged’ as a distinct species). New formalisms mean it is becoming possible to model the above. This is ‘On Computable Society’. It has enormous potential to change society.

We are sceptical that this proposition can make headway against the powers of the establishment (a dominant theme of Computable Society). The plain fact is that Homo Sapiens, as Professor Dawkins has pointed out, is a selfish animal and his big brain is simply his unique weapon in an armoury for furthering self-interest, a synonym for ‘(the) establishment’. Fortunately the same set of affordances can be brought into play in pursuit of ‘higher aims’ than mere dominance; but ultimately the techniques are the same: ‘my dominance is more significant than yours, buster’. Bringing this thesis into play will further the EU Agenda of Horizon 2020. It is a third dimension in the Two Cultures world of C.P.Snow that our Author grew up with. The agenda for this White Paper includes the seven Topics on the title page and these are only a start for a discussion of how to usefully integrate different strands of EU research that have a commonality termed Complex Society. The need for an integrated approach to complexity in the real world is generally agreed, the difficulty is in what this means and how to action it. This Paper takes a pragmatic, people oriented view, roughly that it is an ideal that can only be attained by what we call ‘local’ action because generally something is better than nothing and what matters is to constantly seek ways to link these up so as to further the integration principle. We propose a method for this that advances the state of the art though never permanently. To do so requires a concerted effort to fit the topics together; they are not necessarily easy bed-fellows, but that is the nature of complexity. Computable Society is more than intellectual ontologies; it is how we are as complex human animals.

A White Paper sets out some possible new ideas for discussion or trial when the prevailing climate is one of uncertainty. Its agenda is part challenge to the old order, always change. In the complexity world this is about perturbation, morphogenesis and emergence. All the themes on the title page share this agenda, stability is attractive but we have to work in an uncertain world; certainty is usually flawed however attractive1. This is the world of human complexity that is both the crowning opportunity for us, the human species, and also concomitantly our Achilles Heel. The radical hypothesis of this White Paper is that all progress towards saving our planet, our future, and the well-being of us all, depends on our handling of complexity, simplistically defined as “which way will the interacting systems go and how can we influence the outcome”. We argue that this has always been part of our existence, new tools are now needed because countervailing forces (themselves part of the complexity scenario) act against the common-good, sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately2. The other surrogate force we need to be aware of is that of modernity that perceives the answer to mankind’s problems in false prophets such as things, spurious systems, consumerism, and other such chimeras. Neither the ‘new’ nor the ‘old’ has pre-eminence. Any intervention we design becomes part of the overall dynamics and influenced by all the other dynamics The proposition of this White Paper is that The Peoples’ Toolkit enables us to process these emergent dynamics, categorise those that matter (for now), and do something about it3. The new game in town is Meta-modelling. The above points to the new driving force that is core to complexity of the human condition: ultimately we are all driven by systems of values. These have been identified by thinkers of all Ages, but only now, with the work on CSG/M has this been rendered computable. It will result in the new order. The theme of ‘values’ stands out as oft-emphasised, but rarely understood as a scientific concept, the nature of abstract thought, and possibly ultimately quanta (I speculate). But firstly we must ponder this startling claim in the light of the seven topics of the White Paper that are a topical agenda, core to The Peoples’, and the aim of SMART SOCIETY.

1 “It is a truth, universally acknowledged that a young man in possession of a modest fortune, must be in need of a wife” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice 22 “The world is out of joint, Oh cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right” Hamlet

3 “Minister, we need to do something”; “Sir Humphrey: this is ‘something’; “Then we must do it, Minister!”: Peter Jay: “Yes Minister”, BBC Satirical comedy.



1.3 THESIS

This section tries to identify the commonality in the seven representative themes of this White Paper – representative of a holistic reality rather than just unconnected research domains. It would be hubris to pretend we know the answers – indeed any answer to life’s imponderable challenges; we do, in the application of complexity science to ourselves, cla.im a small step for mankind (no reference needed for that!):

In each section we assert that understanding of societal complexity is in an early perturbation stage; trials at shaking up the current status quo are only fitfully leading to real change

The response of the research world is mostly to continue BAU which means not engaging with complexity but only what one Professor called pseudo complexity4

Perhaps the real illusion is to seek any form of stability or final morphogenesis: what is needed is to engage totally and continually with ‘change’; this imperative is a different kind of stability, defined in the current CAPS Call as sustainability

Although all the stated topics can claim to have made progress in understanding the nature of complexity in our world; (perhaps too easily by setting the boundaries so that their experiment will reveal the bit of complexity they like best); the challenge is to continually cross the boundaries and examine the real complex phenomena that arise. The theory then that everything is interconnected will be gradually elucidated and shown to be the fundamental nature of all our being; what is then the final strange attractor is the ultimate question, by definition unanswerable. We consider all local complexity research initiatives need to be shown to be consistent with a gradually emerging super experimental framework, itself only a larger stage of local initiative. The paradox of holism is everything is local.

1.3.1 Governance,Policy,Standards(GPS):SupportforComplexityintheRealWorld(CRW)

In the ECCS2012 Satellite Workshop on Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS)/CRW, the Keynote address by Dr Ralph Dum (EU) set out a view of another kind of social space in which engagement with the swirling set of interacting complex systems (whatever they are!) could take place. It is a world of continual live modelling, informatics driven, people engaged, a new kind of social space, serviced by the Web. I liked his elegant portrayal of history: the web as: Alexandrian Repository (the complete and definitive collection of all extant knowledge, aka ‘information’, it duly failed, struck down by a cataclysmic event....); Agora (the classical democratic forum); as a modern social lab (the setting for modelling methods); and a new modern concept as ‘Polis’ (the living working out of the classic dialogue between the people and their Rulers, aka Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) authorities?. Only such a vision requires an answer to the new informatics concern: how can the dynamic people world be represented in synchronisation with the dominant model of ‘people’ – we just get on with it. As professor Sylvie Occelli expressed it in her comment, it is living people who all the time contribute the decision data that drives the dynamics, (‘things’ are not really as eloquent as their designers like to portray). The Peoples’ Toolkit combines the above insight and classical Polis, only it delivers the in-vivo dynamic not by setting foot personally in the forum, but by the new paradigm called ‘On Computable Society’. It will move beyond ‘things’ that reify often key ideas, to direct action as people deliver all the time – when engaged, empowered and enabled. It will reveal the ultimate dynamic that is the human mind, deciding what matters, capturing it in every separate computer system/app/decision tool/social modelling/social computing platform that exists, i.e.socio-technology. It is a new epistemology as far as informatics is concerned, but as old as philosophy since the dawn of thinking.

It removes the distinction Dr Dum pointed out between models that drive prediction and complexity that simply describes ‘what is’; CSG/M models it all to: make sense of the world; reach understanding(s) of ‘what matters’; and make better decisions on ‘what next’. Because there is no prediction in a complex world, only change and intervention(s). The distinction is not significant: every intervention is action in pursuit of a future benefit. The future is merely a stochastic outcome, trial-and-error, even a statistical conclusion to the matters in-hand - unless one accepts some absolute Frame of Reference (as in Religions) 5. CRW involves contention between global vision and local action; the former identifies scales of problem not tractable by local action alone, requiring at least coordinated action, and additionally radical intervention and change in the status-quo, amounting to no less than a coherent working complexity paradigm. The paradigm we identify (along with others) is that CRW is part of an evolutionary ecology that parallels the existing dominant ecology that is Darwinian evolution by natural selection, commonly called ‘Survival of the fittest’. Our extension of this is to the ecology of human purpose, whose mantra is ‘Fitness for Purpose’. This idea is not new, its realisation is both novel and like most innovations foreshadowed by much patient thinking that perturbs the idea until a workable solution emerges. CRW is defined as the practical application of complexity understanding to solve problems that involve people, i.e. all of them! In systems terms, how does complexity map onto real-world problem solving; what is a problem-area ( ‘one man’s metier is another man’s posture’). A generalisation is they map with difficulty:

4 Von Ammon, quoting the originator of the phenomenon of Ubiquitous Complex Event Processing (U‐CEP) 5 “ (speaking as a Classical Greek Chorus: ...and whether in Argos or in England, there are certain Laws, unalterable, in the nature of Music, there is nothing we can do about it – there is nothing we can do about anything: ....(back to being ordinary Dinner Party guests)...and now it is nearly nine o’clock, time for The News, we must listen to the Weather Forecast and the International Catastrophes....” T.S.Eliot, The Family Reunion.



There are as many definitions of CRW as people, though some are more persuasive than others o Complexity science, defined as ‘systems of systems that constantly interact and perturb each other’

needs a fundamental epistemology that can be shown to encompass the myriad of individual interactions, and how these lead to change, i.e. morphogenesis. The basis of this in CRW is a mix of sciences with a relevant structure and operation of the primitive forces that perturb the complex social-systems structure (the interesting dimension for the social sciences), in extreme cases producing the so-called Lorenz strange attractor effect, but more generally a range of emergent outcomes that are not solving a particular problem but equipping the system to handle such problems when encountered. The nature of this, called emergent behaviour, is constant change in the context of decision and action, or environment (what can be influenced), or method (resources, competences, tools, effort) – a pragmatic definition of ‘change’. It is also, as will be seen later, the basis of Meta-modelling. The science is embryonic still

o In contrast, the richness (or messiness) of human discourse and understanding means interpersonal engagement supplies the necessary complex ontology, method, way through the Deleusian maze, and a sufficity of acceptable choices to satisfy the actors. Local answers and research point up valuable aspects but end up as self-fulfilling experiments (particularly when they control the data); this is a general problem of all science, but particularly complexity where s/he who defines the boundaries of the complexity world determines the outcome. Local action is always subject to complex meta-levels of influence, whether scientifically or subjectively

o A range of human behaviours attempt to circumvent awkward discussions of who is right: power, persuasion, authority (e.g. falling back on the chimera of expertise/science/technology/evidence as proof of superior know-how), attempts to apply CRW end up modelling a subset enabled by the experimental/investigation apparatus; this can rarely be applied in real-life and the disconnects continue with each successive interpretation and trial of it. The real problem is that the subset of the real world is always atypical, (and actually unique). Even ‘just getting on with it’ is a model, albeit most people would regard it is pretty poor (it fails the ‘fit for purpose’ test that we will show is core to new-thinking)

Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) determination seek to navigate the above terrain by well-tried control and management of the complexity; the most successful system is bureaucracy (control of method before substance):

o The Old-Boys-Network exists in every power based political system; it is good fun and successful – if you are an insider; it applies in every sphere of human activity – down to the Mafia

o It is challenged as a system by opposing forces of the masses; chief is the media and its current flowering in social computing and the internet

o Current moves seek a rapprochement by bringing the two closer together, as in democratisation and the Big Society, but a question remains as to whether any power-shift is truly taking place

All the Papers at the recent (at least two years) Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) Workshops seek to introduce a range of different approaches that introduce into the Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) World a richness of ideas from science to sensitivity to the interpersonal dimensions:

o They all seek to introduce change into the system and demonstrate experimentally that it helps solve a specific problem in the real (complex) world; the experiment involves how human behaviour comes into play on top of some theoretical framework

o On top of varying degrees of success in solving a specific ‘local’ problem, the question they usually pose is how far might they go in offering a generalised answer to complexity

o The workshops, as real life, reveal the difficulty and challenge of generalising to a huge canvas from local perspective(s); complexity science is the complete answer to this but itself lacks any proven master system mapping its theory to human behaviour in the real world where the Frames of Reference do not align and hardly map onto each other

A number of Papers stepped back from direct intervention in a real world messy (even wicked) problem area to examine Frames of Reference that seek to define some generalised method for getting behind the complexity, the ‘un-do-able’ nature, to a more manageable problem/method. In essence these all seem to seek the simple approach to reduce pain and even effort – we are all lazy animals. Alas such methods may obscure the essence of the problem, the solution, or just the senses, even for ulterior reasons – back to ‘values’ again:

o ‘context’ can be defined as those selection of presenting circumstances and evidence that focus most precisely on the ‘real’ problem. Not all aspects of complexity matter, the art is identifying which. The essential aspect of the context approach is to get more skilled in isolating what matters and testing it for completeness: it is a method for ‘sufficity’ (Simon, again). We put such methods into the class of ‘Fitness for Purpose’, a whole industry of which is Standards and Quality. Context is Meta-modelling by a more homely name.

o The lab simulation method tests often elegant theoretical frameworks and even more elegant computational algorithms. Their Achilles Heel is the extent of over-simplification needed to become



manageable as an experiment, that does not enjoy the almost unlimited canvas that real-life enjoys (almost). The permanent risk is of believing one’s own PR and insisting on immediate translation into real world action.

o The narrative story movement falls back on chumminess – let’s all agree how well this fits, eh? Its Achilles Heel is that it suits some people, but action affects all. Its strength is that it engages with a fuller range of ‘people’ dynamics, but are they real or propaganda/persuasion. As a basis for serious change it requires a different form of validation from the empirical method, and not just numbers of followers (sic)

o A number of Papers described approaches that build up over often long periods repositories of evidence, and some actionable framework to apply it on-going to relevant areas of concern. Their strength is alliance with some established organ of action; their Achilles Heel Is getting too close such that any independent perspective is contaminated by the sponsoring area.

o A subset of the above area is reconstructive tools that support extraction of historically valid scenarios from more or less sparse data; their limitation is how much invention has to be used (the success depends on systems of cross reference to establish plausibility). This area also connects with historical alternative academic theories that might have current relevance even though they ‘fell out of fashion’

We can summarise the richness of ideas, methods and work generally in the field of understanding life as ‘nothing is really ever out of date’, only the current fads and fashions vary and even become topical again sometimes

The ‘area of tentative solution’ we will discuss later is to find a way of processing abstracted solutions (or context of solutions) as if they were the real problem and had objective reality (which they did) to gradually identify what we call Metaloger Tapestries of formative recurrent bits of reality even though they could not exist independently of their presenting real-life ‘sponsor’. Surprisingly the Systems Analysis world of the last half-century has built up the technology and methods for mapping Frames of Reference in order to ‘computerise’ human systems in the real world:

o Extending this to embrace complexity, defined as multiple interacting Frames of Reference seems rather obvious; it usually fails by seeing the answer as a ‘master systems of systems’ which is the usual erroneous charge levelled at Metaloger, i.e. Metaloger is the servant of the presenting systems and not their master

o The core challenge is reconciling multiple Frames of Reference, interacting asynchronously, where the asynchronicity is much more than mere time: it is itself a multi-level set of interaction aspects, called Meta-modelling (themselves a crucial extension of the original Dublin Core Meta-data)

Continuing to explain this thinking takes us into the world of the solution…. This challenges the prevailing Frames of Reference by incorporating them in the CRW ontology(ies) and making them subject to a new kind of validation and verification based on meta-values. This will be shown to be the basis of CRW, new-methods, and how people do things. This becomes ‘Computable Society’; it does not exist yet as more than a formative idea:

o So the current job that CRW has to do is to monitor the meta-structure of the real-world and intervene when evidence of change points to deleterious outcomes rather than progress towards a coherent new scientific method. I would describe this interim approach as pragmatic sufficity; it is prone to manipulation, of which the usual kind is it pleases someone which is not necessarily a definition of scientific: it is simply the pre-complexity world of rather less scientific exercise of authority and power.

o On the positive side, all experimentation worlds usually contribute to building up a coherent picture of the problem area, directions of promising investigation; progress towards a solution. This in turn leads to the meta-problem of rationalising different Frames of Reference in order to cross-relate findings (i.e. reach agreement in the real world). . The only way such a body of knowledge can aspire to a true science is when it builds into an empirical, repeatable experimental method; this is not the same as the way social behaviour reaches consensus

Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) are the definitive aspect of CSG/M and the on-going work of the Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) Workshops community is to validate this statement of intent taking it to its generalised conclusion as the support of human purposeful endeavour in all its forms, within a global canvas of systems political, and including the control of negative alternatives that seek to undermine society and dominate it with corrupt regimes. It does not exist without the actions of the masses, the People, the rest is the support and enabling infrastructure, as is the Toolkit:

o So also are such current emphases as IoTS o Another important initiative that is close to Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) is the CAPS Call (see

EU Calls sub-section 1.2.3) o The NoE in Internet Science JRA4 addresses Governance/Regulation/Standards (& Policy?) o The key modelling aspect of CSG/M embraces probably any and every ‘local’ modelling experiment;

includes the key ‘Lab of Life, element, which seems to tie in with EnOLL et al. The paradigm of human purpose does not eliminate any of the action and artefacts that emanate from reflection,

decision and action; they are ephemeral, local, experiments, they are Requisite Variety, a corrective to the hubris of ‘being right’, steps towards a better world, well-being, sustainability. All require integrated purposeful action.



1.3.2 EUResearch–Integratingourwayoutofsilos:purposefulFederation

The idea of an inclusive society is not new, from the remaining tribes portrayed as coming under threat by Ralph Dum, to the pioneering work of Elinor Ostrum referred to at the Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) Workshop, to the Paradiso consortium and more, as governments seek for a new democratic partnership; the underlying dynamic is set out in Horizon 2020, but the change needs to be at the grass roots level of involvement, caught in the term federated: what this means is a new social model of research and not just rearranging the same old set of components. It is truly a complexity challenge and the consortium behind The Peoples’ Toolkit will respond, starting with setting out the scale of change needed. The challenge of moving from science to society is not well taken up; research looks to forge reputations before it serves mankind, the world of serious research seeks the grandiose and competes for publicity, even though in the end it is the ordinary person in the street that pays. Where is the principle of the public good and how is it defined? Current fads like consumerism, wealth, reputation drive life; the social computing scene is, frankly and virtually meaningless yet has captivated research itself; we are moving in a world that has lost its hold on reality in favour of the exotic. Science only comes out of the closet when it has a story that can capture headlines. This does not argue for abandoning new science, but for sharing the arguments with society and accepting wider accountability. We argue that society engaged, empowered and enabled will back research; this is not arguing against the expert, the specialist, the innovator/entrepreneur, the Academic Lab, Big Business, or excellence of any kind, but proposing a re-look at how it all fits together in a universally interconnected world:

Complexity science has an important part in integrating what seems a disconnected world at best, but dangerously greedy or just self-centred at worst. The alternative is a structure of control that amplifies delivery of the common good. In complexity terms the ‘old’ system is closed, lacks requisite variety, is positive feedback controlled (procedural based) and does not meet the criteria of Fitness for Purpose. The issue is what can change this now global gravy train? Again in complexity terms, a system of cybernetic control is needed so that what should direct and control ‘the system’ gives way to a complex system of systems directing mankind’s pursuit of what is worthwhile. This is set out in the Horizon 2020 vision; it needs enabling; it needs the EU research world to take its own medicine

This Paper proposes that a societal system of systems meets this agenda. Only it is more fundamental than just a further overlay of systems control: it is based on a radical change in approach called The Peoples’ Toolkit that processes the strategic agenda, all local initiatives, and Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) – not as a Big Brother initiative (most PPPs’ are that) but as a fundamental re-orientation of society that we call a PPPPP (Public Private Partnership of People and Purpose). Its basis in a new direction for a complex science of society does not fully convey its fundamental paradigm change, its new technology basis, and most importantly it is run by people, empowered, engaged, and enabled

The most transformative feature is it does not itself change anything! It is an enabling science that is new; it works within what exists now and it changes itself from within. We talk about change in the EU Research world, but what we really mean is the power of complexity science to bring about transformative new models of everything. The Dutch proverb applies: we first eat ourselves what we serve to others; everyone wants the same happiness (Anna Karenina).

The challenge of us all collaborating (federating is the EU terminology) has to start with a methodology; we think The Peoples’ Toolkit is worth considering as a trial without suggesting we have a prescriptive answer. We are ready for a dialogue from which we will benefit as much as we hope to do the same:

o We look at Calls we are considering and intend to start our federating at the Open Days o We are looking into Coordinating actions whether specific to our interests or others that could have

possible synergy with what we have to offer o We will open up a new form of Community of Practice dedicated to the Theory, Technology and Societal

aspects of CSG/M Have we missed anything out? The main practical suggestion at the conclusion of the Governance/Policy/Standards

(GPS) Workshop is to coordinate activities – a kind of federation of research into Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS): o Building up a Centre of Excellence in the meaning, methods, infrastructures, technologies of

Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) o Institute the regime of validation and verification of Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS)-in-action o Defining the new area of societal involvement and its associated enabling framework o Tackling the underlying Achilles Heel of all Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) which is its basis in

power and associated structures o Cataloguing experimental work and matching to areas of lacunae in practice o Liaising with expert bodies in relevant areas impacting Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) o Maintaining communications and promulgating findings in the Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) field o Support work, EU Calls, formal journals, education o Actively work with the European Complex Systems Society and other such world-wide bodies.

All the above can be actively helped by The Peoples’ Toolkit, a proposition that needs exploration and detailed work A Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) research and Professional Body needs to be promoted.



1.3.3 ComplexityScience&Society;EUCalls:CAPS;FIScience/FInES/FIRE;GlobalSystems;(alsoCOSI‐ICT;DyM‐CS;FOCAS;FuturICT)

The juxtaposition of all the above Calls commences our aim to be seen as setting out a way forward according to Horizon 2020. We are exploring the scale of federation as defined by DG Connect (Mario Campolargo, opening the FIRE Workshop). We are not the only SMART outfit in town but need to show our proposition is more inclusive and supports albeit critically current ‘local’ directions. The significant use of CSG/M is direct support of new federated research (as we have long argued).

The Peoples’ Toolkit models the world according to a new paradigm Computational Socio-Geonomics, and an in-vivo/in-silico computational infrastructure called Metaloger. It is an overlay on real-world decision and action driven by human purpose conceived in the mind – as all human activity is. The lacuna we note is the absence of this key perspective in all current social modelling. [Technically every scientist who conceives of a ‘model’, or any aspect of its realisation, must think-out its design, but this is external to the key driver that is the subject of this Paper, namely how complexity comes about and is factored into the picture.] The key word in the paradigm is in-vivo.

An early warning: we will argue that not all types of social modelling are the same (obvious!), and probably some will not ‘fit’ with the core premise of CSG/M, namely its driver, in ‘people’ terms and as the central ICT paradigm, is the complex system that drives all other systems in the human world, namely the human mind. To be more specific, the paradigm specifically contrasts the basic Darwinian evolutionary mechanism with its corresponding mechanism in the human mind. (This leads to a basic suspicion of all forms of modelling that treat humans as more elegant ants, bees, termites or any other instinct-driven creature; we recognise crowd behaviour and other such Darwinian throw-backs, but only as vestigial and undesirable relics of our animal species heritage. Sometimes this is specifically exploited; it is a corruption of human behaviour.

Every EU Call seems to put an emphasis on Society, e.g. benefit to society, expanding our understanding of society, improving on reification. We seek is to reverse the above perspective and define society as itself the exemplar of complexity and seek to make it work better. In this perspective society will define what complexity is all about and ‘do it’ in every scientific field. The direction we propose will be as formative as the prescient warning of The Two Cultures by Professor C. P. Snow, in Cambridge in the fifties and sixties; only our two worlds are Science and Society (where science is equally pure & applied, i.e. technology).

We will seek to show CAPS (Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability & Social Innovation) is completely a societal complexity matter, pointing to the need for society to understand its complex nature and everyone to become engaged, empowered and enabled in this radical new direction. We will propose the outcome as society reappraising its role as guardian of our world future because it is our own. This is GAIA (see frontispiece). It is an agenda for the next century and even millennium; this Paper defines CAPS as the core driver of Computable Society:

o We like the emphasis on: Governance, and even on styles of living; in general the Call is ambitious, however, it then picks as examples the usual set of BAU Topics, actually ‘topical’, such as collecting data from IoTS, Big Data, and even mobile phones

o None of the above are necessarily right or wrong in their emphasis; the question is what strategic goals, plans and approaches are there, and how might specific areas of enquiry and experimentation ‘fit’ with the Big Picture, strategies, and methodology(ies)? position on ‘sustainability’, viewing this as a long-term strategic quest whose solution depends on complexity science and on societal visions and goals (in which people will be instrumental). To cherry-pick frankly trivial moves such as mobile phones to counter poor eating habits is non-sensical – except as cheap publicity: we are against even quick wins that are not strategic or even seriously tactical

o The problem with the CAPS Call in the short term is it is short term – it does have a synergy with FI Science and we should promote a more in depth social agenda for CAPS Science as Future Internet

FI Science is already bracketed with CAPS and this points to an immediate federation with the FI Science Network of Excellence.

o JRAI towards a Theory of Internet Science aligns with CSG/M (as a GOMS); o JAR2 Emergence Theories & Design aligns with CSG/M o JAR3 Evidence & Experimentation aligns with CSG/M o FI hints at its role as a driver of society, but this needs more precise definition that we would base

around Computable Society. Future Internet is not merely topical, a microcosm for all overloaded systems or resources (it is that); it is an example of an incredible technology that is at risk of losing its early vision as ‘for the people’, behind the big-business technology (that it is also); it is being commandeered to be the utility for delivery of many worthy new directions in the associated worlds of business, government, communication, entertainment but so far has not sought or found any fundamental realignment around the current ‘complexity’ imperative, especially as this pertains to society

o It has also become a vehicle for directing and enabling the life-style of society, from the legal to the dubious, to the illegal; in this respect it is a technology of propaganda and manipulation, masquerading behind instant gratification, sense-stimulus without reality, substitute for responsible consumption



o The alternative is to redefine FI as the society backbone defined as ‘how we exist as the sentient species in a complex world’ and therefore how we play our part as has been the case in every age, culture, society and family. In this definition FI does become the social computing of choice but centred round a new paradigm of Computable Society

o The other current confused message is to mix up the word ‘backbone’ with that term as a technology component/layer in the delivery technology; we will argue for a reappraisal of the technology infrastructure around a new societal paradigm (that goes beyond the current ‘data package’ dimension); this itself will herald a new definition of ‘data and traffic’ but more so of ‘what for’ in support of society. THIS IS TO REDEFINE WHAT FI SCIENCE IS ABOUT: it is also a core driver of Computable Society

o FInES is already deeply engaged in wrestling with new paradigms for enterprise information and a focus of research will be how to extend its scope to a new societal paradigm; we can expect this to centre around world resources and sustainability to take enterprises beyond their current delivery/logistics mandate. It too is a core driver of Computable Society

o FIRE seems to us to need to turn round its focus from current infrastructure to what totally new infrastructures can be foreseen; for this the FIRE Community has to engage with FI Science and FInES as well as others to anticipate and support new FI paradigms (this was anticipated at the recent FIRE workshop, but no discussion of possible new paradigms was possible in the timescale available). The significance of Computable Society will require an infrastructure of intrinsic experimentation which is the given-role of all mankind: FIRE redefined as ‘Socio-technology infrastructure’ is a core driver of Computable Society.

Global Systems is still in its conceptual phase and we intend to go directly for pitching this as the vehicle for a new societal paradigm

The early Calls (COSI-ICT, DyM-CS and FOCAS) all sought to find complexity in Man-made constructs; this is only possible if actually designed-in; all the Calls point to important ideas for human exploitation of complexity (in our conception, they are natural for a virtual model of how human purpose designs a model in the mind of society that is the basis of ‘what exists’.) The rejection of this radical hypothesis in favour of reifyng complexity as a property of ‘the natural world probably lies behind the disappointing outcome in which no change has come from these calls except to show we can model reality in any way we choose but that is only a game).

o COSI-ICT proposes intelligence lies in ICT, instead of enhancing ICT as a tool to leverage human intelligence; the former is a chimera

o DYM-CS looks for a natural phenomena when such can only be of interest to us if we wish to change the natural world; the only dynamics of interest to us are those that are man-made; there is no system displaying complex dynamics that is not designed by human intelligence

o FOCAS makes the same error. Until we accept that all societal phenomena is a man-made construct and the process of construction is complex and

can be modelled, we will continue to absolve ourselves from our responsibility and seek to find ‘natural causes’. Accepting our role is much more interesting and ultimately fruitful:

o The games of the British Civil Service can be modelled (Yes Minister parodied them and was great entertainment) but sophisticated games are a well known way to block real change; our modelling will harness the same tricks but to elucidate real life, not block it

o There were several key Papers at the recent Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) Workshop that explored the range of complexity modelling that could embrace real-people striving for real change; we propose that a complexity toolkit must be a compiler of all such initiatives: variety of human life is a match of perceived human complexity and neither has a unique perception of some superior truth

We hope to learn an idea or two from FuturICT with whom we have been a supporter since the beginning. It may be that we are small fry swimming in the global pond they have so expertly sailed across; we think we have a crucial complementary scientific direction to offer FuturICT:

o FuturICT has stated they are not directing their efforts on the bottom-up/grass-roots dynamics as these are manifest in individual action; we will therefore seek to find and fill that lacunae

o Correspondingly we will find The Peoples’ Toolkit needs to engage with the FuturICT Big World. o But it is too early to start and speculate on the direction of federation and cooperation with the FuturICT

Consortium, they are proposing a working framework that fits with the Horizon 2020 vision. The S-GAIA Consortium advocates a strategic coordination framework for all EU Societal research, with many of the

same focii as ‘Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) outlined earlier. Much of this could usefully follow the directions set out on the FuturICT Web Site; it fits with the Horizon 2020 vision. Such a framework would not exclude any of what we term ‘local’ initiatives; nor does it imply any moratorium whilst a strategic pathway is mapped out.



1.3.4 Society:people,purpose&complexbehaviourmodelling(simulation&dissimulation)

The core scientific issue to be considered by this White Paper is the locus of ‘complexity’. Currently, systems of values do not form the agenda of scientific research, being handed over to philosophers, religion, or (most dangerously) those holding political power. Their output becomes the Statement of Requirements for research; paradoxically this needs to change because ‘one man’s metier is another man’s posture’6. This Paper asserts it is a societal phenomenon.

Discussion of Complexity science from the perspective of society and the real world is in an interim stage of development from the many Papers on General Systems Theory, the learned academic studies and the seminal Ilya Prigogine Nobel Paper on Perturbation and Morphogenesis, to current experimental techniques and trials, especially Agent Based Modelling7. Academic studies process data in sophisticated ways to reveal new insights; no one yet has succeeded in applying the same to dynamic human behaviour (some partial understanding is derived from post-hoc analysis of consequences).

How we behave is the most basic of the primitive forces driving complex outcomes in children, families, social entities and every aspect of society. It would seem essential to bring these forces into a modelling environment driven by human will and wilfulness. But this does not figure significantly yet outside of the medical sciences which is surprising given the power of the individual to display the heights of creativity and also of depravity. It is too simple an explanation to say that ethics are outside science. Concomitantly research does not automatically follow ethics, (and indeed can be hi-jacked for ulterior motives). In general research tends to assume the intelligent human mind proceeds in one direction (simplistically called ‘the general good’) and not in the other direction called immoral, criminal, selfish, or simply wicked. Alas this is neither simple nor true; the same capacity for directing human thought and action towards the common good is equally directed in the opposite direction. In between these polar opposites is the spectrum of behaviours that are neither one nor the other but simply disagreed-on.

In human systems terms the recognition that this is contested features in all philosophical systems; at best it leads to some new and valued consensus that re-orders our systems of values. In Ross Ashby’s seminal work on Control Systems it is termed Requisite Variety. In the real world the process of deciding which is simply the power game (irrespective of what systems of values, tools of persuasion, or set of compulsion methods, are brought to bear). Structures of human values drive everything from the inter-personal level through the entire world of enterprises, up to Governance, and sanction systems: all are human constructs that can be modelled; they drive complex emergence.

The key difference between our approach to modelling and that of all EU Calls and systems up to now, is we do not let the decisions regarding Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS), the ‘truth’, or even EU Authorities be taken as a given. The Agenda is itself continually perturbed and the final morphogenesis is arrived at on a much more inclusive basis and is never fixed and firm: it is evolutionary. Letting go of traditional power is possibly the final frontier in saving our world; the commonly understood basis of power structures are simply evolving society. Why is this approach not anarchy by another name?

The secret to our model is it does not interfere with real-life ‘complex events’ but makes the basis of complex interaction the set of purpose/decision/action ‘moves’ made by the protagonists in life’s march. These are virtual moves until instantiated into ‘events’ that change something, but more important is these virtual moves interact in the network of complex systems co-existing. They trigger evolutionary changes by being the foresight from which the evolution is determined. This rather over-simplified story is that of human thought as the designer of our complex existence (or existences).

Whatever conclusions the workings of the model of human purpose derive this is not the same as action; the toolkit is neutral; action is never neutral. The toolkit however does provide the means to experiment with different directions of human purpose and thus simulate possible different ‘worlds’. It is experiments in the mind acted out in an in-vitro environment (where this term denotes the virtual world of Metaloger and not the petri-dish). It is role-playing taken to a different dimension.

This capability to model real-life in-vivo and do so without the real-world consequences (unless the switch occurs) is possibly the most significant feature of CSG/M. An observation that is hypothetical at this stage of our development is that the most significant Lorenz-type effects are those conceived in the mind and shared without necessarily acting-them-out. The strange-attractor is not an event but an idea. Get the message? We think and therefore we exist (cogito ergo sum) is not as substantial as “We think and action becomes possible with each other”. The power of the mind beats that of muscle every time.

We assert that all EU societal research needs to be based on active, dynamic processing of complex value systems. This will be a service The Peoples’ Toolkit provides to the World, in-vivo, everybody, everything, everywhere, everyday, fuelled by people, enabled, engaged, and empowered. Of course human behaviour is wider than this; systems of values can also be exercised instinctively via our animal genetic heritage; what we alliteratively term dissimulation identifies the world of corrupt values. Values are built into our real world: processing them as complex systems is new and the foundation of society.

6 JSB Thesis 1999, Metaloger 7 See the Brian Castelini Chart reproduced in the OU Introductory Survey of EU thinking behind the 2011/2012 EU Calls



1.3.5 ThePeoples’Toolkit:ComputationalSocio‐Geonomics/Metaloger(CSG/M)

Infinite variety of human action coupled with total inter-connectedness are synonymous in The Peoples’ Toolkit. The world as modelled is a symbiotic, holistic, totally interconnected representation. Such terms need careful definition in the toolkit to double check they mean the same to everyone: the reality is there are different flavours according to the dynamics of the moment – as everyone knows from their moods, let alone other peoples, or even the quantum dimensions. This rich reality is essential if costly; it is Requisite Variety8.

We can view CSG/M together with FI as a common experimental infrastructure and methodology for Society. The Science of this needs elaboration, together with the Technology(ies), and the ‘people’ engagement (we use that term rather than the obsolete one of human interface, or human factors as we called it in the sixties). The terms ‘experimental’ and ‘methodologies’ have rather well understood meanings to researchers, to prototype designers, but they are also part of the human condition, as every parent knows from observing their baby(ies) at play. (We note that the same also operates in the terrible ‘two’s’ and teen-years). CSG/M simulates this ‘play’ as the on-going way things work. The big scene is infinitely richer and it may seem to trivialise global problems to see them and everything in-between as extensions of basic human behaviour; the richness consists in how we as humans bolt things together and make bigger things (more than objects, or even ideas, we interefere with the natural world, as CAPS/FIRE states, we fail to ensure the sustainability of our world – or actually destroy it and each other.

Rather than lecture on History or ethics, however, this paper places the locus of ‘complexity science’ in society, made up of us all, forming a huge Complex Adaptive System (CAS) – the largest one in existence. The Peoples’ Toolkit is about what drives this complexity and how this underpins everything, everyday, everybody, everywhere. This definition drives the term ‘Geonomic’ in the scientific basis of CSG/M: the driver is systems of values (including all abstract entities devised by mankind).

Computational Socio-geonomics/Metaloger (CSG/M) is a simulator of complexity across the systems of the world; the simulations are in real-time, in-vivo, processed in Metaloger Labs; the design of the simulator is at the conceptual stage with a consortium from academia, industry, and society involved. Our aim is for involvement to be open, free, ubiquitous and pervasive across society, globally:

o S-GAIA is the consortium of interested parties involved in CSG/M development, that comprises: development of the infrastructure for CSG/M and its deployment across society; it comprises society, its governance, and scientists in: the social sciences, enterprise systems, communications, Future Internet,plus computational scientists and engineers developing the new paradigm through its formative years

o The application of CSG/M is a huge new industrial opportunity exceeding the scale of all current commercial enterprise systems, of social-computing, and of the scientific community outlined in this Paper;

CSG is a designed solution to processing complexity in any societal setting, involving a new ‘science of values’; the man-made structures of values comprise a huge, dynamic system of complex interacting forces that operate to perturb the entire structure of society and mankind’s workings within it, it is called, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, SOCIONOME; the activity of compiling Socionome is called Meta-modelling (it is a new overlay on systems):

o they are evolutionary, as highly differentiated as their counterpart, the genome, on which the modelling ideas are based, but evolution is entirely in real-time (in-vivo in fact)

o real-time, real-life human action, most of which is represented already in computer systems, has a further level of evolution as people break the rules, driven by the exigencies of the real world

o both of the above drive complex change in the systems of the world as social transactions take place; we are only interested in the meta-level changes

o indirectly the transaction instances are a trace of world-wide systems activity at the level of SOCIONOME and its associated phenoytypical behaviours in real-world instances of socionome behaviour

o the ‘phenotypes’ mirror real-world systems and are a tapestry of their complex activity according to designed, evolutionary and accidental change in world systems; we call them METALOGER instantiations (NB the Peoples’ Toolkit has no direct interest in the business of real people and systems)

o a set of principles, rules, and real-life operational realities will evolve out of the research into CSG/M METALOGER9 is the platform and operational infrastructure for the Socio-technology that underpins CSG/M; it

comprises an overlay on the participating systems of the world, paralleling IoTS in many ways; its operation is a new sort of meta-ERM system extending through all levels of society from top to bottom:

o Metaloger-Labs do the day-by-day operational business, both individual instantiations and their compilation into the infrastructure of living complexity

o Components are billions of interacting Meta Frames of Reference (MetaFoRs), synonymous with ubiquitous Metaphors!)

8 Ross Ashby, Psychologist, Control engineer, cybernetician 9 9 Metaloger is a neologism from meta‐ ‘over‐arching’ and ‐catalogue ‘ordering a set of resources’, only the set is societal‐models‐in‐use. To this can be

added the process‐control meaning of the term ‘loger’: a device that records signals for feedback and control of the process and analysis of its outcomes.



o Metaloger Tapestries form a living compilation of the complex events of the world and their emergent properties; they can be viewed as a stochastic, living record of complexity in action. They are the equivalent of Big Data, available in perpetuity to re-run simulations

The NPD10 of The Peoples’ Toolkit can be viewed as a conventional exercise in bringing a new technology to market, with several aspects that make it unique:

o The technology is radical in that it does not interface with ‘users’ (the old paradigm of ‘information; it is Socio-technology; the entire concept of information processing changes to human cognitive, social, and cultural interaction; this presents as a new paradigm as it becomes embedded in the way ICT is experienced

o The operational dynamics are not determined by levels of transactions processed, but by the stochastic outcomes of interactions across a structure of dynamic meta-levels (complexity-in-action); the interactions are social in nature, recorded and indexed by social characteristics (related to the Meta-FoR ‘behaviour’)

o Societal interest and involvement with CSG/M is unpredictable, even seven billion world population is a crude measure; the interest in complexity will determine the traffic.

o There will be a new industry of ‘Metaloging’, professionally, engineering, applications, support, equipment’. The nearest parallels are FI and the telecommunications industry

o The science basis will evolve rapidly, from our understanding of the significance of Meta-modelling at every level in society,. To a totally new basis of ‘engagement’ with Metaloger; we define this as cognitive, cultural, entirely inter-personal, experiential, modelling and role-playing, and based on holistic experience recording

The biggest change from introduction of The Peoples’ Toolkit will be in the extent of impact on people and society of a radical new Socio-technology:

o The experience of the mobile communications industry together with first generation social computing is an indication, and although the true outcome cannot be readily foreseen, experience shows people adopt new ICT very readily; how much will depend on the penetration of the complexity paradigm into everyday life

o Social commercial penetration and new apps is likely to be huge, especially in the area of marrying up true social experiencing and engagement; this will include new entertainment and educational fields. But it is all a bit speculative at this stage

o Enterprise and organisational penetration is difficult to predict as current capability is relatively mature and sophisticated:

o Indirect societal impact will be a spin-off from opening up the sustainability ticket, dependent on complexity and involving major attitude changes across society; there is a huge potential, from quantification of resource impacts (optimisation and threats); long term life-style impacts will (in our view) occur not from ceasing exploitative behaviour, but growing belief and commitment to alternatives – not foreseeable yet

o Lastly there is the area of improvement in Governance and we anticipate (probably some wishful thinking here) that considerable progress can be made in moving towards a science based system and away from a personality-based system.

Perhaps the greatest impact of CSG/M will come from its perceived relevance as a generalised processor of complexity. This is entirely dependent on take-up of the core idea that all complexity is societally driven and the old paradigm of looking for it in historical data, lab simulation and artificial societal engagement is simply out-of-date and basically incorrect and ineffective:

An interesting turf war is possible as the new ideas perturb the old: o We think cooperation in devising tools for use within the Toolkit concept are the best way forward o Gaining traction within the complexity community is important

We conjecture there is enough news-worthy potential in CSG/M for it to gain support The biggest supporters club will probably come from outside the current commercial players

o This aspect is in the realm of opportunism, PR, and finding one excited partner (we are working on it). There is one further dimension to take-up, support, commercialisation and application of CSG/M: it concerns the forensic world, i.e. the recognition that modelling values, behaviour and socio-technology is equally relevant to the bad as to the good. We do not discuss this side of our work in this Paper; at a top-level it concerns:

Modelling society that tries to keep under the radar, i.e. does not ‘join in’ Simulating society that does join in - in the hope they can exploit it (conventional criminals) Simulating societies-within-societies.

The long term relevance of The Peoples’ Toolkit lies in profound social change; we hypothesise this will accompany the EU programme for sustainability, generating an unstoppable movement for wide change. We hope so.

10 New Product Development (NPD) is a serious professional framework for design, construction, roll‐out and usage of new products through their whole‐life

cycle



1.3.6 ICT‐AnewKondratievShift:OnComputableSociety

The theory of complex change embraces long waves of perturbation and morphogenesis in society; today’s society also displays pervasive short waves, whose source is people and mobile phones. We think this can be better served by new ICT.

Economists have argued about the waves of societal development since the middle ages and broadly agreed with the dominant forces giving rise to them; there is a clear development from agrarian to industrialised society; that this shows no sign of stopping; its economic and social results are profound; and that this has fuelled the current wave called The Age of Information. This section discusses why ‘On Computable Society’ is potentially the next Kondratiev Shift, an apparent paradox since both are driven by ICT. though that should not be equated with either BAU or more and more: the information deluge is clear and the illusion of this generating understanding does not need arguing. What can be demonstrated is the ability of ICT to enable such volumes to be organised and processed so that the task of deriving useful meaning can take place. The question is What meaning? The answer is the meaning contained in societal complexity whose origin is people thinking about life.

Our world is dominated by the forces that broadly have been at work through all the identified waves of ‘progress’; against scientific criteria, technological efficiency, economic benefit they stand proud. That is the positive picture; the negative concerns the criteria identified by the latest EU Calls, such as threat to our world from resource depletion, and in general what the Call calls ‘sustainability’, but we call by the Lovelock term the GAIA hypothesis. The other side of all this World change is the impact on people, society, well-being and the sustainability of society itself – such concepts as fairness, the common good, progress (however defined). One of the obvious new waves is the focus on people and the associated new ICT exciting a global opening up of society(ies) to wholesale ‘people’ involvement. What is less clear is what are the roots of all this change and is it more of the same? The Thesis of this Paper is that the signs of societal change are not fundamental but BAU and the only difference is ICT cannot prevent enterprising people making use of it in ways not planned or even anticipated; as perturbation of the system the evidence is clear; what is emerging is not planned change; what outcomes there will be is unclear. It all comes into the category of random disruption, we assert a deeper understanding of complex systems can offer hope for greater control of the directions of change.

The unstoppable movement that started with European revolutions that spread globally, that focussed on individual rights and responsibilities, has reached a tipping point where power cannot contain and channel it (the BAU model). But we assert it can be channelled by the new paradigm of People Power. This is the paradigm behind the new ICT processing systems of values, because where we recognise these in ‘things’ – science, technology, innovation – they are all products of people in society, not just doing things but thinking about what they want to be doing. We need to process this huge force, the basis of the CAS called society, present in GPS, Quality, ethics, protest, solidarity, and ordinary life when empowered, engaged, and enabled.

We have identified strong forces concerning the future of society and the world - resource depletion is the key one; similarly logistics is a mature and effective discipline for moving resources globally; but the most important resource, and it is unlimited, is people. Together we can save our world, enhance its viability and sustainability, increase its fairness, make it more worthwhile not just in material terms but the wider context of well-being. Science, technology, engineering fuel this societal ambition identified in this Paper as Socio-technology, and in the sciences as the most important complexity phenomenon yet to be recognised. It is not just a complexity phenomenon but concerns in complexity terms abstract ideas/concepts, and hence it forms the new Information paradigm. Getting this out to the People so everyone can experiment with the meaning and conduct of 'Life’ is our scientific quest, though we prefer to call it socio-technology at this stage.

The most modern forms of ICT excite and attract followers because they give the illusion of deep involvement, and already that is being questioned. We want to see this new wave of ICT mature into a new information paradigm of society. The paradigm of meaning is gathering pace all the time; the Kondratiev wave is simply the way we choose to go:

‘Computable Society seeks a symbiosis of ICT and society as profound as any change in how we live since time began: how do we process the world around us to establish its ‘meaning’ for us as the human species and beyond that to our world and its continued existence (the GAIA imperative)

o We will argue that ICT thus far has simply followed the traditional route of experts exercising their authority to tell the populace what meaning is, what to do with it, deliberately offer exciting ways of achieving a spurious human-computer confluence, and sometimes how to become involved in it; the mechanisms can be attractive, often are seductive, may well pay rewards - and so on. The new question is what can ICT do for ‘people’ that is truly life-changing

o The deep question(s) are those of every major societal shift, of each Kondratiev Shift, of the total dominance of society by ICT, in every way as dangerous as all previous paradigm changes, even as they each promise untold benefit to mankind. This Paper does not in any way seek to make a popular critique of ICT but to challenge its very basis as complexity science and society impacts on this last frontier of Information

o This analysis concludes with the same message as all the six topics: people have the creativity, insights, will and motivation to change our world; its is all about local action supported by specialists (and not



the other way round). However one single track has pointed the way: the information systems of the world already define how society has progressed and are a continued living repository of societal change; they will continue this role only embracing the new dimension of complexcity (sic). The key step will be to base this on the fundamental dynamic of how we function as sentient people:

o It is not data/information/meaning that changes the world but peoples’ engagement, empowerment, and enablement to bring their will to bear on what we do with our world, today, tomorrow, everyday, everything, everywhere, everybody.....

o This emphasis on human will as the driver of computable society has also to keep a focus on reality: it is also about human wilfulness (it always has been)

o We are discussing a world where ICT does not any more fuel our preferences (or anything else) but our values and how we implement them (to use the current paradigm terminology)

The new paradigm will, like all previous, evolve as research accelerates, as conditions dictate or even thwart it; nor does this Paper suggest we can know in advance how far it will go or even whether it will be overtaken by that other technological imperative - built in obsolescence. Huge fields of opportunity are open to further research:

o The merging of data processing and the human activity of turning information into meaning, decision, and action is far more complex and profound than current routine information processing; this is the cycle of purposes, values and intention, that we have called human will and wilfulness. This is the Frame of Reference dimension, itself the basis of any system realisation, and the basis of complexity in human affairs and society

o Unlike the definition of a ‘piece of data’, or an ‘object’, or a java applet, a piece of complexity is a rich holistic pattern of significance derived from continual and changing interaction with all the worlds it comes into contact with. It is the living enactment of ‘the sum is greater than the parts’. Meaning derives from the purposes that fuel it and ultimately derive significance for ’I’ and for ‘society’. Since this is in continual flux, multiple meanings are the norm (and the stamping of such meanings is the new indexing)

o Information becomes a record of behaviours, based on cognition through to action; research is in its infancy regarding how this relates to the human senses, the constructions in the mind/brain that embody feelings, emotions, understandings; closely allied is the most obvious human attribute of forming pictures, representations, symbols and ultimately language to communicate and share understanding; the old concept of data becomes subsumed by a completely human/societal new type of meaning called a ‘social enactment’; this is the unit of complexity – literally a perturbation in a MetaFoR that is part of a complex system

o These are complex events, where ‘event’ does not indicate an instance in an algorithmic chain, especially not one that comes to an end (in the Turing sense), but some further accretion of meaning in the sense of an unfolding drama (that is the continual set of perturbations building up and possibly leading to some emergent change

The Kondratiev wave of change is the post-hoc label that will be placed on the new handling of complex society if we get it right; we can discuss it in ICT terminology; ditto complexity; and increasingly in terms of specific societal change in dealing with the affairs that concern us: EU Research foci; all the Future Internet actions underway; Governance, Policy, Standards (GPS); etc. We will not talk about the data deluge any more, but the permanent richness of the Tapestry of Life;

Early ICT processed calculations, from simulating weapon trajectories, to esoteric computational conundrums, to processing governmental statistics. The development over the second half of the twentieth-century to what was seen as ‘’Business Data Processing’ abstracted the human and societal element in the form of processes to be fulfilled to deliver routine efficiency similar to mass-production in factories:

o The human element was irrelevant or signalled errors to be sorted out outside the system; the ‘people’ interface was managed out as far as possible

o The real-world was excluded to achieve efficiency; this produced the inevitable backlash o Awareness that complex life and its potential was being thwarted by ICT’s limitations remained a lonely

and futile complaint by the sociologists. We would describe the resulting world as one of missed opportunity; The necessary correction to the system has been slow in building momentum, but enough interested people are now around to start to bring about real change and not just workrounds

We consider we are the pioneers as much as Jo Lyons did in their ‘Lyons Electronic Office’ (the LEO Computer project in the UK in the fifties); the real pioneers were the General Systems Theory (GST) thinkers; today’s band of researchers seek to bring social simulation out of the Lab to being a mainstream concern of ‘the People’11. On Computable Society will be the outcome.

11 Front page of Metaloger Thesis, JSB 2000, quoting Addison, Volume 1 of The Spectator: “It was said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from the

Gods to dwell amongst Men; I am desirous of having its said of me that I brought it out of the closet to dwell in the coffee house and at the dinner table.”



1.4 SOCIO‐TECHNOLOGY

1.4.1 Scope

This section sets out the Systems Analysis project that is needed to design, build and deploy a starter ICT solution for Computable Society. It follows a schema set out for EU Calls, though that is unlikely to be the correct way to deliver the early prototype CSG/M solution. This is now the Agenda for our dialogue with a range of up-coming EU Calls.

1.4.2 OutlineComputableSocietySystemsRequirements

This submission discusses Computational Socio-Geonomics and Metaloger (CSG/M), called "On Computable Society", a potential paradigm shift 75 years after "On Computable Numbers", or a century after Wallace and Darwin12. The frontispiece shows its value proposition: to optimise and arguably prevent waste. It computerises how we intercommunicate as social higher animals. This is purposeful (wo)mankind, now striving towards a sustainable future.

This Paper defines ‘complexity’ for SMART SOCIETY (Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) to grass-roots functioning) as how a necessary level of control is attained in an uncontrollable environment. That paradox is resolved by sufficity13,: the toolkit is a means to this – considering the pragmatics as actionable, goal oriented means to achieve a desired end-result in a context ranging from cooperation, through co-petition, to outright hostility. We are all players in this environment, it is a world of Meta-modelling. The new toolkit is embedded in society to handle its ubiquitous and pervasive complexity. The project combines New Product Development (NPD) and Action Research into this new communication paradigm and how to apply it. It does not itself provide specific real-world ‘solutions’. It interfaces with these to process their interconnections with everything else.

The People’s Toolkit extends the current ABM concept to model any instance (theoretically all) of societal complexity viewed as a Complex Adaptive System (CAS). It is an in-vivo virtual meta-world overlaying the entirety of ‘how we do things here’. It is realised as a post-Darwinian set of evolutionary ecologies; its radical feature is to model human abstract values – as species roaming the meta-world and triggering the entirety of what we observe as complexity. Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ is replaced by ‘Fitness for Purpose’. There are as many genus/ family …domains of this concept as there are human solutions to ‘life’. The toolkit models them all whether someone approves or rejects them (ultimately by waging war).

The model is neutral: the world is not; SMART SOCIETY is not. SMART SOCIETY processes complexity and elucidates its meaning; the project merely constructs the affordance for this. The workshop examines how this toolkit can be realised and deployed in any domain of SMART SOCIETY.

1.4.3 DimensioningTheProblem‘space’‐microlevel

In any SMART SOCIETY domain, there is a context of sub-objectives enabled by a strategic infrastructure that drives the enterprise forward. This generates an operational framework that itself will work within other constraining and enabling frameworks, all comprising the larger complex system that needs to exist as a viable ecology.

There is a general understanding of the idea of an ecology, but not yet a consensus on what it means as a solution to the complexity of society. Ecologies are the collection of entities forming a complex society: “Complexity is the interaction of systems of purposeful behaviour thought out in the human mind”. This is proposed as the design paradigm for The Peoples’ Toolkit in its quest to factor complexity into all its domains. Computational Socio-Geonomics/Metaloger (CSG/M) processes the societal behaviours that uniquely generate the observable complexity in human affairs, and asserts these must be understood to address complexity. However, bringing complexity, social science, and the ICT world together has always been problematical.

The Peoples Toolkit bolts together tried and tested ideas chiefly from General Systems Theory, with innovations regarding how complexity is experienced, how this relates to our cognitive world, and how this in turn forms new perceptions about what that world is made up of. SMART SOCIETY modelling in a complex world requires a special kind of joined-up approach involving: Meta-modelling; how people in the field engage with the process; the kind of tools that are necessary to support the process; and most crucial, how the findings are translated into new decisions and actions. All these are at the heart of what ‘complexity’ means in society, from the individual, through all organisation, enterprise and government structures up to supra-government levels. The toolkit processes the practicality of a CAS called SMART SOCIETY. The EU has to master change to make sure any new paradigm is not stifled before birth by reactionary forces.

12 Huxley/Kettlewell “Charles Darwin and his World” (1965), p91, quoted Wallace (contemporary formulator of the Theory of Evolution) who concluded in

1864 that ‘further evolution of the body was unnecessary – specialised tools and machines were more efficient than any bodily organ’. ... as a result, Man possesses ... a second mechanism of heredity ... he can transmit culture ...changes in ideas, techniques, social organisation and artistic expression .. Man has embarked on a new psycho‐social phase of evolution ... in which he has responsibility for the whole planet ... for this task he must learn the rules of this ... the mechanisms by which it operates. [i.e the brain/mind is special!] 13 Simon



1.4.4 DimensioningTheProblem‘space’‐macrolevel

The Peoples’ Toolkit implements SMART SOCIETY as a set of interacting ecologies that function as a Darwinian ecology, i.e. that functions by natural selection based on survival of the fittest; this paradigm represents its complex nature (and not the reality of the SMART SOCIETY domains). This paradigm allows SMART SOCIETY domain(s) to re-design their existence by selection of MetaFoRs that are fit-for-purpose. In their complex world this process is simply the best that can be devised at a point in time and constant re-appraisal goes on as the experiment throws up success or failure. MetaFoRs are a catalogue built up from experience in the real world domain whether directly real or any meta-level of perturbation/force experienced and designed into the system. This all happens in real-time

Giddens described the CAS of Society as ‘the global runaway world’. Increasingly problems overtake solutions. A joined up approach must embrace the whole picture while facilitating local action. A new paradigm is required that intertwines complexity and society. Processing its intricacies requires a new type of ICT, embedded in society, because it involves billions of complex events every second; this is not hype but indicative of the scale of the phenomena encountered. None of this changes the role of the expert or that of the client. SMART SOCIETY has always involved the best brains (the only other means to process phenomena on such a scale) and sophisticated methods of engaging with the problem space. At best it has produced vision, ideas, awareness, action and results. Complexity science seeks to address dimensions of the problem that are not tractable with legacy methods alone:

Globalisation, accelerating change, losing control14 Risk, out-of-control, threats and societal pathologies Legacy solutions fail, ‘wrong problem’, wrong solutions, widening gap, impossible to catch-up Societal changes, loss of authority, reversal of the old-order, disaffection, protest and direct action Myopia, vested interests, competing systems, non ‘joined-up’, “too difficult”, no quick ROI Resource contention, societal pressures, down to the much vaunted abstract values of fairness, sustainability,

opportunity.

The complex configurations of perceived phenomena do not even have ‘solid real-world’ names: we refer to patterns of complexity, new things like ‘strange attractors’, and generally to types of experience that lack the means of normal discourse. This for society is systemic failure. Socio-technically they are meta-factors. The job of The Peoples Toolkit is to resolve such conundrums, at the heart of human wilful behaviour. We need to devise a new system to do so. It models our complex existence to change it. A new lingua-franca of societal-complexity will be an intuitive language of ‘experiencing’ together.

The concept of ecologies fits the idea of many nested influences emanating from different complex systems; each will have its own GST model, describing and defining the set of behaviours possible within the ecology; these are implemented as Meta-models, each having a set of allowed MetaFoRs.

An ecology can range from an actual physical set of real-world entities down to totally abstract ecologies that exert forces on reality; this implements structures of values. What behaviours can actually occur is defined according to the nature of the entity; there will be a limited range of permitted ways one ecology can interfere either cooperatively or competitively with other ecologies, i.e. perturb their viability (for good or ill). Ecologies will be at one or other of stages of maturity, i.e. having the capacity to survive and thrive or degenerate.

Events across the ecology of ecologies determine its evolution and the pattern of events remains a perpetual record of this evolution; but not as extinct species fossilised remains, but viable virtual entities that can be re-run to test behaviour again – ultimately being available for selection by ‘living’ ecologies learning from the virtual-past.

All these ideas need research, experiment and trial; the benefit of designing The Peoples’ Toolkit as a virtual World is there is no need to ‘get it right’ first time (that is impossible anyway), rather a trial-and-error process achieves this without wasting resources.

It will not be easy to get into the thinking behind this design paradigm instantly, it is totally new, requires careful management of the Frame of Reference at any point in the design activity, but is entirely familiar to anyone that has designed a role-playing exercise – a similar ‘playing with multiple Frames of Reference’ in order to trial a situation. It is the process of rapid prototyping applied to behavioural entities.

The outcome of the above is realisation of an experimental laboratory for trialling complexity in any SMART SOCIETY domain. This is the generic framework for a Metaloger Lab. Special Metaloger Labs will develop the master set of ecologies of such things as Structures of Values; we have not yet got a firm handle at that level of detail.

Our view, or is it ‘hope’ is all the above is a straightforward systems modelling exercise, with some esoteric bits thrown in.

14 Giddens Reith lectures 1998



1.4.5 DimensioningTheSolution‘space’‐amesolevelenquiry

The Peoples’ Toollkit delivers a working framework for building a simulator of any SMART SOCIETY Domain’s complexity and then running it operationally. There are three stages to this:

Instantiating Metaloger Labs, as many as a domain requires, at a suitable scale of detail Running complexity experiments i.e. the set of interactions ensuing from the totality of participating Labs Investigating complex emergent patterns and relating these to the determining behaviours as experienced by the

domain designers. The Peoples’ Toolkit consortium provides the generic designs for the above; support for the participating domains, and full operational services and support. SMART SOCIETY continuously models itself to ask “how well are we doing?”. This reflexive process starts in the mind and then gets expressed in every aspect of our existence. It forms the most incredible CAS known and is the basis of the ‘design’ of human society, encapsulated in SOCIONOME, a neologism from ‘society’ and ‘genome’. This is Meta-modelling. It has always addressed the most complex aspects of how we drive society, in the ICT systems we use pervasively; now we are beginning to add the science of complexity directly to our thinking and acting process and its expression in everything around us. We all simulate. Alas, some dissimulate. Human behaviour will be built-in and not factored-out of such systems. We and everything we do is a (CAS)2 assemblage15; joining the (CAS)2 game empowers, enables and engages people. People solve problems and are innovative – Figure 3 is a generic scenario. SMART SOCIETY is a special case of the CAS of human purpose and intentionality; it is about translating ideas Into decision and action. It is specifically about the structuration of IoTS&P so that what we want to happen does happen. It concerns power, resources and winning. It works within and sometimes counter to the prevailing social ethos. It is never neutral. It belongs to the people – and not the other way round. The People’s Toolkit defines a new system that will close a lot of gaps – holistic and symbiotic are the OK terms. This needs SMART SOCIETY feedback and involvement in the Toolkit NPD and instantiation of the solution across all its domains. It is primarily a huge deployment exercise – on the scale of Future Internet itself.

A requirement of CSG/M is that a core, ubiquitous generic model of how human behaviour drives our world can be built to process its complexity and render it both understandable and tractable to change. The Peoples Toolkit offers an engineering solution and method to process the societal transactions embodied in human behaviour that give rise to society’s complex outcomes. They have not before been considered computable; they must be rendered so to process societal complexity. Technically it enables in-vivo Action-based modelling of our Future. The single word that describes its vision, solution, and societal methodology is ‘interconnectedness’ – one of the mantras of EU complexity thinking. It aims to be a generic societal complexity modelling framework for application to any SMART SOCIETY domain, down to the public on the receiving end.

This Paper discusses the way the affordance called the Peoples Toolkit can be designed, engineered and deployed, and invites participation in the Action Research to deploy and trial how it meets this workshop’s requirements. This solution is novel, nothing like it exists, and it is a huge opportunity for the EU and SMART SOCIETY World. Of course the statement of requirements for the required engineering involves many experts from many disciplines, but chiefly the domain of complexity science applied to society. We are pioneers in this area. New hypotheses can expect to be proven in field work, standard to NPD methodology. But it is important to separate the engineering and the actual SMART SOCIETY research. The Toolkit does not play God. This White Paper is about change. Paradoxically it is not about the inventiveness of SMART SOCIETY but the inventiveness of how we tackle it; it is about method, technique, technology, new-scientific discoveries - bringing new tools to bear. Business As Usual (BAU) can tinker at the edges; complexity requires a new type of thinking. It is widely acknowledged that new ICT is required to address its dimensions, but it is about societal discourse that does not yet have a language. We call this “Computable Society”. Its significance is foreshadowed by social computing (that it will supersede).

A CATWOE model (Peter Checkland’s Soft System Methodology (SSM)) gives a first dimensioning of the systemic solution: Customers: all of us, SMART SOCIETY domain Researchers, society, people, world Actors: all of us, participants in the collection of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS)s making up our world-society Transformation: everything, everywhere, everyday, everyone – all interconnected meaningfully World-view: people, empowered, enabled and engaged Owners: Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS)-makers as conductors and choreographers of the CASs comprising

society Environment: the GAIA threat and need to restabilise a global runaway world, towards sustainability, fairness,

opportunity, managed resources, quality of life and well being of us and our world.

When we talk about SMART SOCIETY domains, or social, or complexity modelling, we are into the unique human attribute of being able to ponder and redesign our ’life’. Computable Society takes that to a new dimension (compared against the current state). SMART SOCIETY will move from the Adam Smith Homo Economicus to a new paradigm HOMO SOCIONOMICUS.

15 an assemblage is the orderly collection of everything that is put together to accomplish something in ‘life’ i.e. both collective and complex – CAS

2



1.4.6 DimensioningTheSolution‘space’‐themicrolevel

There is no given master list of complexity methods and The Peoples’ Toolkit works on the basis that the portfolio will continues to expand and run-out as methods develop a useful shelf-life. This is the equivalent to configuration management and assembly/part substitution, All will be sub-ecologies within the master ecology.

The micro aspect concerns individual behaviours, thought and actions, SMART SOCIETY domain questions, approaches, priorities and problems to be solved. The intricacies of behaviour are both resource and constraint, as the range of papers and enquiry illustrates for the domain of Governance, Policy, Standards (GPS): this is the ‘top level’ of society in the current model, but in the emerging model of all society is common to everything, everybody, everywhere, everyday. Turned upside down, everything at the top is made of smaller things; this was reflected in the varied range of Papers presented and discussed at the Policy/CRW Workshop. And the follow-up consideration of ‘what next?:

the universality of ABM several proposals involve meta-modelling frameworks of practice need for a master-framework validation and verification tools that tackle specific needs sophisticated modelling implementation in the field/society need for radical change reflexive-enquiry engagement with stakeholders, actors, players ‘concerns/feelings’ (these terms needs explicating) the impact of real-life behaviour on Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) enquiry and the primacy of grass-roots

experience transition from SMART SOCIETY domain modelling and enactment to decision and action (applies to all Papers)

All Papers discuss current limits against perceived needs. This is a complexity strategy focus; whether incremental or radical change works best – and if it is ‘horses for courses’, how does such choices come about and get traction. What matters is to align such issues of complex emergence with the real-life model. Our method is to explore what an Action Based Research approach might achieve, and what this means for societal engagement. It is holistic and symbiotic complex society.

The reality of human activity is that it is continual experiment, but modern life has programmed that out of most people’s lives, substituting behaviour as an automaton, e.g. better described as people obeying the rules, eight hours a day, through until retirement. Opportunities and encouragement to be creative, innovative, concerned and involved have been supplanted by modern forms of ‘bread and circuses’. The alternative for the few is individual action to search for alternative societal solutions.

This is systemic failure, typical of all major periods of change. There is plenty of evidence of volatility and actual chaos in societal affairs; the usual response is a mix of coercion and BAU. Given this scenario Governance, Policy and Standards seem ready for some concerted action: it always duly happens in the chaos-ridden areas of breakdown, usually followed by further dimensions of chaos and breakdown. This is not to turn this White Paper into a lecture on reorganising society and government: the presenting problem is we have no framework for addressing continuous change; action is too near to emergency recovery, all thinking goes out of the window because it seems to late (perhaps an undiuly pessimistic appraisal)’

We need a framework that encompasses the scenario of change from the stable (even if unsatisfactory), through change initiatives (even if spasmodic and even sticking-plaster), to seriously driven and accompanied by sanctions (even as the response is some level of rebellion, however ineffective). We need not address warfare that always throws the rule-book out of the window. This is not a digression but a story line to show that systemic complexity works at many levels but the bottom levels are the surest indicators of the health of the system; they are what has to be worked-on (but will not receive funding or attention in normal times, being seen as an expensive luxury).

This matters to realisation of The Peoples’ Toolkit because it will be perhaps the biggest societal experiment ever conducted, we would like to quickly establish some confidence we are going in the right direction, what the pundit call ‘some quick wins’. The surest way to lose trust is to fudge issues, falsify findings, follow simplistic solutions. Our S-GAIA Consortium, spearhead groups in CSG/M domains, but mostly people, engaged, empowered and enabled will do the business of their own accord because it matters.



1.5 DisruptiveChange,tippingpoints,decision&action:Closingthe‘Gap’

The People’s Toolkit project is a SMART SOCIETY domain modelling and simulation tool and a framework for strategic change, addressing how to engage with, manage, facilitate, and optimise the experience of complexity in the affairs of mankind. Both are dynamic, and concern the interests of all members of society - including Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) practitioners.

‘Complex social dynamics’ concerns bringing about change in the SMART SOCIETY domain arena. A practitioners dialogue and working infrastructure is required: What do we want to change? what change is happening anyway, and are we prepared to act strategically? The People’s Toolkit consortium has identified the strategic importance of Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) in its portfolio and SMART SOCIETY domain practitioners need to engage with GPS. We admit to issuing a manifesto (so is any new product announcement).

The workshop brief and the range of Papers offered are a huge resource; this paper offers a possible integrating framework. It addresses social, economic and environment areas, and the need for new instruments. The task ahead is to validate and verify its applicability to the field targeted. This is an exercise in systems thinking and modelling, both concerning the People’s Toolkit NPD and crucially its deployment. It is a truism that no tool is useful unless relevant and properly worked.

The gap is lack of tools to process complexity in society with Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) (and Governance) at the apex (in a Maslow sense). By this we mean the totality of method and range of affordances employed. But most of all that elusive word ‘change’. So there is a need to explore how current thinking and new thinking can establish a dialogue. This is a challenge at several levels: society, research, vested interest, resources and investment, prioritisation, ‘not invented here’, fear of the future, and perhaps most of all, ‘power'. Complexity teaches us to expect perturbation and morphogenesis as a fact of existence; societal change is opposed or hidden for various reasons. But it also involves creativity, entrepreneurialism - even just liking to experiment with the possibilities of change points to the incredible variety of human life that is capable of solving problems. An integrated approach must work with all types of SMART SOCIETY domain study: field-based experiment, laboratory simulation, tools-driven, comparative study, methods, (and more). The integrating feature is the dynamics of what is occurring, from initial intervention to possible action, factoring in external contamination, to validating and verifying the experiment. Understanding dynamics is costly and time consuming; we need to consider the relation between research and reality and what contemporaneity brings to the piece, at what cost. Most research involves second-hand experience and progressive degradation in that experience; in contrast the ability to retain and re-run ‘experience’ is not yet possible in our uni-directional time curve. There is a lack of any systematic Road Map. The dynamics of human abstract thought are the important primitives - not the same as their consequent ‘global dynamics’. You can re-run thought but not its outcome. The People’s Toolkit is nearest to a totally real-time complexity driven paradigm, including the ability to retain and re-run its processable version of past reality and play with possible alternatives or futures. It is an enabling affordance for the societal complexity World to integrate complexity science into its portfolio of approaches: we deliver the toolkit for the SMART SOCIETY domain Community to prosecute the scientific study of Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) and Complexity in practice. The People’s Toolkit Project will start a discussion on how the Toolset might be rolled-out: the real benefit of the toolset is when it facilitates the complexity science paradigm in society and its Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) World. We will want .to explore the pivotal place of Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) and Governance in the overall schema of societal complexity. Ultimately we need to recognise that the system called Society drives our existence as fundamentally as Quantum Physics drives the physical world (Fig 2); how the micro level of individual will (and wilfulness) progresses to fully integrated societal behaviour promises to be an exciting research experiment. The ‘gap’ in Tools is also fundamental: computers are still in the era of “On Computable Numbers” [Turing, 1936]. They need to shift to “On Computable Society”. Of course complexity is not about computation but the different logics of human perturbation and morphogenesis. Experimenting with new constructs of complex society modelling is actually life itself, now with the added in-vivo/in-silico/ ‘in vitro’( ICT) dimensions.

The subject of Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) is too big and important for researchers to contemplate their research in silos. EU complexity projects should form part of the research portfolio, to inform each other creatively. It is also important to note the emphasis being given to Complexity science in ‘grant proposals and funded research’. The Workshop has to respond forthrightly to such a steer. All work on complexity gets involved in interventions; it is a designed act of perturbation and morphogenesis. This is the paradigm of self-referencing human intention. These arguments illustrate that change is about modelling ourselves. All change is disruptive to the status-quo, BAU, current paradigm: the workshop is about how deeply the Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) world engage with this, at a number of levels. Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) is about the challenge of world complexity, especially how it disrupts, or more technically ‘perturbs’ orderly operational ‘life’- we could equally use the French term ‘amenagement’, because everything is part of the CAS of ‘life’. Simpler models of bygone ages are unrecoverably gone in the modern world. All complexity modelling has to factor into its view of Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) improvement the inevitability of disruptive change; for this there needs to be a processable view of possible and likely disruptions. This is standard Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) thinking: complexity takes this to new levels of significance.



Computerising the model of complex human behaviour is our invention. The Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) world is about how to use it in practice. Computational Socio-Geonomics, is an invention, to which the NPD and Khunian response is ‘let’s just do it16, because the opportunity for mankind and the EU outweighs the likely set of hurdles to be overcome’. Invention always matches science when it comes to practical advances. As with all complexity it is a matter of how the bits are bolted together and engaged with. The Peoples Toolkit project plays in the current world of EU Complexity Research; the Workshop should consider becoming a mainstream player in this community. The ‘gap’ is our readiness to break the current model, to come up with a new approach. The second message is the ‘boldly go‘ one. This Paper does not mind being the stalking horse for both. It offers a radical solution; We consider The People’s Toolkit is the best integrated solution on offer and invite participation in it.

1.6 CoreConceptsofthePeople’sToolkitSocio‐TechnologyEngineering

Firstly it is an EU Proposal; there is an existing CoP; shared research amplifies results. The People’s Toolkit is a real solution that bridges the gap, based on Action Research, trial and error conducted in the real world, based on complexity science, applied to societal problems. We model ourselves all the time; 'The People’s Toolkit formalises the method in the new paradigm of computable society.

I write as an Engineer: the new focus is on socio-technology, the enabler of the new paradigm of Computable Society. It builds on the universal tools of the information age, but principally those directed at personal and societal interaction – mobile technologies, the Internet, Human Interface, (defined as universal empowerment, engagement, and enablement). The new foundation is Meta-modelling, where Meta Frames of Reference (MetaFoRs) are both the way people and society work as well as computers. Socio-technology defines and applies this critical confluence.

The origin of the People’s Toolkit was Metaloger, the Author’s MBA Thesis on the significance of meta-data, the focus was not the usual Dublin Core Initiative stuff, but the meta-systems driving the human aspects of computers-in-use, particularly the ‘quality’ movement17 (Frontispiece.), the realisation of the pervasiveness of meta-systems in human life, and that they are the ubiquitous component of all control systems, now identified as Complex Adaptive Systems (CASs). For this toolkit, the focus is the human side of control, just as computing has emphasised human-computer confluence; ‘The People’s Toolkit’ goes further in proposing a new paradigm that reverses the primacy of computation before holistic-thinking, bringing together society and computation where before they joined forces at arms length. Holons are upper-case Meta-models.

The concepts combine socio-technology and theory: living complexity drives our world. Human will and wilfulness is the force at work: mankind has the ability to think herself out of trouble, but alas also to think himself into it. Figure 2 is a top-level systems schematic addressing the CATWOE model earlier:

1. Root Definition: Computational Socio-Geonomics (CSG/M) formalises a computable view of complex society and The People’s Toolkit delivers the framework to apply it: this is ubiquitous Meta-modelling, working the Meta Frames of Reference (MetaFoRs) that are pervasive in all the systems of society; Metaloger will be its practical lingua-franca.

2. CAS Theory is about what complexity means to society (and not, e.g. thermodynamics): the fascinating theory of emergence has to be interpreted for human behaviour: 2.1. dynamics is human behaviour (but e.g. not crowds which is vestigial animal behaviour predominantly) 2.2. Requisite Variety is collective because thought to be the necessary ‘structurated’18 solution to a problem 2.3. emergence is the solution coming together, but unfortunately someone else’s having an equal chance 2.4. we conclude: the universal example of complexity is human abstract thought and systems of values [discuss]

3. In-vivo self-modelling is, paradoxically, more self-correcting, efficient, and responsive than traditional panopticon methods (the exception being deliberate manipulation of the self-correcting system, as in e.g. organised crime, pathology, propaganda, systems-within-systems – that is why they are difficult to counter): 3.1. it is compiled from live experience and not dead data (that has to be reconstructed and brought back to life) 3.2. contemporaneity beats post-hoc narrative 3.3. simulated dynamics is (simplistically) a contradiction-in-terms (this is particularly relevant to evidence/verification) 3.4. the basis is the mindset of the practitioner and not a post-hoc interpretation 3.5. the objective is to generate/trigger decision and action, so ownership matters we conclude society is not the product of science: society-interpreted is science.

16 Web ( ), New Product Development, gives the example of the open‐cycle rocket engine that US scientists proved from the Laws of thermo‐dynamics was

impossible: Russian engineers said just build it. It is now the standard design, but gave a several years advantage to the USSR in the Space Race 17 The Author worked for forty years on organisational change, pioneering in‐vivo‐simulation; he initiated the first BCS Human Aspects Specialist group in

1972. He first worked on modelling tools interfacing to operational systems in the seventies. He was a Booz Allen Consultant and for twenty years a strategic planning and programme management consultant internationally. His full‐time focus now is Metaloger Technologies research with PublicComputing 18 Giddens term



4. Socio-technology is human inventiveness – hardware, software, liveware, and a new artefact called CASs: Meta-modelling/MetaFoRs deal with all this incredible, designed sophistication of organised modernity. The practicality of The People’s Toolkit is that it involves and builds on all existing systems out there ‘in the field’: 4.1. Every existing computer system used across society computes according to a meta-model, designed (theoretically) to

be ’Fit for Purpose’, by an external Agent called a Systems Analyst; its Achilles Heel has always been the twin pressure points of the human interface, and that external ubiquitous-complex-events19 often means the system is out-of-date, before it even launches.

4.2. As one reviewer points out, such systems cannot match the capacity of the human mind to understand and process the human condition. The answer is to bridge that specific ‘gap’, which the new paradigm of Computable Society targets, by placing the CAS of human purpose at the apex of meta-modelling. Modelling the human mind via its outputs is the neat solution. They exist in the real world and are living representations.

4.3. The human capacity to ‘model’ is the manifestation of ‘people designing the world’; we conclude: 4.3.1. self-modelling is the unique capability of the human species; it is also worth pointing out that prototypes

utilise existing technologies, whilst the socio-technic components capitalise on the capacity of the human actor to invent and discover new solutions to old problems continuously

4.3.2. the virtual world is synonymous with the real-world 4.3.3. which is instantiated is the act of choice, decision and action.

5. The design of ecology simulators is already happening but radically extended for The People’s Toolkit: that extension

is driven by ‘people’. Complex Adaptive Systems (CASs) represent a new research focus on this: (FOCAS is the current EU Call). CSG/M extends this thinking beyond the ‘things’ of life (cf IoTS) to IoTSP (!). The solution is to extend system concepts to include the entirety of the CAS, processed dynamically in real-time, and driven by the human, i.e. societal, dynamics and not the ICT ones. Only these have to be identified and rendered computable. The outcome of this on-going work is called the SOCIONOME, a dynamic coded structure of human purpose and intentionality, behind every reification of modernity (but not the GAIA except where Man interferes with it): 5.1. Computational Socio-Geonomics (CSG) deliberately mimics genomics because both concern evolutionary structures

and the codes driving them; only CSG is man-made, designed in real-time, and evolves continuously in human-time, its outcome being the accelerated canvas of change now occurring. The contrast between ‘Survival of the Fittest’ and ‘Fitness for Purpose’ is seminal to our work. The concept of CSG removes the bottleneck of fixed ontologies

5.2. The socio-technical design is an ABM platform simulating societal systems, driven by the SOCIONOME, and creating the virtual world of CASs-in-use; it bridges real-world systems-in-use and virtual S-GAIA World. All components are modelled as ecologies of interacting ‘species’, whose members are societal phenotypes. GAIA is the top level

5.3. we conclude that people choose the amount of complexity they can, or even want, to deal with. This is the complete opposite of Darwinian evolution by Natural Selection. We cannot predict how the take-up of the People’s Toolkit will proceed: our conviction is it will be part of our philosophy of people enabled, engaged, and empowered.

6. Metaloger processes the universal SOCIONOME, but the source of the ‘codes’ are all society’s people and systems:

6.1. it is the top-level of all CASs 6.2. Real-world systems pursue their own life-niche, dealing with every kind of interaction (sometimes?). Metaloger is an

overlay on this to bring to the proprietary information processing world that of the CAS world of multi-level societal intentional interactions

6.3. Every participating World System is a Metaloger instantiation (called Metaloger-Labs) supporting complex interactions with the CASs of which it is a part; the uniqueness of these interactions arises from the tailored MetaFoRs that are specific to each local interaction; it can (and always does) give rise to local phenotypical evolution and it is these dynamic changes that generate emergent behaviour

6.4. the main evolutionary path is where a species ‘becomes extinct’, i.e. falls into disuse, and the socionomic examples cease to exist or have any meaning – except they exist in perpetuity, ready to be brought back to life, much as the geneticist studying prehistoric DNA hopes to do

6.5. we conclude: 6.5.1. Metaloger Labs will have a life of their own – like today’s social computing (which they are) 6.5.2. complex phenotype evolution is the basis of human progress (and the reverse) and Mankind’s

dominance of the World, including our ability to destroy it 6.5.3. They are an exercise in a new kind of cooperation.

19 Rainer von Ammon is the expert on Ubiquitous Complex Event Processing (U‐CEP) in the People’s Toolkit consortium: it is a matter of their dynamics



7. Much as today’s Information Age seeks to capture more meaning from the data deluge, the Metaloger world will want to understand life, interpret its meta-significance and forecast its future destiny. The outcome of Metaloger is a permanent repository of complex evolution and its dynamic patterns, called Metaloger Tapestries: 7.1. The instances of phenotype actions (that both mirror their socionome and also modify it), generate the picture of the

‘life’ of species and the CASs they represent, and whose patterns reveal their complex functioning. These records of in-vivo complexity are a priceless heritage: their analysis enables emergence to be observed

7.2. Metaloger Tapestries can be both the record of actuality and alternatively of experiments, in which case they are simulations to project possible new states, i.e. ‘what if’ scenarios. They are available in perpetuity to re-run 'life’, rather like those other domains of societal cultures that are the legacy world of evolutionary records such as history, folklore, philosophy; generically ‘culture’ (only Metaloger Tapestries are ab-initio ‘computable’)

7.3. we conclude the language of complex Meta-modelling will become natural to young people’ much as children take to computers (remember ‘Smalltalk’). Possibly the focus of Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) will shift from feeding the machine of information/intelligence, or even decision/action to enabling, engaging and empowering the global world to plan its own destiny wisely, together. Paradigm change always leads to reinventing the past.

8. The People’s Toolkit will require a huge pervasive and ubiquitous operational infrastructure, foreshadowed by the

Internet, by the communications industry, and by the ERM systems-industry. It will bring about its own societal culture, foreshadowed by the social computing phenomenon – typified by twittering in Tariha Square. It will not be a tool of the expert and the elite only, but everyone, everywhere, everything, everyday: 8.1. it will become the model for Dynamic global interaction, exchange of Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS), and

monitoring of its effect and follow-up because it is all embedded in a holistic interacting ‘world’ of CASs 8.2. there will be an infrastructure of global complex-life, down to local standards of behaviour, quality and involvement in

running its affairs; we can expect a new paradigm of news and communication to emerge including that of governance

8.3. the technical infrastructure will, like the internet, have both industrial and governmental components 8.4. we conclude that computable society will become as potent a force in public affairs as current models of the market, of

technology, of dominant factions, e.g. PPPs. The need for this can be seen already in the world turmoil brought about by the clash between established but defective systems across our global world. Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) together with its partner, Governance, will emerge as far more significant a role than the current technical processor of complex agendas: the author has identified this role as a kind of 'Metaloger Librarian’ role – custodian of the priceless collection of living computable society enactments, comprising computable society.

9. However the explication of life as a CAS is hard imagine or predict at this stage. The foremost question for

Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) as for the Peoples Toolkit project, is what strategy for the way forward and the future of ‘society‘. i.e. firstly ‘what society’, and then, what will enable it. Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) cannot sit outside these questions. The People’s Toolkit will involve a huge enabling effort, to bring about its introduction, deployment, and most of all prepare society, business, organisations, government, to handle its impact: 9.1. the socio-technic and societal involvement requires the Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) Community to reappraise

its modus operandi at every level; the issue is taking a lead role in bringing about the profound change of complexity and society; this canvas is not limited to any one domain; ‘Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS)’ is universal to people

9.2. There are special domains of Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) that concern alternative bases of society’s existence and functioning; e.g. organised crime, forensics, security and the military in an age of ‘complex threat’. The generic area is ‘systems-within-systems’, identified as high-jacking the complexity model itself. These are not addressed in this Paper.

9.3. the total in-vivo nature of the symbiosis between complexity science, socio-technology, human behaviour, evolutionary-systems, and the entire fabric of society requires a correspondingly integrated and eclectic approach to its introduction. An in-vivo societal simulator meets this challenge (it still has to be provisioned and deployed!)

9.4. As with all systems work, there is the aspect of transition and change-over from what is called ‘legacy systems' – we prefer a term such as ‘transitional society’. This will require hybrid systems and tools to bridge the legacy world and that of in-vivo complexity, probably simply a different kind of Metaloger-species.

9.5. we conclude The Peoples Toolkit addresses this challenge because it is predicated on the only model to change the Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) world and will take it to its necessary position in the paradigm of complex society.

10. The People’s Toolkit Project has some useful traction already to offer to the Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS)

Community in its task of devising a new strategic direction – which is what complexity science is. We do not consider Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) to be a ‘nice add-on’ to an existing product (which is the current marketing model):



10.1. the FOCAS project framework proposed is a stalking horse: directly relevant, but not a prescription. The schema in Figure 4 is the Work Package structure for S-GAIA currently:

10.1.1. WP3 is the over-arching theoretical basis and design 10.1.2. WP4 is R&D of Generic societal behaviours that model complexity 10.1.3. WP5 is applied methodologies for working with complexity in the real-world 10.1.4. WP6 develops the socio-technologies used in the field to engage with Complexity 10.1.5. WP’s 7-11 are field trials to validate and verify CSG/M in use 10.1.6. WP12 addresses the next stages of S-GAIA and Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) modelling.

10.2. The proposal to the workshop is for the Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) Community to take a lead in constituting a new research stream for Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) at Local, National, EU and Global levels:

10.2.1. The model of FInES is worth consideration 10.2.2. This Paper offers a specific working proposal to the Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) Community 10.2.3. Further material is available, including ideas for the construction of a strategic Road Map

1.7 Summary:Conclusions

We hope many of the approaches/Papers discussed will find the strategic way forward presented by this Paper useful and meaningful, its theoretical significance to Complexity , its usefulness as a practical integrating framework, and its positioning of the Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) Agenda within the established EU Complexity and Societal research streams. We hope to be welcomed aboard the next stage of implementation of a new strategy for the new set of FI/CAPS/Society Projects research. The key feature of the evolutionary toolkit is it works by trial-and-error: there is no possibility of ‘getting it right’, any more than Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) can be written in tablets of stone. The important goal is to build up enough experience and history to justify the experiments carried out. S-GAIA is particularly relevant to experiments involving real-world behaviours where human motivation enters into the dynamics of discovery. ‘We first eat ourselves what we serve to others’20. Ultimately People-power, (Figure 5), will take over, but by then everyone, everywhere, everyday, will be empowered, enabled, and engaged so to do. Figure 6 is a social-model. We welcome an opportunity to share and expand the strategic canvas of change. FuturICT is a strategic Flagship programme and Figure 7 gives the S-GAIA (The People’s Toolkit) perspective. We support it.

This Paper can only touch on what is a huge research canvas; we wish to share it with others. Thank you for listening (I hope!).

20 Dutch Proverb



Crisis management Global sustainability fairness cooperation governance

Integration conflict resolution innovation progress well-being happiness

Food, water, survival, habitat, resource depletion

Evolution & progress: Survival of the fittest v. fitness for purpose ?

Cells, chemistry, reproduction

N A T U R A L W O R L D

CHAOTIC

ENTROPICPARTIALLY ORDERED

L I F E

E N E R G Y

M A T T E R

G A I A

M E A N I N G

arePERTURBATIONS

Q U A N T A

Organisations/ processes

Human & computer systems

Knowledge/ informationTechnology artefactsArtificial societiesI o T P S

O R G A N I S A T I O N S

H U M A N – C O G N I T I V E S P E C I E S

F U T U R E I N T E R N E T

L I V I N G L A B S

M E T A L O G E R L A B S

U – C E P

L I V I N G E A R T H E C O L O G Y

Knowledge accelerator dynamics

Eventful life is a constant enactment of human volition & meaning

F u t u r e I C T

S M A R T S O C I E T Y

P E O P L E

it generates the CAS called ‘society’

“Yes, we compute our World” & can change it for the better

Ultimate destiny –outside our scope

D E S T I N Y

S C I E N C E

Computational socio-geonomics simulated Society, Culture & cognitive computing

Symbiosis of thought, values, purpose, decision & action

(Meta) information Meta-modelling, Meta FoR’smeta-values MES/HES

Meta-FoRs are the strange attractors of human volitional computation

events

events

events

events

events

events

COMPLEXITY THEORY: INFORMATION-PROCESS-STRUCTURE-PERTURBATION-MORPHOGENESIS

FInES

Fig.1 Complexity Theory: Information-process-Structure-Perturbation-Morphogenesis



SOCIONOME

METALOGER

PROPERTIES OF SOCIAL SYSTEMS

LIFE

“purposeful goal seeking

(selfish)”

• fundamental sciences• rigorous formalism• evolutionary aspects

Governance

• framework platform of processable MetaFORs• layers of abstraction• emergent/CASS

METALOGER ENVIRONMENTSΣ (social systems in organisations)

Real World Social SystemsCulturalIndividual & group behaviour

Evolutionary ModelSpecies, Life, Resources

Engagement

Computer Sciences

Social Sciences

Simulation

V.OSS

THE SCIENCE: Computational socio-geonomicsThe platform for World Society Modeller (S-GAIA), a FuturIcT federation

S-GAIA – THE ULTIMATE ERM PLATFORM

Complex events

Domain of computational socio-geonomics

SimulationEvolutionary Model: Species Life, Resources, & socio-technic (CAS)2’s

Figure 2

COMPLEX



prob lem

behaviours

PURPOSE

ACTION

EVENTS

OUTCOMES

DECISION

Rich Picture: THE COMPLEX REAL WORLD OF PROBLEM ‐SOLVING

DECISION SYSTEM 1

DECISION SYSTEM(S) n

EVENTS

prob lem s

PURPOSES

behaviours

groups

forecasting

value & supply chainsglobal

C heck1

cash

£££

ICT

data

EVALUATION

ICT

DECISION

ACTION

other inform ation

other decision m aking system s

unknowns

+ models

continuous change

we are all part of a web of meta ‐models

The manager and Business Process Engineer design the operational processes.

The manager has to reach decisions with in a context of many overlapp ing models spann ing: industry, specialism , national, regu latory, in ternational ‐ as well as stakeholder values.

O rgan isation behaviour is not easily included in 'p rocesses' because it is sub jective and irrational. Yet it is a crucia l part ‐ ord inary people can see it, and that it is sometimes a defective part ‐engendering work‐arounds

The management process is dynam ic w ith in a rea l‐time envelope consisting of many system s in teracting across discontinuous and asynchronous in terfaces as well as a purpose driven one

Models are a set of pictures of life of which the management 'cu lture ' is one part of a jigsaw of decision models (which is the metaphor behind the icon for 'm odel' in the diagram). The modelling partakes of all the vagaries of human activities, behaviours and organ isational dimensions; these d imensions can also be meta‐modelled.

BPE as an overlay on an organ isation's life to change the way it does th ings, by modelling and changing the 'p rocess'. The picture shows process models as a set of in terlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: get them all in place and the fu ll p icture is clear. BPE engineers these processes to im prove them.

The complexity and sophistication of meta‐models lies in their dealing with all the dynam ics of rea l‐life , defined in such term s as asynchron icity, discontinu ity, multip le patterns of sign ificance, and mean ing ‐ in short all the vagaries of rea l management life.

Fig.3 The (CAS)2 World of Problem Solving, Optimisation, Purpose, Decision-making & Action – Assemblages of people, things, ideas, happenings, meaningful patterns



WP1.NPD MANAGEMENT

Inter-operability

Legacy transition

Complexity Inferencing

SOCIO-TECHNOLOGY

(CAS)2’s: THE SCIENCE & PRACTICE OF THE ECOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIO-TECHNOLOGY

(iteration 1 & 2)

WP2. (CAS)2 & CSG/M Architectures integration

Figure 4 WORK PACKAGE STRUCTURE

WP3 - (CAS)2 & CSG/M THEORETICAL SOLUTION/FRAMEWORK

Design principles – Metaloger: Meta modelling/Meta-FoRs/Networks

Development: Evolutionary principles – GST/SOCIONOME/Values

Operating principles – Metaloger Labs Instantiations/Social Enactments

WP4. SOCIO-TECHNOLOGY:Generic (CAS)2’s Framework+CSG/M Toolkit: science practice & integration samples

Complex Change

Governance/Policy/Standards

GOMS/action Viability/cybernetics dynamics

Innovation/Problem-solving

Emergent Society/social (CAS)2

Fitness for Purpose Pathology

WP5 (CAS)2 Frameworks + CSG/M Toolkit Applied Societal Methodologies samples

inter-operability

Legacy & Transition

Complexity Inferencing

Instantiations

Engagement & Lingua-franca

U-CEP Resources, Power, Triggers

BRAID Innovation & Problem solving

Reference & Normative models

Catalogues

etc

etc (Iteration 4)

WP6. (CAS)2 & CSG/M ECOSYSTEMS ENGINEERING

Engagement with ecologies Metaloger Ecologies operations Meta-Lab(s) Ecosystem Tapestries

(iteration 4) WP 12 – S-GAIA GOVERNANCE/POLICY/STANDARDS (GPS), STRATEGY & FUTURES - Global Pathway

Society Involvement:

SWOT, Stakeholder Review; Socio-economic impact & implications

Dissemination, exploitation & commercialisation to address the S-GAIA Mission:

“S-GAIA is committed to furthering the paradigm of Computable Society; for CSG/M to be a world-beating application; to the Change focus & The Master Builder/Inventor role to contribute to the well-being of our world; to pervasive societal involvement; & to the research effort to achieve this.”

(iteration 3) FIELD TRIALS & EXPERIMENTATION: (CAS)2’s ECOLOGIES

WP9. Metaloger Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS), Planning & Governance

WP10. Metaloger Tapestries : (CAS)2’s Topology Inferencing Services & U-CEP

WP7.SOCIETAL INVOLVEMENT

Piedmont Trial

CoP Experiments

WP11.Cell-Biology & bio-domain Societies:

Comparative reference study

WP8.(CAS)2’s SIMULATOR TRIALS

Macro-level Setting the Agenda

Meso-level Whose priorities?

Micro-level the ‘movers & shakers’


THE METALOGER PARADIGM SHIFT

Schmookler

paradigm‐shift vers 1

basic research exploitationparadigm changeSchumpeter

People Power

IDEAS information & cognition management models practical applications

PEOPLE behaviour/social sciences management practice ventures/sponsors/stakeholders

TECHNOLOGY systems theory Metaloger/virtual reality specific products

(CAS2;s)

To the great sweep of change that is simplistically categorised as a technology ‐push and market‐pull, can be added 'people‐power' somewhat contentiously. There is a wide concern at blind technology leading the world towards the brink , and one of the answers is to give people the means to voice concerns in a way that makes them effective ; there is an even wider issue , one of purpose and involvement generally in the march of progress. The interest in more effective democratic processes is widely pursued ‐ from the western model, to that of China, from the model of involvement on the factory floor in Volvo or Japan, to the delivery of low technology to the Third World. We envisage a different way of re‐capturing the organic wholeness of earlier societies :

JSB Thesis 2000, metamorphosed into S‐GAIA

Crisis-free managed Global World The dynamics of society are the result of Abstract values perturbing the CAS2 called Society – actually the entire set of socio-technic (CAS)2’s in every enterprise / social group in the world: Us.

Figure 9 – CSG/M + (CAS)2’s + Society = Paradigm Shift Figure 5 – CSG/M + (CAS)2’s + Society = Paradigm Shift


31

Figure 6 “The Social Group Paradigm” points to personal psychological factors driving social groups & needing to be part of the Socionome

.

JSB Metaloger Thesis 1999/2000


32

Taguchi: quality is inversely propor onal to the ∑total of loss to mankind

Complexity scienceEmergenceEvolutionary patterns

ICT/computer scienceInfrastructuresInternet scienceLiving dataMeta‐modeling/abstractionsSpecies Agents ecologies

Emergent properties of societyComplexity science/EmergenceEcology & Evolutionary patternsMathematics/Statistical PhysicsSocial sciences & Socio‐cyberneticsPsychology & CognitionSocial meta‐theory

FuturICT: the universal emergence toolsetICT/computer science/InfrastructuresInternet scienceLiving data/reverse engineeringMeta‐modelling/abstractionsSpecies Agents ecologiesMetaloger InstantiationsLiving engagement technologies Media/avatars/soft robotics

space

“Everyone part of the Model”Models/tools/methods/processesSimulation environments & trialsUniversal semantics of ‘life’Society/people engagementCultural bridges & understandingComputational socionomicsWorld ecology

EMERGENCE SIMULATION: living laboratory•Crisis/risk management monitoring/prediction/mitigation•Innovation, creativity, problem solving tool•Emergent Internet/wikipedia/social web sites•Ubiquitous organisation systems•New institutions•World resources/logistics/ownership bank•Thinking/problem solving/decision taking/action patterns•Values/purpose/management & Governance laboratory•Universal simulation tool‐set: everyone connected

Society/peopleinstitutions: government/global bodies“Internet”Voluntary sectorBusiness/industry/servicesPersonal providersOrganisations/professionsAcademia/FET/research coordinatorsAlternative worlds: global knowledgeMetaloger Web Supervisory Body

Substitutes for engagementMeaning v manipulationEducation/trainingContribution & rewardFalse prophetsCollective social dynamics

Collective social dynamicsSocial unrest/conflictGreed/selfishnessSocial pathologyWorld orders

Economic collapseResource scarcity/destructionDemographic imbalanceglobalisation

Peoples alienationUnworkable systemsInformation overloadUnderstanding difficultiesPower & Politics of protest

ManagementValidation & verificationFutures anticipation & causalitySustainabilityFairness & initiativeCreativity & synergyInnovation risk & reliability

We are the experimentFirst cure ourselvesBelief & passionHumility not hubris

Surveillance/privacyBig BrotherMisuseSocial engineeringAvailability /control

Kondratiev shift 6: complexity science, emergence & ICT facilitate a new social order: Virtual model Society(VmS)

S‐GAIA “securing a better world” – opportunity space

Implementing new technologiesHarnessing scientific researchMoving the social goalpostsPartnering with people to change the worldSharing the fruits of industrial progressGoverning a sustainable world

meta‐jousting – not wars

Figure 7 – S-GAIA Strategic FuturICT Federation to build the Paradigm Change called ‘Computable Society’




34

2 ANNEXES

White Paper: Delivering Kondratiev Shift 6 – “ON COMPUTABLE SOCIETY” SOCIETY– AN R & D PERSPECTIVE

Author: John Sutcliffe‐Braithwaite Research Director, Metaloger Technologies, PublicComputing BV Vers 2. 04/11/11 Page 35

2.1 ExtendedextractfromtheDYM‐CSSubmission

Background

This annex is detailed argument from our earlier submission to the DyM-Cs Call. The origin of this Paper is the Authors experiences coincidentally spanning the interval cogently set out by Brian Castellani in the Map of Complexity Science21; it fits into the area defined as “newly forming areas”; SMART-SOCIETY is the first stage in a strategy to introduce in-vivo modelling of society across all its systems. ‘The Peoples’ Toolkit’ will disturb the current paradigm of expert authority; ‘bottom-up’ perturbation fuels change creativity and innovation. Inclusivity also requires commitment to contributing. We are all the movers and shakers of society when enabled, empowered and engaged. The uniqueness of SMART SOCIETY is that the experiment is the thing itself; none of the disadvantages of abstraction apply (at least not in the sense of the limitations of the experimental environment); if there are any limitations in the experiment they are intrinsic to the actors and it is for them to go back to the drawing-board. The crucial aspect however is that scientists in both schools are the product themselves of the phenomena they are studying when this is specifically ‘society’. SMART SOCIETY uniquely embraces this and makes it a feature of the research and in fact the determining feature of it. The expert has a role but on a par with any other actor; everyone is concerned to better the situation, solve a problem or pursue an opportunity; even an improved experiment is inclusive, efficient, emergent, grounded in reality, and (guess what) there is no one else to blame. The above leads to the starting proposition and a corresponding direction for responding to the DyM-CS Call; this starting point clarifies what a computable model is and further what its target ‘owner and actors use it for’22: SMART SOCIETY is a computable artefact, evidenced by: the pervasiveness of ICT in society; the ubiquity of modelling

- the crowning ability of the human intellect; constantly applied to both ‘operate’ the thing itself and ‘review the experiment and set new goals’. The computing starts in the mind.

Simulation is continuous, embedded, and part of normal societal ‘life’; the only distinction from BAU is when an emergent decision is made to adopt a new model (revealed by the simulation of intense reflexive thought)

Computing the 'experience and story' of life is a complex translation process extending ‘multi media’ to incorporate how we interpret and make sense of experience in the mind (analogous to intelligent robotics)

SMART-SOCIETY introduces Values of abstract thought (synonyms) into societal simulation; these perturb the system, drive its evolution, & need to be modelled as (themselves) a complex adaptive system. With this perspective it is possible to control dynamics bearing on societal well-being or harming it. Metaloger Labs are not one-off experiments, but the process of continuous in vivo societal change. The

canvas starts from an obvious statement that everything is interconnected with everything else23, whether from the viewpoint of social computing or enterprise interoperability. All action concerns how to render the canvas of change tractable; SMART SOCIETY is a processor of ecologies, of which the largest is, after GAIA, the global, top-level ecology called human society. Metaloger Labs will become a ubiquitous middleware component of all existing enterprise and social systems; ‘middleware’ will mean socio-technic middleware. The concept of ‘multi-level’ includes how structures of interconnectedness come about and work in practice, and also everything to do with how multi-level systems of abstract values exert influence and force (sic) to change something. This is the stigmergic dimension (again)! The sign-posts are evaluated complex dynamics observed in real-life scenarios.

Proposition The Concept described above will yield, in the words of the DyM-CS Call Briefing: “a general common theoretical approach…challenging ICT…with a user/social/economic component…a foundation for a new ICT paradigm…applied to a large socio-technological system…and testing the theory on themselves i.e.society”.

SMART SOCIETY will validate and verify the starting hypotheses of The Peoples’ Toolkit: People are the source of the dynamics through their behaviours, driven by human thought (and vestigial biological

drives that perturb this) and multi-level evolving complex systems of abstract values they adopt

21 Complex Systems Science: Expert Consultation Report, December 2009 22 Checkland, SSM – CATWOE model (Customers, Actors, Technology(ies), World view, Owners, Environment) 23 ISTAG EU ICT R&D and Innovation beyond 2013 - 10 key recommendations, 20 July 2011 does not identify the fundamental symbiosis between society and computation called “On Computable Society”



The entire structurated edifice of society its technology, artefacts, information/meaning, processes, aggregate organisation structures, physical resource utilisation, economic and environmental consumption, and ambitions to dominate are multi-level, multi-scale phenomena driven by the above

The new science, Computational Socio-Geonomics, and its toolset Metaloger, constitute an affordance24 for elucidating the above and applying it, by enabling its total interconnectedness to be processed, rendering the dynamics meaningful and useful, i.e. actionable.

The experiment will yield qualitative and quantitative evidence of the value of processing the dynamics of society. The test is whether the evidence is correct, truthful, trust-worthy and well-meaning. SMART SOCIETY will start the proof of the above primarily by demonstrating its usefulness as the affordance to take society into a new level of competence to address presenting problems, to behave more effectively, and to get results from so doing: this is the science and tools argument. They are a radically extended practice of meta-modelling. The main objectives of the SMART SOCIETY project are to carry out a multidisciplinary enquiry into the above, to elicit the necessary symbiosis and holistic solution involving society and its socio-geonomic simulation called Metaloger Labs. Scope of Work The following are the baseline for Action Research25 that SMART SOCIETY will carry out on this: 1. Show that the new science and toolset, together the affordance for processing the dynamics of society, are a step

change in capability, driven by complexity science, enhancing and integrating with disparate current methods in society (Figure 1), using a wide and evolving range of socio-technological formalisms

2. Work with society, at every level (that have to be defined), to build a societal affordance called CSG/M for People to use in solving their problems, enhancing their operational performance, and gaining a handle on their future; all this appropriately to the specific concerns, aims and objectives of the group, organisations, enterprises, and public bodies that take-up the new toolset. Use the toolset to enable learning, to support empowerment, engagement, and enablement of Users. The core action is to engage in deep social modelling and its representation in the computational and societal environment called Metaloger Labs

3. Research, design, specify the build processes and deployment actions needed to apply the toolset to early trials. Engage with such users to refine the societal affordances of Metaloger Labs, i.e. improve its functionality through self-reflexion and evolutionary improvement,testingthe radical different significance of social computing compared with ‘hard computation’ as in transactional systems that have validated out such inconveniences)26: (the following are specifics from the Piedmonte Project) a. the ontological issues : Metaloger Labs will have to address questions related to: a) the uncertainties which

accompany the ICT penetration process in human organizations; b) the need to empower people and human organizations to master their own view in/of the system (society) they belong to ( the system is in the eye of the beholder !! ) and engage actively into it; and c) the need to communicate and share socially relevant system’s views;

b. the functional issues: the role of Metaloger Labs will necessarily be manifold. Metaloger Labs therefore will have to structure itself in a way to account for the different points of views of societal actors (individuals, firms, local governments), the different roles (producers, consumers, institutional..), levels (micro, meso and macro) and knowledge types (scientific, folk and policy knowledge);

c. the context issues: any application of Metaloger Labs in real contexts, resulting from the instantiation and leveraging of the ontological and functional elements, will depend on the overall (social, economic, institutional and cultural) conditions existing – this context mappable to the originating abstract values;

d. the reflexivity issues: over time, the functioning of Metaloger Labs entails learning and will, thus producing feed-back and feed forward relationships, onto the ontological, functional, and context issues.

4. Cooperate with all SMART SOCIETY research streams on the Title Page as well as others, building relationships and working plans with their existing initiatives and use them as quality control bodies, reaching out to affected societal domains

24 A term in the fields of cognition, psychology, AI, HCI concerned with perceived utility. [Webster] social affordance = the properties of an object/environment that enables action, especially socio-technology. Psychologist James Gibson 1977 “Theory of Affordances” emphasised inclusive & potential/objectively measurable/actor-dependent. Donald Norman, 1988, “Design of Everyday Things” adds goals/plans/beliefs/past experience 25 Action Research is investigation and trial of change in vivo premised on the discipline of rigorously defined perturbation of the existing system; this requires meta-capabilities, such as innovation mind-set; boundary control (e.g. VSM) and deployment of resources to test yield (risk v opportunity) 26 Ref OCCELLI



5. specifically their formalism focus, and test plans, sharing and extending use of Metaloger Labs instantiations appropriate to their functional and non-functional requirements27; work with and involve the SMART SOCIETY Community of Practice to extend take-up of The Peoples’ Toolkit in such areas as: a. establish measures of performance and yield from the new affordance for society’s dynamics, to ensure synergy,

leveraging of performance and yield (as in process plant terminology). This has a resonance with every form of articulated standards and quality framework – typical Meta Frames of reference (MetaFoR’s)

b. manage the overall pace of change within the dynamics of societal interest, resources and affordability, perceived escalating need, the will to act

6. Research design, specify and Introduce the socio-technology of the toolset, principally Meta-modelling, and its use in conducting experiments in societal dynamics, including consideration of wider impacts from the start, (this is the specific CSG/M integrated formalisms intention), subject to openness of intention: a. CSG/M: the generic models of societal purposeful behaviour, activity, decision and action; mapping of these to

proprietary and specific models of organisation and enterprise activity; and construct coherent master-reference models that will support and enable evolutionary business ecologies to interact, assess, and thus handle deliberate and accidental emergence. This is the complexity agenda, and the Ubiquitous Complex Event scenario; CSG/M is an open platform subject to proper use

b. Metaloger Labs: the environments for specific domain instantiations, their ownership and operational ‘life’, especially concerning their processing of dynamics (e.g. establishing their relationship with every aspect of simulation, viability, change, and futures-planning)

c. Handling the discovered outputs of CSG/M at the societal infrastructure levels such as: governance and ethics; escalation of take-up and pressures on the programme and society; resourcing for the toolset, and strategic consequences and considerations of the new dispensation (not least the ability of ICT to process pervasive societal enactments – the societal relativism aspect); handling of paradigm change; transitional aspects (including legacy systems issues, reverse-engineering of societal/cognitive/cultural aspects); and finally protecting the interests of the whole of engaged society

d. Technology directions, including early emulation of societal enactments as well as emerging technologies, advanced virtualisation; media-methods; and upcoming sensors, personal robotic natural world ( the WYSIWYG28 aspect), and protection of society’s interests from malicious attack by dis-engaged societies

e. Provide the end-to-end infrastructure for conducting SMART SOCIETY experiments , working with technology providers to provision the operational infrastructure, providing transparent interfaces to existing systems, modes of HCI, information handling, especially considering facility planning and support.

f. CSG/M deployed and used as a self-learning and evolutionary environment, relevant to the advanced concepts of socio-cybernetics, complexity elicitation, inference analysis and their usage to inform organisational and ‘people’ purposeful behaviour (i.e. as a symbiotic activity between computational and societal ‘agents’, taking this out of laboratories and into the Living Labs of Life), built around User societal/organisational models, generalised for interconnected usage, involving deep simulation technologies such that the computational basis is hidden behind the ordinary everyday discourse of society and its organisations, their specific languages and culture. This also includes ability to spot falsification of the presenting picture (the forensic bag), revealed as discrepancies in the dynamics

g. Establishment of the industrial infrastructure for wide use of CSG/M across world societies, enterprises and governments,(including new directions to social computing) embedded in their normal systems and operational affordances. A special case of this is the pathological area, i.e. societies outside normality29

h. ACTION RESEARCH will be the proposed method, like an industrial ‘new product’ launch. The introduction of any innovation and new paradigm both holds out opportunity and (deeply) perturbs the old system; SMART SOCIETY will harness the deep springs of creativity, innovation, and problem solving to engage Society; This dynamic will be embedded in Metaloger Labs, exploiting this to exert a multiplier effect and herald a rapid take-up of the toolset and acceleration of the process of change. BRAID30 the specific model for this, will be introduced (see also [1.3] Progress beyond Current State and [Section 3] Impact).

7. The project will assemble data to tune the simulation both societally and computationally; this is a normal QA action, and for society a reflexive one. Findings will update socio product enhancements, again part of the normal cycle of

27 Non-functional generally means functions requiring user-computer interventions, including HCI. In the SMART SOCIETY world, such requirements are oriented around the societal requirement and are termed affordances. We aim for this distinction to diminish or disappear within a Metaloger Labs enabled computational world (a core ambition for Metaloger). The term ‘non-functional’ is misleading 28 What You Sense Is What You Get [Prof Yannis Charalabdis] 29 Pathology is a generic term used to cover any type of behaviour considered to be ’not fit for purpose’ itself a dynamic term 30 BRAID (Benefits, Risks, Assumptions, Issues, dependencies) are the key meta-model of innovation & change management



continuous improvement. The main improvement process will be incremental emergent discovery and incorporation – a characteristic of General Systems Theory (GST)

8. Over the entire concept and build is continuous validation and verification, which means scientific, societal, technological, in complexity terms, evolutionary and people – i.e. the full gamut of V.STEEP Pathway concerns (metaphor is explained later). This ties-in with the ontological categorisation etc, i.e. the full range of applicable formalisms that establish a scientific and useful basis for CSG/M findings and inferencing (and its human dimension of creative imagining); an interlaced parallel version will tackle malicious subversion – not the same as ‘re-version’.

These objectives are an entirely usual set applicable to a system to support some real-world requirement by an organisation within society; the novelty arises because the system simulates itself. SMART SOCIETY is the computing of societal enactments – billions every second; the toolset for this is simply an extension of the current explosion in social computing for which SMART SOCIETY enables, empowers and engages ‘people’, depicted in Figure 2. The outcomes of CSG/M will be validated and verified against systems criteria that will be set out as each artefact is designed and built, and operated. The core of these is how society transacts its business now and the level and extent of improvement realised from processing the dynamics in real-time. The eventual scope is a similarly constructed, tested and deployed system for every sub-domain of society, the ‘Metaloger instantiations’ bag – owned proprietarily but working within the global framework. This is the interconnected and interoperable regime, (already under way, e.g. the Consortium is collaborating with FInES). The V & V regime distinguishes CSG/M from current social computing, from web ephemera, from cult sites, and generally from marketing, propaganda, spin, and hype. These examples highlight the key additional component of CSG/M: it includes human reflexive thinking in its regime of validation and verification. This therefore raises the same question

as, e.g., the Copenhagen quantum mechanics model did: the role of subjective goals in ascribing objective criteria to any phenomena. The answer is what do you want it to mean?

The regime of Values will be itself an evolutionary complex one, but this simply displaces the problem; it is necessary to be able to say what the output of any formalism means in the context to which it is applied (the ontological bag), how it informs will, decisions, action (the Policy bag) and their control (the Governance bag)

The domain of measures is quantitative and qualitative, where complex value systems, power, and persuasion, together with esoteric meta-forces such as persistence, do become determinants of “measures”.

Deliberate subversion of society is a special case: an inversion of the socio-technic fabric of ‘open’ society . SMART SOCIETY will construct taxonomies to map between systems of values to support and render meaningful and usable inferences and patterns across multiple levels, scales, and real-life instantiations of societal enactments.

Formalisms Annex B is a White Paper setting out the strategic frame of S-DyM-CS and the formalisms that will be researched to implement CSG/M; socio-technology is itself the integrated formalism of SMART SOCIETY dynamics in action. ‘Formalisms’ are the full range of affordances applied to the workings of S-DyM-CS dynamics of values. They range, metaphorically, from the scalpel to the sledge-hammer to (topically) the global blunderbuss of nuclear armaments. For this Paper, they are the more civilised abstractions of complexity science overlaid with the determining factor of ‘the way we do things here’. A preliminary list at the level of academic research includes tentative approaches discussed at the Open Day (see Cordis Call, dymcs-01_en.pdf). We highlight Gott, ‘Individual and Agent Based Modelling as a basis for Theorising Complex Systems’31. The give-away word is ‘theorising’: it misses the crucial factor of in-vivo action-based modelling that categorises CSG/M. It is a useful categorisation however of CSG/M as a “Managed and/or Contested CAS”, Fig. 1&2: What do we mean by contested? Our answer is speculative (since our aim is to prove the new science of society. Gott seems to imply that in such systems there is the likelihood of disturbance of the system that would not be capable of being included in the model because nothing is known about it when the model is constructed. Comments:

The nature of all complex systems is unpredictability regarding what sub-systems will perturb ‘the’ system The consequent invalidating give-away is the corollary that is the model-data is assumed to be sufficient The category of disturbance defined as power bases, coalitions, ideologies are the stuff of this pervasive class of

complex systems. They are features of human actors behaviours – precisely what our Hypothesis states Phase shifts are common to all true complex systems that display emergence The definition of ‘ants’ as Agents or decision-makers is wrong: their behaviour is purely sense and cell response to

chemical markers; not as aware entities able to make any selection (Agents whose reponses are programmed-rules are not complexity-actors, but only semi-complex automatons

All managed CAS involve intelligence, it is not extreme events that prompt restructuring: it is too late then.

31 J Gary Pothill (Lancaster), Nicholas M Gotts & Andrew Jarvis (Hutton)



figure 1 distinguishes the subclass of complex adaptive systems, . that …make decisions, … influenced by … other agents and/or the environment, and … which can affect the agent’s survival, or some other measure of success, such as inclusive fitness, wealth, or happiness.

in figure 2, … multiple agents with differing goals, which can come into conflict … Strategic considerations … considerations of institutional design and the articulation of arguments and belief-structures.

Gott comments on belief structures: “these are extremely difficult to formalize, and may currently be beyond the scope of complex systems theories”. S-DyM-CS aims to deliver the answer to this pessimistic assessment. But, in general, Gott is a comprehensive account of the present state of ABM in the Managed/Contested CAS context, and it is encouraging that the socio-technology of CSG/M centres on ABM, to us People and Values. The core innovation that S-DyM-CS will research and introduce as the basis of CSG/M is value-systems as themselves a CAS, together with every post-hoc instantiation that ensues from their perturbations of ‘society’. Annex A discusses the wider range of formalisms that inevitably come into play in the CAS called society: it is the most complex, diverse, and incredible artefact in existence; it needs a correspondingly eclectic approach. As the author of this proposal stated in the response to EU DyM-CS Call briefing:

“To tackle this Call hypotheses and terms “Dynamics, Multi-level, Artificial, Natural, Differentiation, Organization”, need defining for the domain of “social simulation and policy impact assessment”: Differentiation and Organization : the domain is as diverse as there are social organisations, divergent interests,

local conditions, varying structure, methodologies, global overriding priorities, and the systems are subject to a high level of change; simulating this underpins how people take decisions and act i.e. ‘policy impact assessment’

Widening the Frame of Reference is the priority CSS contribution; dynamics and multi-level are specific to thinking people and involve systems of values that perturb the entire domain working; they have a specific and related aetiology that needs exploring comprehensively

Paradoxically social systems are both Artificial and Natural; they are designed continuously by people.

The selected subset of examples given (Internet, energy management, climate, financial markets, infrastructures (including ICT), biology, transport, epidemics, meteorology, urban planning) are part of a holistic complex adaptive system (CAS) called society; a general theory of its functioning has to accommodate such component sub-systems”.

This is the area called Meta-modelling. Only by starting from the primitives can the basis of societal evolving dynamics be understood, related to societal structuration, and action on these take place reliably: we all simulate. Alas, some dissimulate. If we fail to start from the primitive components of society’s dynamics, we will be like chemistry before the understanding of the periodic table and molecular interactions, or biology before molecular biology, or physics without both Newtonian gravity or quantum mechanics.

The problem we face is that the body of academic opinion has little or no experience of complex organisations and society at the sharp end where the above issues must be resolved to prevent stalemate or organisation anarchy; the doors shut on the laboratory and an abstracted experiment can be carried out. In contrast managers in organisations are not conducting abstracted experiments (usually) but reviewing and rearranging how the organisation deals with unexpected complexity. Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model (VSM) is one famous example of how this is incorporated into the ‘method’ thatb deals with complexity. Complex Society continually deals with complexity, by designing stratyegies; we are going further and incorporating the unique human competence into a system from the start.

This is what we will model. It will form a total overlay on activity and all experimentation (reverse engineering will be required to get back from lab experiments to possible aetiology in the systems of values that were their cause).



Validation and Verification Framework It is essential to have a v&v framework that manages the project by subjecting it to scrutiny and methods able to monitor its real-life impact; following are well established methods: V.STEEP Pathway

MODEL ASSESSMENT

Values The SMART SOCIETY values of engagement, empowerment, and enablement are exemplified by the toolkit concept. The product is about culture as much as engineering. We will live our vision. Delivery requires an attitude of innovation and pragmatism

Sociological/people We have a core team of experienced people who understand and have the competencies to realise the toolkit vision. Partnerships will be forged in specialist areas. We have to define and work our own model of empowerment in order to convincingly market the concept

Technology The Consortium has a track record of innovation in SOCIETY and technology and this will need to be maintained and enhanced to successfully innovate at the level demanded by the toolkit, from basic science, through advanced knowledge codification, to innovative engagement environments

Economic Trajectory considerations will influence how fast a paradigm change can be introduced into the world of socio-technocratic automation. Involvement across a number of industry sectors will be needed. Market share is that of new innovator and toolkit releases will keep ‘SMART SOCIETY INC’ in that position as followers enter the space. Releases are defined so as to gain the necessary following and revenues to give confidence to move to the paradigm change that is believed to be the killer application (new social computing)

Environment One of the hidden strengths of the toolkit is that it focuses on getting the ‘people’ aspects of SOCIETY directly into the equation of world progress sustainability, fairness, and pprosperity. This is a key requirement for success in tackling global structural change. The strength of the toolkit will be the excitement felt by customers at a genuine new product that challenges the status quo and the simplistic delivery models that are current. Protection of SMART SOCIETY know-how against unapproved appropriability will be needed.

People (issues Political/regulatory/ legal)

There are no constraints or enablers foreseen provided the programme tackles the huge ethical aspects openly and effectively. Long term applications will each be further evaluated. CSG/M will tackle the obverse of SMART SOCIETY & its issues are the same as currently

Pathway The SMART SOCIETY Toolkit project will ride on the back of existing EU programmes but is also about developing the next generation of product. This has opportunities that far exceed the early Metaloger perception, driven by the combination of global need and solutions. Therefore we have to combine feet-on-the-ground delivery with vision and the high ground of potential paradigm change. This is the Flagship canvas, called S-GAIA that will follow successful early trials of Metaloger Labs. It is a potentially huge commercial and scientific opportunity for EU

BRAID

This methodology is an updated version of risk analysis that is essentially negative in its application; BRAID is an example of a critical meta-classification in The Peoples’

BRAID32 strategy weaves the exceptions management into the programme tapestry; these are ‘complexity’ dynamics

Benefits: should happen – monitor mostly meso level dynamics Risks: might happen – evaluate meso or macro (the latter are strategic level?) Assumptions must happen – check micro = ‘us’; meso = ‘them’; (macro = futurist star-gazing?) Issues have happened - act now micro/meso usually determines scale of treatment Dependencies will happen – monitor Weave them into ‘do’ systems for Action and Change management

32 This wonderfully evocative term came from Rosie Harrison, QA Manager at National Savings Bank



Applied development – productisation

The initial scientific phase will have demonstrated the workings of a socio-technocratic ‘emergence’ toolset, through building a platform that is robust enough to generate emergence within a simulated application. Scaling up to actually support a real-life application is not inherently more difficult, but does require major commitment of resource, not least to develop the tool-box approach and necessary support infrastructure to give confidence in the product’s robustness, reliability, usability and on-going support, enhancement and benefit. SMART SOCIETY project Team has major experience of the transfer of solutions from the research, design and development environment to roll-out in both society and industry; its starting assertion is that these are synonymous with the FI Programme (starting with FInES Science). The industrial canvas is larger and more richly painted. It would be wrong to set these narrowly in the DyM-CS context; that has delineated the underlying science of SMART SOCIETY and this is the clean canvas. The usual approach to this is a combination of technology push and market pull (the Schumpeter-Smookler effect; we emphasise also ‘people power’ (Thesis, ibid), the key invention of CSG/M. People like products that combine new science with involvement – our mantra. They like those that bring the domain of the specialist into their work, home, social life. Squaring this circle is an aim of SMART SOCIETY. We can list some of the domains in outline: Macro level - societal enabling infrastructures:

i. the Future Internet, Internet of Values, Societal Layer ii. Personal and group Meta-modelling, structuration and values systems, the theory of societal perturbation iii. S-GAIA involvement in World Modelling, global ‘make a difference’, realignment iv. Emergent Management science and involvement in decisions v. Communications and social-computing of purpose, including media and Public service broadcasting vi. Wikipedia of CSG/M, education, Life management vii. Open-Society’, Big ‘ society, Local community society viii. Simulation everything, global involvement, international cooperations ix. Programme management, strategic change, International government and cooperation x. All Socio-technology is at this level because it is systemic across all societies

Meso level – targeted infrastructures i. Strategic planning, Policy, Impact assessment and forecasting ii. Global targeted change programmes, education, food, health, sustainability iii. Industry sectors, utilities, EU Research iv. Local government, administration, voluntary sector, v. Social computing with attitude vi. Forensics vii. Support services for societal programmes viii. Quality assurance, standards and values prorammes ix. Targeted societal engineering

Micro level individual cooperations i. The service and market support for any business, enterprise, organisation ii. Making a difference initiatives, alternative society iii. starting your own thing, being me, helping you, caring, wanting to change something iv. Protest and argument.

The above categorisations do not represent specific initiatives. They suggest that societal dynamics pervade everything that we do as the human race; the major opportunity for the EU is to set up the enabling framework of action for societal dynamics. The parallel with FI is obvious: this time round it is not a brilliant piece of serendipity but an opportunity created by EU foresight, bringing together strands that have the potential for paradigm change globally. There are significant application domains that will be vital and capture interest. SMART SOCIETY Dynamics (S-DyM-CS), the first project in living societal complexity, is already positioned to apply the Toolkit to other EU Projects specifically discussed in this proposal and others are mooted (the first is likely to be FOCAS, then COSI-ICT). We have no doubt the earlier rejection of SMART SOCIETY as a FI-PPP UseCase was short-sighted. We do not know what expansion of opportunity will come from international cooperation but expect it to be significant. We are in the game of making things happen; this indicates EU taking a proactive approach, to sustain its lead in applying complexity science to society. Road Map and Outcome A tentative road-map starts the thinking to turn the above ideas into results: 1. S/DyM-CS: Societal engagement, proof-of concept, Specification and Prototyping phase: 3-4 yrs



2. S/FOCAS: First-follower trials & roll-out the CSG/M infrastructure of societal complexity: 4-8 yrs a) Component interest groups include: FInES Science base; Paradiso; FuturICT b) Industrial interest is currently being solicited c) EnoLL is an obvious group to be consulted d) International reach is an obvious priority for action given the societal dimension e) The 2020 canvas needs to take note of the societal potential from this work.

3. S/Science of Global Systems EU led, Industrial grade, global deployment, tuning global society: 10-15 yrs 4. A flagship-scale effort could do all phases simultaneously, delivering paradigm change: ≤ 12-20 yrs 5. Kondratiev shift can be targeted to radically influence our vision for a new world FUTURE: ≤ 25-40 YRS The only way to make this happen is to start it; doing it all together would reduce the time to perhaps 30 years. We think we got the basic idea right in the paper to the road-map (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite ONCE-CS 2005 ):

“Metaloger Labs targets vital... industrial and societal advantages for Europe. 'Behaviour', especially decision making, the mainspring of both creative and pathological action, will be brought into an empirical and observable framework which will both support it and hold it up to scrutiny. Moreover the dynamics of such behaviour will be held up to scrutiny in real time. .... [Metaloger is] a ubiquitous toolset to support working with the manifestations of complexity in modern life, rooted in everyone’s everyday life, but applying complexity science to compile the information, measures, decisions, actions, management and potential outcomes on which optimisation of our fragile ecology depends. There is then the ability to optimise the yield of our human systems, both in the operational scale, and progressively up to the strategic and global level. More importantly we have the possibility to prevent or mitigate down-side problems and catastrophes. Key areas in which the Metaloger will deliver fundamental change are quality; the amelioration of pathological management; handling of complexity; proactive management of the dynamics of change; incorporation of the sociological dimension .... The benefits accruing from developing the Metaloger are: firstly, in the support of a new science of management, and, secondly, it will be the knowledge repository which provides the only means to control and harness technology so as to achieve Taguchi’s vision of quality as ‘inversely proportionate to the sum total of loss to mankind’. The Metaloger will make it routine to surround data and decisions with recorded and verifiable audit-trail of their aetiology so that pathological misuse of data and wilful mal-practice becomes more visible. Where real-time handling of such data and decisions is enabled it will be much more difficult to engage in mal-practice, to hide it, and escape from its consequences. The Metaloger also makes such processes available for future decision making and learning.”

What we missed then was the micro basis of individual human pertubation of society derived from human abstract thought, and that this is the foundation of Metaloger Labs Technologies – a new European Industry. We can expect to meet most of the milestones set in the ONCE-CS Briefing submitted by ‘Metaloger’[Road-map 2005] albeit with an extended timescale as the scale of the endeavour became apparent. The correctness of the evolutionary emergent approach is vindicated by the above characteristic of complex human behaviour:

Human abstract thought & its structuration in the entirety of society codifiable in CSG Mathematical definitions defined for structures of meta-models A meta-model process-engine built Fundamental patterns of information, process, dynamics identified and codified, relating to specific and generic aspects of

human behaviour Sociological research demonstrates the validity of meta-model structures to codify complex behaviours Specific industrial/organisational problems solved using a Metaloger engine (ICT meta-modelling system) Metaloger [Labs] evolve towards a generic behavioural tool-set (i.e. a learning and adaptive environment) Reverse-engineering of existing systems of governance begins to take shape, yielding measurable concepts Society perceives Metaloger [Labs] as useful and NOT Big Brother ... Metaloger [Labs] environments as as ubiquitous as the Internet.

SMART SOCIETY takes as a key challenge that enabling, empowering and engaging society will prove the value and ensure the take-up of the toolset. Dissemination will be by field work.



WhitePaper:

2.2 AnR&DPerspectiveforComputationalSocio‐Geonomics/Metaloger(CSG/M)

Contents

1. Introduction page3 2. EXECUTIVESUMMARY page43. ABSTRACT page64. DyM‐CSTHEORETICALDISCUSSION page7 5. THEDOMAINOF(COMPUTATIONAL)SOCIETYISUNIQUE:S/DyM‐CS page86. COMPUTATIONALSOCIO‐GEONOMICS/METALOGER(CSG/M):SIMULATINGLIFEp107. TECHNOLOGIESFORS/DyM‐CS page11

a. Socio‐technology p13b. GeneralSystemsTheory(GST) p15c. MathematicalFormalisms p16d. Socio‐cybernetics p17e. Methods,processes,rules p18f. Multi‐level/multi‐scalebag p19g. Game‐theoreticapproaches p20h. AgentBasedModelling(ABM) p20i. StatisticalPatterns p21j. Topologies/ontologies/classifications p21k. NetworkTheory p23l. EcologyofTechnology&Society p23m. (Otherdomaincross‐overs) p23n. Meta‐modelling,Tools,Problemsolvingp25

8. APROGRAMMEFOREUGLOBALOPPORTUNITY page319. OUTCOME page3210. TIMELINE page3211. CONCLUSION page3212. APPENDIXA:EUISTAGKeyRecommendations page3413. APPENDIXB:Primeron“OnComputableSociety”(seeover) page40

Author:JohnSutcliffe‐Braithwaite,MA(Cantab),MBCS,C.Eng,MBA(TechnologyManagement)OU

ResearchDirector,MetalogerTechnologies,PublicComputingBV

Email:[email protected]

Telephone+44(0)7973315177

Circulation: unrestricted



AppendixBContents:Diagrams/NotesinPrimeron“OnComputableSociety”

SectionI–Complexity&Society: page41

1.ComplexityTheoryInformation/Process/Structure/Perturbation/Morphogenesis

2.Scenarios:ProblemstoPolicy

3.ComplexityChaosEmergenceandMetalogerLabs

4.DyM‐CS–integratingcomplexityscience&Society:WheretoStart?

5.Computationalsocio‐geonomicsandGAIA

SectionII–S/DyM‐CSandSMARTSOCIETY page48

6.FuturICTandSMARTSOCIETYResearchscope

7.MetalogerResearchChallenges

8.FInESResearchcooperation

SectionIII–NewScientificParadigm page59

9.ScienceofComputationalSocio‐geonomics

10.GeneralTheory&practice:S/DyM‐CS&Society

11.DynamicNetworkModelofSociety

12.World‐Society‐Modeller(S‐GAIA)

SectionIV–ComplexWorldSociety page68

13.MetalogerParadigmShift“PeoplePower”

14.Meta‐Web:TheMacroCanvasofSMARTSOCIETY

15.theComplexSocialmeta‐world

16.Emergence&Change:TriggersandStrangeAttracters

17.ComplexSystemsScience:Governance&ManagementScience

18.ComplexSystemsScience:TheMesoView

SectionV–PeopleandOrganisationalbehaviours page81

19.TheSocialGroupparadigm

20.WorldEcology:QualityofLifeHealth/sickness&Well‐being

SectionVI–Meta‐Modelling page86

21.Socionome‐MetalogerResearchSpace

22.GeneralSystemsTheory(GST)Model

23.Socionome‐phenotypeprocessing:MetalogerLabs

24.BusinessComplexEventprocessing(CEP)

25.BusinessEcologies



SectionVII–Technologies page97

26.MetalogerPlatformSchematic

27.MetalogerSystemsArchitecture

28.U‐CEP&CloudEventprocessing

29.MetalogerLabs&FISystemsoverlay

30.EmergentComputationalSocio‐geonomicEcology

31.TheGAIAGenieinthebottle



1. EXECUTIVESUMMARY

Background

This White Paper sets the context for Research and Design (R&D) into CSG/M - the new science of Computational Socio-geonomics and METALOGER, the affordance for its practical deployment in Society. It is brought into focus by Call 9.7 The Dynamics of Multi-level Complex Systems, which targets research into mathematical (and other) formalisms that might point towards a General Theory of Complex Systems. This Paper argues that ‘complex systems’ is a portmanteau term covering a type of behaviour observed in many fields and this cannot be usefully studied in isolation from the presenting target domain. Societal behaviour and especially emotions are particularly like this. Dynamics are the consequence of disturbances caused by a domain’s normal activity plus any caused by the experiment which itself disturbs normality. For society, paradoxically, this is normality and not a limitation: its dynamics are essential to it fulfilling its raison d’etre: to structure transactions between people to further their purposes (and the reverse of this). In other domains also the dynamics may have an underlying societal aetiology: this study is into how Society’s dynamics perturb itself and our world and can be understood and harnessed; Society is widely accepted to be critical to all other domains since society drives explication and intervention in them all. As example of the limiting case for all domains, complexity can be defined as the resolution of the uncertainty principle33. Complexity science is ubiquitous to our World and the Human condition the largest example of it in operation. S/DyM-CS - The Dynamics of Society: a DyM-CS proposal

S/DyM-CS response to the 9.7 Call proposes a collaborative research effort into human behaviour that is the origin of the dynamics of society, and its manifestation in all societal systems. S/DyM-CS will research and apply formalisms pertinent to living societal complexity, embedded in an in vivo computational experiment called CSG/M which will eventually be deployed across every domain of society. It is an anthropomorphic simulation that will also be a tool for other specific complexity experiments; all complexity is discussed using anthropomorphic language; arguably all complexity is a human perspective on what the world means. Rationale

It is hardly necessary to argue that science needs to be turned into practical means to effect change or that equipping society with an affordance to harness its self-reflexive dynamics has implications as far-reaching as e=mc2 and as critical. Failure to galvanise society can arguably repeat many times over the same level of awful potential result: rogue dynamics spilling over into destructive and non-reversible outcomes instead of progress: e.g. (topically) a basis for ‘renewable energy’ became the race to construct a bomb; it sub-optimised locally when the global risk was terminal. Complex dynamics pervades modern society, its organisations and enterprises: harnessing these to bring about change requires engagement, empowerment and enablement at every level. CSG/M is a tool for this: our ability to use our thinking-caps to understand and model these dynamics, to think ourselves out of trouble, and change the future. S/DyM-CS is the journey. CSG/M is not interested in dynamics as some elegant phenomenon but as the signal of the need to act, how to decide what form this should take, and the process of harnessing the means to undertake it and succeed. CSG/M aims to be the affordance to underpin all practical manifestations of human ingenuity to master our world but within a new dispensation of concern for it; it is the practical science of all societal constructs. That includes not just social behaviour but its manifestations in harnessing the resources of the world, including new ones discovered or engineered, to build a better world. FOCAS will apply the newly elucidated dynamics. Complexity science: the science of society

There is a good argument for identifying complexity science as specifically the science of society. Its interacting component systems are rich, diverse, constantly inter-acting, exhibiting inefficient trial-and-error but also rapid evolution into ‘this year’s improved model’. What the term ‘improved’ means is the crux. Society replaces biological evolution termed ‘survival of the fittest’ by the human concept of ‘fitness for purpose’. It is a human design process, exhibited in all the systems of the world, operated by people. The science is how this happens across society, generating billions of dynamics as the process unfolds. These reveal the options exercised and their efficacy; CSG/M maps social enactments as they happen to generate pictures of possible outcome in the future. the mapping is multi-level but predicated on one of the seminal findings of complexity studies so far: it is the paradox observed that the small effect acts as the strange attractor that tips the larger system. Seen in society as the power of ‘bottom-up’ versus ‘top-down’ syndrome, the antidote to authoritarian control, the reality is all levels of dynamics matter to optimising the complex adaptive system.

33 Heisenburg: it is not possible to know both position and momentum of a particle, only a statistical approximation. Any intervention changes these.



Its science maps onto all the applied sciences of human behaviour, decision-making and action: at the macro level, management science, governance, policy, and all direction of the affairs of society; at the meso-level all the designed constructs of society that act as proxy or supra-human agents; but also the dependence of these on the micro-scale of individual choice and action. The formalisms of this are the entirety of the theoretical and practical means to model and manipulate the above to validate and verify its optimisation – the novel ingredient is to locate this in systems of abstract values that constantly perturb this world and lead to morphogenesis. Society is a purposeful complex system, the single feature unique to mankind. CSG/M harnesses the power of individual and collective cooperating (wo)mankind to choose to direct and optimise the dynamics of human behaviour towards the betterment of our global World. With a supreme irony the Manhattan project has become a symbol for successful group cooperation and delivery: its outcome precisely sub-optimal though locally and terribly ‘effective’. Applied socio-technology

CSG/M is a toolset embedded in society used by society in a continual experiment on the model, by everyone, everywhere, everyday. CSG/M joins a distinguished cast of players with the same concern, from the aeons of civilised societal enquiry to current societal efforts in EU and Globally. As a tool it has an applied research basis appropriate to a societal focus, combining the best of theoretical research and practical application. It should be a coordinated and serendipitous undertaking recognising that each small discovery can amplify the result and moreover build consent on the way forward. The toolset has to be designed and built, initially as a prototype to test societal dynamics, but forming proof-of-concept for a working deployable artefact. This will launch a new industrial opportunity for the EU. The real context is not S/DyM-CS nor the tool-set for experimenting on these: it is applying this as a societal lever for accelerating change before it is too late. The technology of the tool-set is new socio-technology, not the old HCI but a reversal where the computational model is an extension of the human intellect. All the many areas of formalism mooted so far in the DyM-CS enquiry will be subordinated to mimicking the human intentional intellect and the entire structure of applied social behaviour it spawns. On varying scales this affects the family up to the family of nations. Our World cannot be sub-optimised any longer by manipulating presenting dynamics, but only by understanding and predicting causes buried deep in the psyche of society and its members – which then continually perturb the complex systems of purposeful society. CSG/M is a complex modelling environment, what we do all the time. Outcome

The significance of the dynamics of society will become understood as its actionable basis. S/DyM-CS will research the core formalisms of society’s dynamics and build these into the experimental environment CSG/M. Simultaneously with the Call 9.7 research a wide programme of deployment will be set out to validate its scalability to the entirety of the societal domain (FOCAS ). The research model for this will be progressively larger-scale living experiments, conducted with parallel societal initiatives: as examples, Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES), Paradiso, FuturICT, the European Networks of Living Labs (EnoLL) and many others within the overall EU 2020 vision. The eventual delivery will be a global-scale deployment of the new-science of Computational Socio-geonomics and its Toolset, Metaloger. This will require an infrastructure and level of global take-up that the EU will lead. It will become thinking mankind’s new social-computing. Its final form will never be certain, except that human values will be shown to be the crux of societal complexity. S/DyM-CS seeks to harness this to build a new world order, predicted to bring about the next Kondratiev shift called “On Computable Society”, a worthy successor to the current Information Age34, but putting people back in the driving seat. It will revolutionise involvement and accountability for our choices and actions. Programme

The R&D work for CSG/M will be a large, multi-dimensioned , global programme on a Flagship scale. The initial step is to build involvement by the DyM-CS community and engage with future initiatives that will influence the research from its inception. We see the CA as the vehicle for this, with a global reach from the start. The two further Calls will progress CSG/M from pilot proof of concept to global roll-out and Kondratiev Shift.

34 Deliberately mimicking the near eponymous “On Computable Numbers”, Turing, 1936



2. ABSTRACT

The DyM-CS Call targets a general theory of the dynamics of any complex adaptive system to be formulated in the abstractions of mathematics (and other formalisms) and tested on real-world data. This Paper will test this by grounding it in the real world of human social behaviour (also considering other domains of complexity connected with society). It will design an in vivo experiment in ‘computable society’ to test and validate the formalisms’ efficacy to deal with experienced societal complexity; the methods for this are a new scientific and computational paradigm embedded in living society (terms significant to societal-computation in italics).

This Paper identifies the general theory of and the formalisms necessary to process the DyM-CS of the Complex Adaptive system called Society (S/DyM-CS). It starts from a common position identified by the body of researchers investigating a general theory of complex systems (and by implication standard mathematical approaches), namely the present state of the science points to a tool-kit of methods rather than any useful over-arching general theory; hopefully this will result in general tools adaptable to different domains or problems in complexity. This requires identifying how features of a particular complex system condition the general view, and how this mix expresses itself in actual real-world changes. These will then point to the kind of experimentation that can verify specific domain complexity, and possible further layers of linkage to other domains. Commonality of techniques discussed points towards an interdisciplinary collaborative approach.

The dynamics of any complex system concern: what has the power to perturb the status-quo; how and when does this reach a threshold so some kind of morphogenesis occurs and how does the system adjust to this. What this means has to be understood, so there needs to be some system for communicating and translating the different terminologies and expressions of this for different domains, e.g. society its constructs and workings involve the biological and affective worlds. Computational Socio-geonomics is the designed science of this and METALOGER35 is the experimental environment, together called CSG/M. This paper elaborates their critical feature, namely it is entirely an in-vivo experiment. It will be shown to encompass all society’s enterprises and organisations as well as laboratory research, and in part the natural and biological worlds. The agency for this is people and systems of abstract values underpinning the constructs and processes of society. All these constitute the formalisms of S/DyM-CS, as well as the mathematical and computational tools behind CSG/M. It is a Living Lab processing the dynamics of reflexive thought36 and everything that ensues from this.

This special feature conditions the research method for S/DyM-CS; CSG/M will be the affordance for this as an applied ‘living’ science. It embraces a spectrum from top-down high science to bottom-up living aspirations of everyone, everyday, everything, everywhere; it is about how we organise to deliver a result from S/DyM-CS. The Paper identifies how this is potentially a vast new industrial and societal opportunity that the EU can spearhead, applying complexity science to solving global problems that have a S/DyM-CS aetiology. We will show living S/DyM-CS is never neutral but designed and deliberate and society needs to embrace it to deal with global dynamics running out of control37. The alternative is letting them run riot (sic). For this we need an over-arching framework within society that CSG/M will provide. The emerging new science is matched by corresponding expansion of technology, by many EU societal initiatives, by burgeoning social computing (in which emotions are a particular case). The outcome is evolving SMART SOCIETY including experts. The initial experiment is to design and test the affordance for SMART SOCIETY as perhaps the most significant domain of DyM-CS; we need to discuss a collaborative research and deployment model for CSG/M that supports the emergence of societal competence in the wider domains of the entirety of DyM-CS, itself an emergent social exercise in the Living Lab we term ‘life’; it requires a new modality identified in the Expert Consultation Paper. It is built from the bottom-up as well as the top-down (terms with special meaning). It involves paradigm change in how we pool our individual capabilities and competences to generate continuous new outcomes for (wo)mankind. The formalism of S/DyM-CS is fundamental: CSG/M can deliver the next Kondratiev shift in human affairs called On Computable Society. We will discuss what this means and how to implement it. Human thought is the stigmergy of human society and all we need to do, also significantly affected by vestigial biological drives. This is not people as electronic avatars but people harnessing ICT to enhance their humanity.

4.DyM‐CSTHEORETICALDISCUSSION

35 JSB Thesis 2001‘Metaloger’ is a neologism from meta‐ & catalogue because a catalogue orders and makes available sets of resources, in this case

models‐in‐use. Also the term logger that senses, processes and makes available dynamic data for indefinite re‐use 36 Robert Rosen

37 Anthony Giddens, Reith lectures 1998



The DyM-CS Call, defined as the search for ‘A General Theory of Complex Systems expressed in terms of mathematical (or other) formalisms and how these can be made computable’38 is assumed to mean a foundation to derive actionable outcomes in domains. The essence of ‘complex systems’ is the dynamics of both interconnectedness and independence in some way that is not deterministically or algorithmically programmable; it is extremely potent: its resolution lies in what is termed metaphorically ‘multi-level’ (something), i.e. seems to point to new science, practice, understanding, and headaches: we do not know yet.

There is a common theme in the proposals discussed that it is seriously challenging because despite the last decade of attention (and a history going back more than a century at least) the search for the above meets the blockage of incredible diversity that renders the search chaotic, particularly in its stated objective of being useful. In short there is no general theory yet that properly covers this diversity; at best any domain’s complexity is tackled using some selection of possible components from the complexity bag – i.e. ‘Horses for Courses’. Even then, because diversity generates further dynamics, special constructs are needed. The general risk of applying a ‘one size fits all’ theory is it fails the test of Requisite Variety, whereby multiple partial solutions can offer dynamic control (sacrificing efficiency now for resilience later). The greatest risk arises from formulating the scientific experiment according to some convenient means at hand rather than the dimensions of the problem and possible experimental difficulty. We propose the test of usefulness is at the top of the experimental validation criteria, for example any mathematics has to translate into comprehensible practical applications supporting the dynamics of requisite variety. This counters what may be the search for some wholly abstract but necessary component of existence beyond the realm of science (at present).

In summary, at present any General Theory of Complex Systems is meaningless without specifying the domain, its properties, the parts making up the whole, how these behave, (focus on interactions which has a specific meaning for complexity), the overall system unique schema (enabling meaningful desirable outcomes to be identified or even actually brought about)39 and 40. Some workable taxonomy may emerge that improves the utility of particular approaches (the pragmatic ‘tools’ approach). This Paper does suggest some specific foci in the search for useful formalism(s): for example, it identifies the core of the ‘multi-level’ dimension as residing in how society tackles what can be termed asynchronous/competing designs – the antidote to the recognised impossibility of a single huge deterministic system of systems (even the word asynchronous is metaphorical). Translating to real people, we all pursue individual agendas even though sometimes with cooperation (or otherwise): these have to be reconciled. Considering the generic aspects of perturbation and morphogenesis leads to questions of power(sic), work, resources and multiple processes – all terms with different connotations in different domains. We will argue from a General System Theory (GST) model to show this is always in some way ‘directed’ – what ref 5 below calls ‘super-ordinate driving force(s)’. In the societal domain we would use terms like ‘closed to efficient causes’ (CLEF systems) –an example of new mathematics needed41. But all terms have flavours specific to a domain. The overarching theoretical construct appears to be that of topology, which we can colloquially call multiple frames of reference – and these need to be classified (ref 6 below). On a first approximation they govern operation of meta-levels of dynamic forces at work. But the crucial practicalities reside in what any domain means by all these terms – so that any experimental results can be shown to be validating and verifying the discovered world from a common frame of reference (or how different ones might be reconciled, which we call meta-modelling). Messy human reality is constant incremental variation for all sorts of reasons and society seeks to adjust to this, neither endorsing nor rejecting it out of hand, but recognising constant dynamic change, where the top-level can be seen as its governance (though we must not equate ‘top’ with hierarchical levels – a topological ambiguity). Diversity is key to controlling complexity: more levels of interaction need more levels of control to bring about purposeful morphogenesis. Metaloger holds up to scrutiny the complex processes behind society’s outcomes42; i.e. ‘dynamics’ meaning: in flux; subject to change; resulting in new form(s) (additive/exclusive etc ). Society does this continuously, other domains such as the biological very slowly. Change and ‘why?’ are S/DyM-CS.

5. THEDOMAINOF(COMPUTATIONAL)SOCIETYISUNIQUE:S/DyM‐CS

Society computes the best way ahead wrestling with its complex dynamics. For DyM-CS “social simulation and policy impact assessment43”, hypotheses and terms need defining for the domain of Society:

38 Turing “On Computable Numbers”

39 Atay et al, Max Planck

40 Nick Gott, Hutton Institute et al

41 Louie & Poli

42 JSBTorino & Paris Complexity Workshops 2002‐2004

43 DyM‐CS Call Briefing



Differentiation & Organisation: the domain is as diverse as there are social organisations, divergent interests, local conditions varying structure, methodologies, global overriding priorities, and high rates of change; simulating this, aka modelling, underpins how people take decisions and act, i.e. policy impact assessment. Complex Systems Science widens the Frame of Reference, aka Meta-modelling

Dynamics, Multi-level, Artificial and Natural: are specific to thinking people; that is they do not occur naturally (leaving aside the vestigial biological component of social behaviour): they are continuously designed by people, specifically to meet defined ends according to their values, and it is these (we argue) perturb the complex system. Values are the Meta Frames of Reference(MetaFoRs) bringing about change.

Selected examples given (internet, energy management, climate, financial markets, infrastructures, biology, transport, epidemics, meteorology, urban planning (ref 9), are mostly defined ends (exceptions are those complex systems which are domains of the natural and biological worlds – and we will discuss carry-overs in these). The universality of systems of values underpin the holistic complex adaptive system called society; a general theory of its functioning (the micro/meso/macro designed structures44) enables accommodation (rather than integration) of all component subsystems into a useful general theory

“in order to describe and control these systems, there is a need to observe and reconstruct their dynamics, and make sense of large amounts of heterogeneous data gathered on various scales”: living society is the source of all relevant data, its dynamics, and how we make sense of it: reconstruction is not required (although historical, cultural, philosophical data is a vast source also); the technology for this is socio-technology. We note that language used, words like ‘observe and describe’, and certainly ‘control’, are not value-free terms but illustrate the difference between natural and social sciences.

SMART SOCIETY = People and Dynamic Social Simulation: it forms a unique FOCAS laboratory45 to review and redesign systems to address complex ecological change. The importance of this study is how to turn it into working methods for society and enterprises, interfacing to laboratory experiments also, and bringing about ultimate change such as replacing war with meta-jousting (to take an extreme example). Ubiquitous interconnectedness/interoperability of FInES is only achievable with a complex science underpinning46 .

CSG/M: the new affordance, postulates a new paradigm of societal computing has the potential to evolve a way of dealing with societally-grounded problems of unsustainability, unfaireness, and selfish systems. Taking its cue from the eponymous genomics, it postulates there are repeated common underlying codes driving societal evolution; the mantra of these is universal interconnectedness and interoperability, both entangled. To solving the logistics of things and services47 is added that of human will and wilfulness

Meta-modelling – the formalism of thinking: can be seen as the stigmergy of thinking mankind; MetaFoRs as thinking pheromones, and Metaloger tapestries as patterns of stigmergic outcomes (the mud-balls of thinking edifices). Language is the human equivalent of swarming48, but shouting crowds are a throw-back, not always innocent

Socio-technic Scale(s) problem: the raw-material for the new paradigm consists of billions of societal enactments per second49; fed by the burgeoning ICT/Sensing/public-computing world, and social computing whereby people express their preferences. The new world is not that of ‘data’ (though in the legacy world this still matters) but of information made meaningful and significant by the continuous evolution of in vivo expressions of desire, determination and dissent by people everywhere: what matters is the dynamics of social intent and the constant perturbation of this by every single social enactment.

Patterns of ‘life’: the ability to detect these S/DyM-CS patterns is the new policy modelling and social impact assessment. Participation is the counter to known issues of privacy, misuse, mistrust, & misfeasance; complex values cannot be falsified (this underpins new forensic applications).

Computational SMART SOCIETY is about purposeful people, engaged, empowered and enabled together.

The Challenge of complex social dynamics

Societal multi-level dynamics are one of the most challenging domains of complexity. To identify the formalisms behind this domain it is necessary to define how S/DyM-CS works and also how society itself deals with its dynamics. Although we know a lot about society through existing life sciences, the humanities and culture, the chief understanding comes from observing and participating in systems of human behaviour itself; i.e. trial and error; the sum of all this experience of the

44 Giddens theory of structuration

45 CSG/M is the scientific affordance for co‐evolution, an approach pioneered by Prof.Eve Mittleton‐Kelly (LSE) et al

46 Ricardo Goncalves, Head, FInES Science working group

47 FI PPP components

48 JSB, Torino, 2002 & Paris 2003/4

49 Luckham: Ubiquitous Complex Event Processing



human condition is the traditional material dealing with life’s dynamics, equivalent to the domain we seek to elucidate. The current focus is to compute these dynamics themselves and whilst this may seem like a purely technological challenge of computational science, the real paradigm change is to turn this on its head and realise it demands the computer behave like people rather than the traditional model of HCI - which will be seen to be a stepping stone to a new dispensation that we hypothesise will lead to the next Kondratiev shift, called ‘On Computable Society’. In this, instead of analysing data/information, relating it to abstracted models of society and then trying to extrapolate these to particular local advances (the model that exists now), S/DyM-CS itself model, mimic and replicate the fundamental dynamics of human thinking, together with potentially the entire constructs of human societal behaviour, thereby adding to the power of human thought, the power of a new computational method. The formalism of this is the subject of S/DyM-CS, with the added dimension of building it directly into how society functions, expressed through, and extending the entirety of modern computing and communications that have gone as far as is possible with the current technology. This paradigm change called computable society is a total symbiosis of society and its computational representation. This programme will research its formalisms, their expression in the new computing paradigm, and its validation within society and all its current computing systems. To these we should add the emphasis that instead of a computational system on top of a human externally derived design, the new paradigm is the total dynamic design of thinking society working together.

S/DyM-CS is more far reaching and inclusive in its scale of dynamic change than most of current complexity research; the evidence is all about us of accelerating dynamics threatening our existence or pointing to an unsustainable world model. Practically, S/DyM-CS will come up against all the issues attendant on any large programme of ‘change’50. Experience we will cite and analyse of different methods of addressing this risk all start from trying to understand, work with and unravel the dynamics occurring51; the particular focus S/DyM-CS targets is to apply the dynamics, i.e. to identify and harness the living force they represent. This is human intentional behaviour; we hypothesise it will be the defining exemplar in validating the operation of S/DyM-CS. The solution, CSG/M, will model this in vivo and thereby turn its peculiar dynamics into genuine validated opportunities and a new scientific approach, emulating and going beyond what similar successful approaches (computational biology and genomics) have achieved - they do not deal with people. In the case of society the research and the experiment are synonymous because society itself is a designed and continuously modelled in vivo experiment, involving both operation of the thing itself and simulation of possible different operational forms via the systems of the world. Reconciling the formalisms of both are therefore key; this paper will elaborate what the effects are of this continuously modelled world and the formalisms to represent and deal with it meaningfully . It will also study any aspects of other domains outside the experiment but potentially indicating (through nearness) yet further ‘levels if complexity’; this is to keep open the boundary question while focussing on the achievable; this seems possibly more rigorous than applying the formalism(s) to data that already is partially degraded by being abstracted from the totality of its dynamics in the living processes occurring and conditioning the ‘data and its meaning’52), and also vestigial human biological drives impacting on designed societal behaviour. Technology driven reality without humanity is a worrying special case.

S/DyM-CS model the human condition in which philosophically and practically, Society is both the problem and the solution; every individual initiative contributes towards the goal of society seeking ways-and-means out of the entropic mess to various kinds of order. So do all DyM-CS initiatives; all complexity research harnesses the human ability to solve problems of the human condition. CSG/M models the ability to think ourselves out of trouble and alas also the reverse. We are at the start of modelling this and its power to change the world for good or ill. This is the basis of science, society, technology and all human purposeful life-plans.

50 Dr Michaela Smith, Commonwealth Partnership for Technology Management (CPTM) & Club of Rome; Ralph Stacey, Professor of Management,

University of Hertfordshire Business School, England 51 Author, S‐Gaia world society modeller; FuturICT Living Earth Simulator

52 Atay et al, Max Planck



6. COMPUTATIONALSOCIO‐GEONOMICS/METALOGER(CSG/M):SIMULATING‘LIFE’

Design of a living society simulator with the aim of trialling complex scenarios is the same for real-life and S/DyM-CS experiments: both rely on complex-scenario designs that are mapped and refined until a sufficient set of rules is presented to drive behaviour choices. The complexity of the processing is the set of meta-level scenarios that come into play and are the formalisms that will be tested to reveal possible complex outcomes. For Metaloger Labs, the complex-scenario designs exist within bounded real-world rules called, e.g. ‘policy’ ‘enterprises’; for S/DyM-CS, scenarios will be chosen to role-play/emulate specific scenarios that reveal the complex formalisms in action; this is the type of activity common in complex training simulators: they are non trivial but similar to any systems trials where the outcome is subject to external validation and verification not involved in the behavioural enactments, (this role exists in the real world also, i.e. ‘governance’). The design is not intrinsically different for laboratory and real-life simulation, except that a laboratory system has a more limited set of behavioural options than real life and lacks the real-time complex evolutionary design capability of real-life. We can note the need for clarity in the use of the term ’system’ and ‘complex system’; as in the real world interacting parties need to define where they are coming-from on any point at issue, i.e. what their frame of reference is. (Sometimes this is deliberately hidden, but this is one of many special cases that will be progressively elucidated in choosing a do-able scope of the experiment). As in the real-world it includes factors such as available time given to produce some emergent result, aka deliverable; real-life is not objective or neutral , but conditioned by a goal-driven change agenda. System is equivalent to formalism-in-action.

Life, as experiment, relies on evolving enactments that refine the outcomes until the adjudicator is satisfied, or some other rule specifies ‘the end of the game’, or a severe outcome exceeds the designed limits of the experiment – when it is back to the drawing board. The CSG/M game evolves continuously in real or simulated worlds rather than periodic systems enhancements and no actual outcome is invalid in absolute terms; the meta-level processes determine the meaning and significance of findings. This is double-loop learning i.e. there is the option to redefine the rules as the game proceeds53. Since complex interactions are the basis of the game, the possible outcomes are exponential and a further role for the adjudicator is to establish and manage the discipline of unbounded playing – as in parent-child play. What happens in practice is the extent of play is a significant ‘change’ decision and a balance is struck between unbounded experimentation and boring routine that does not include creativity, innovation, thinking out of the box and other essential features of complex-learning; this dimension of experimentation is the basis of strategic planning, i.e. deciding on the game-plan and how far to push the rules. Goals/Values = multi-level dynamics of CSG/M enactments.

The design and operation of the simulator mirrors complexity to an extent not necessarily aligned with specific societal systems that are bounded/grounded according to limited sets of sub-optimisation rules; the simulator enables measured and controlled variation in the game-plan(s) so as to test and project possible new futures. Both rely on understanding sufficient past enactment outcomes to define current game-plans. The formalism of this processes experience in the current system rules of engagement sufficient to satisfy a subset of possible operational systems conditions and simultaneously remain open to possibilities arising from more complex interactions. Both are controlled according to game-theoretic socio-cybernetic rules designed to enable a winner to emerge. A real-life actual game can be expressed as: to specify the dimensions of a problem; its possible solution(s); the means to it; and to validate and verify some correct alignment between them all. We will find that every aspect of the DyM-CS bag requires this alignment. It can be seen as a systems design exercise with the added frisson of complexity thrown in. Only the baseline is always shifting, the result of operational conditions always being out of line with the formal rules: CSG is the set of evolving game-rules where the rate of evolution is a property of all the complex system components

dynamics – simulating patterns of action according to the rules but also outside them Metaloger is operational enactments both conforming to and in contradiction to the parent rules.

The interplay between these two, over many levels of significance defined by the rules of the formalism and methods, is the core of eliciting complex emerging significance(s). It is CSG/M representation of S/DyM-CS perturbation and morphogenesis. Presentation of what this means is a mix of analytical methods and the specialist languages of complex emergence and change; this will be the FOCAS engagement bag .

53 Senge, the 5

th discipline; hysteresis is a similar ‘catch‐up’ effect in the physical world



7. TECHNOLOGIESFORS/DyM‐CS

The dominant issue in any discussion of technologies is the gap between technology as applied to the physical reality of our existence and when applied to us as social beings. Every facet discussed in this section is easily described and comprehended in some framework from the physical sciences and there may be some attempt to translate this to the living world – usually by transposing the living to the mechanistic world. It is much more difficult to see reality as a social construct, informed by its own type of technology. (It has proved equally difficult to come to terms with the reality that possibly the entire physical world is in one sense a subjective, social construct.) We argue that the solution to this is to locate the integration of these two worlds in a new paradigm of socio technology that is the essential framework of human thinking: to identify connections between different domains – only these are not just physical but abstract, brought together in figurative constructs we call Meta-models.

The DyM-CS Call emphasises ‘technology’ but specifically Information and communication technology (ICT). This section asks what this implies and should we go forward with the current ICT paradigm(s), i.e. the current work-arounds involved in applying current ICT methods to a complex evolving ‘data-set’ whose dynamics are not at present collected at all (except in very limited applications that are not ‘real complexity’[ref 13]. The list identified (thus far) have a common ICT focus, not just because the Call proposes this but because the bag cannot be meaningfully processed without it, i.e. the emphasis on large heterogeneous data-sets mandates improved ICT. There is a history of complexity and ICT that is revealing the limitations of current ICT, which we argue stems from lack of understanding of complexity applied to society and people. We propose that the old model be somehow replaced; this is a sine-qua non for the concept we call computable society; we consider this may well apply to all other complexity domains as well, in varying degrees not yet considered or agreed. We propose to start this discussion and to test it based on the new paradigm of S/DyM-CS. The starting point for this is a wider view of what technology means in a people/society domain, at the simplest level, how people understand a basic tenet of human existence which is the ability to devise and use tools as an extension of the biological repertoire we inherit from that domain, and then any further extension of this to getting a new capability altogether. The answers to this explain why it is incorrect to label CSG/M an ‘application’, i.e. a computer system to solve a specific computational problem: CSG/M is not just a prosthetic but an extension of human capability enabling a different class of problems, opportunities and outcomes to be envisaged and delivered. Mankind can elect to use this new capability, when CSG/M becomes their thinking extension. This is a different model to the current one; the whole DyM-CS community needs to reflect on this.

The focus of this section is how the various technologies under discussion can be applied synergistically; this needs a common test environment and a coordinated approach. This environment can be a real and a simulated society model, exploiting socio-technology, using this to create itself, and living it under controlled experimental conditions to see what happens and validate it, i.e. the DyM-CS research community is a complex adaptive system itself; this defines a Coordination and Support Action.

It may seem paradoxical to consider the finer points of considering society and emulating it together as technology: we should remember the Greek word means ‘art’, especially drama, as well as artefact’54. CSG/M emulates the ongoing ‘drama of life’. But the most obvious connotation of ‘technology’ is as the means to leverage the power and capability of the human faculties (more than physical power); for this it is necessary to fashion the technology into a usable tool trialled in real, tough and challenging problem(s). The starting position is that this effort is important to all complexity science experiments that require ultimately to be deployed in society (them all); S/DyM-CS asserts that the involvement of society in the experiment is significant; it is a kind of project trial and deployment from its inception: society will drive the search for ways and means if properly engaged, empowered and enabled. Work has to be done to bring this about.

Briefings for DyM-CS have coupled together disparate fields of enquiry that are either meaningless/opaque or genuinely represent a search for the one answer (usually a chimera) whereas an alternative technology approach is to pursue a collaborative research programme. We consider societal complexity is not just a field in its own right but a possible integrated, unifying and synergistic discipline. The basic question is whether all of the DyM-CS bag of technologies have an essential societal dimension and whether society can embrace the set of new technologies that will become part of the evolving experiment called S/DyM-CS. The answer is both will change through the introduction of living complexity into peoples’ lives. This is the starting position of experimentation; it is the main focus of early investigation regarding what our domain is really all about. What we are considering at this stage is how the difficulties and vagueness of complexity are its opportunity (and not a nuisance to be circumvented which is the old model), rather seen as the means to keep open the state of play to allow Requisite Variety to generate exciting possibilities. Every child infuriates its parents by ‘try-ons’ to test the limits of rules. An interesting feature of the present state of play is how a concept can seem to mean different things to

54 Prof, Yannis Charalabdis Uni.of Aegean, Samos 2011



different practitioners. It is probably best at this stage to use such ambiguity as an opportunity for lateral thinking and opening up the mind to wider, novel, considerations. To this Author, a refreshing feature of the discussions was how little emphasis was placed on ‘raw data’, indicative of how data is seen as imbued with a far richer aetiology through its complexity than current information processing systems allow, (where multiple meanings signify an error to be corrected). This is the idea behind ‘social enactments’ as the new information paradigm: this will re-order the huge data-deluge into a meaningful exemplar of complex human society. We are all still at the ideas stage!

In this discussion of technologies there is no particular identification or alignment with any specific aspects of what we call ‘socio-technologies’ because we are only just stating the exercise of asking what each of us understands by any perceived relevance or alignment or potential applicability; this is the multiple frames of reference syndrome. CSG/M locates the tension in this as the source of dynamic emergence and critical ‘events’; also multiple relevance according to the dynamic context of any action is key to decision making.

Some common themes showed up in the Papers discussed at the DyM-CS Open Day; all relevant to S/DyM-CS. Most significant is that open questions indicate an exploratory phase that should not be closed by the arbitrary bounds of the Call, this in itself being necessary Requisite Variety that the CA action can advance. A first cut list actually provides a specification for CSG/M, i.e. building the formalism for S/DyM-CS. We will propose that a S/DyM-CS experiment can be a model for the CA and this does not break the rule that a CA does not engage in research (i.e. it is administrative and supportive) but is fundamentally enabling (sic). This list reflects different levels of formalism: mathematics; physics; management science; computer science; cognitive science; social science; information science artificial intelligence (eh?) – and the list is still emerging. It reflects understanding according to that of each research group: combining these is a social process, dependent on each group’s agenda. It also can be seen as a complex processor of multi-level constructs, in manufacturing called a Bill of Materials (BoM) system; in the world of DyM-CS ‘materials’ means complex interacting methods and formalisms; in GAIA it means resources; etc. What is emerging is a specification of this elusive general theory of complex systems: it is ‘the system of human thought applied to understanding and controlling the evolution of our world’. Another analogy is that CSG/M is a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) system for society. It is quite useful to discover many formalisms all working alongside each other to trial which are most useful to society’s dynamics, which work together and what gaps remain requiring further lateral thinking even if no immediate answer is forthcoming: this is the process of innovation, creativity, or plain make-do and mend.

The list below is work-in-progress: a trial list of possible complexity technologies (according to the classic definition of ‘technology’ as hard and soft ways-and-means to accomplish some task); it is a living experiment of CSG/M to design and trial the formalisms constituting a general theory of S/DyM-CS:

Socio-technology, the politics of groups, information, values, and power General Systems Theory (GST), designed and/or conjectural scoping Mathematical formalisms, abstracted logical views of a problem, ultimately computable (somehow) Socio-cybernetics, the pragmatics of exercising socially-driven control systems: people circuits for

feedback/amplification Methods, processes, rules, perturbation and morphogenesis, the means to change something to something better

i.e. added value Multi-level and multi scale conditions, aggregate/super-ordinate structures. Also Inter-dependence, i.e. discovering

a useful connection previously overlooked Game-theoretic approaches, Goal oriented modelling systems (GOMS), i.e. ‘life’ as serious fun, collaborating in a

team, competing with other teams, sharing the same pitch, swopping players Agent Based Modelling, i.e. spanning humans as ‘agents’ of our destiny and some computable representation, so

that each can inform and enhance the other , i.e the useful tool approach Statistical patterns and optimisation, i.e. reality is ‘how we got out of bed this morning’ so we can only work within

its limits – sometimes changing these tomorrow morning if it looks a better bet Topologies, ontologies, classifications, i.e what do you mean by that...? And ‘what a good idea’ ... Network theory and practice, i.e. talked with Fred and discovered we know lots of similar thinking people – perhaps

we are onto something useful, eh?. Better follow this up! Ecologies: viability and sustainability of Technology and Society entanglement; how our pet-ideas build an entire

edifice of functioning (the stigmergy syndrome55) Some further aspects are added which show the limits of interconnectedness (in S/DyM-CS):

o Emotions and the psychology of human behaviour, driver of purpose and values

55 I am indebted to Michele Piunti for this serendipity ([email protected]



o Cognitive science, sensing, culture, stories and meaning, driver reinforcing meaning(s) o vestigial biological characteristics and behaviours as drivers of dynamics o potential natural-world risks and events as drivers of perceived concern o (a reverse-world where the illusion of intelligent technology leads to thinking it can solve something on its

own i.e. avatars as vicarious people) Meta-Modelling, Tools and Problem solving, i.e. how do we put all these ideas together so they become useful:

this will be the starting specification for FOCAS and the Science of Global Systems.

The above list are all overlapping parts of any purposeful system, although that term is peculiar to humans it is often applied metaphorically to non-human complexity; it ties in complexity science with being a tool to achieve an aim, and hence method, ways and means, control and validation. S/DyM-CS dynamics are what happens as any of the above are deployed/applied – or any other affordance since our list is not final; both the system and the experiment are subjective, symbiotic56, designed, and on-going. A basic question is what selection of all the above works now, perhaps should be reinforced, (or even can be), to establish temporary punctuated equilibrium. We emphasise intellect as the dominant affordance in this determination, but clearly this is compromised (or reinforced) by other forces; society has a duty to discriminate and resolve this contention - it is the basis of the ultimate complex value: the choice of good over evil. Socio-technology

Social science seeks to understand and thereby improve society; the means are socio-technology, the politics of groups, interactions, information, values, and power; that is a snapshot of the components of its dynamic complex system: they execute the purposes of (wo)mankind. There is little point in any general theory that excludes complex social dynamics; CSG/M is the affordance to experiment with them and validate their workings: its theory is how the entire list works together. All this reminds us that complexity is about which systems will prevail, or be sidelined in the evolutionary game of value systems. Complex systems are things that work; tools drive them forward; theory supports the search for better tools. Socio-technology is the formalism for designing and operating society; a hypothesis is this is the nearest to a general theory of complex systems. Socio-technology is not an application nor is it a test-bed for complexity, rather both these are components of a working model of how society functions. ‘Model’ denotes several levels from design principles, to a trial version, to an in-use ‘release’; specifically this process, called a configuration management system (CMS), is about the complexity of change, run-out, deployment, and sometimes roll-back: note, a new product is a special case. This analogy explicates the bag of phenomena given the label Dynamic, Multi-level, and Complex Adaptive System; it is possible to argue all these terms only have meaning within the societal context and this meaning is necessary to elucidate any subset of the phenomena. The top-level holon57 is Final Causes, the ‘WHAT & WHY?’ of any domain (the fundamental driver of complexity); for S/DyM-CS this is abstract values a concept going beyond the abstractions of any other science (which it superficially resembles); this can be identified as the crowning delivery of the Human species and its singular power of intellectual curiosity that enables dominance despite other e.g. physical, limitations.

For socio-technology it is thus an obvious step to further enhancing this by tools58, significantly computational tools, especially in the field of cognition, communication, sensing, and inferencing meaning and purpose. This goes beyond Darwinian evolution called ‘Survival of the fittest’ to the pervasive human social concept of ‘Fitness for Purpose’. Its ultimate range is that of consciousness of destiny and the means to harness this – more prosaically to be able to plan the future. This system of values is dynamic, complex, difficult to apply, and in its capacity to inform the entirety of society, the largest complex adaptive system (CAS) in existence. It is designed, applied, and constantly evolving in real-time and in vivo. These dynamics therefore matter. CSG/M will elucidate test, and apply them for the benefit of society. Argumentatively this means non-conforming individual people.

This ultimate domain, that of human thought, has dominated the world for several thousand years in the deliberations of philosophers, but also exhibited in prehistoric cave-paintings and structures, and has continued through the Age of Enlightenment to the present day – (conflicting systems warn us the process is not uni-directional). Its modern expression is the world of communication and computing, both of which are now recognised as not mere technology but the affordances of something fundamental to the human condition. This can be described in information-theoretic constructs but the fundamental nature embraces a more inclusive range of significance from the hard to the soft sciences, the humanities and how we function physiologically and cognitively. These are the new science of CSG/M based on the hypothesis that its dynamics are fundamental to the conduct of our world and it is the means to elucidate and process the dynamics experimentally. It is the formalism of society, an evolutionary applied general theory.

56 Cf Vickers two‐stranded rope

57 Checkland SSM CATWOE “root definition”

58 See ref 2 page 3, on the seminal definition of human tool‐making prowess in 1864



S/DyM-CS addresses this domain because it is fundamental to all others because of its potential to enhance the purposeful focus of people in their real-life dynamic existence; this is the tool-set complexity dimension. This principle explains why CSG/M is not an application – that is the opportunity pursued by the entirety of purposeful society; CSG/M is merely the affordance to understand and harness the underlying dynamics so that everyone can apply this new understanding to everything, in everyday affairs.

Complexity science is the natural expression of this and its application to society an essential progression. Society functions through processes that marshal the resources of the world to fulfil needs and desires, everything from survival of the species to ‘higher purposes’ and also the special case of the reverse59. This canvas is the Human Condition. Its scientific form can be expressed in General Systems Theory (GST) which is the generic framework of all kinds of real-world specific systems. Its processes cover principally intentional behaviour, but also biological forces (human animal behaviour) and the forces of the natural world (the Gaia hypothesis60). The modality of these socio-technic systems is complex actionable models of human behaviour and all their directed (proxy) behaviours for reinforcing and bringing about defined purposes; these are structured, complex, hierarchical and meaningful at multi-levels, called primitive (granular), reference, and normative models.

The further dimensions cover the interfaces with the biological and natural systems at work. These are also complex particularly because their evolutionary scales are vastly different and alignment is therefore problematic; a special case of this is the conflict between actual and vestigial biological behaviours which is a fruitful area of social modelling: control parallels between animal and higher behaviour are crucially degraded by the non-alignment. (We may feel belittled by being described as human ants, but actually it is unfair to ants.) Similarly we know very little about the way cognition works and rely on looking at his second-hand (a fruitful examination), to spot patterns in what happens. For socio-technology this suggests information breakdown between the systems criteria in the three domains. The remaining domain of technology-driven reality is third-hand (actually the tail-wagging-the-dog) reality and dangerously manipulative since it assumes we are all lazy recipients of convenience thinking-food.

For the Call DyM-CS the intent is to investigate how the components following on from systems of abstract value generate the complexity of human society, and its proxy structures (organisations, enterprises, groups and single-groups called people), their systems, and functioning (methods, formalisms processes, information structures). This is S/DyM-CS. The formalisms so far discussed find a coherent integrating framework in CSG/M. But this paradigm suffers from being another example of the failure to bridge between the worlds of hard science, technology and the social sciences61. Conspicuously there is a paucity of integrated thinking about socio-technology; the pioneering approach of Occelli, NGN X NGN is an exception, offering a real-life experiment for CSG/M ( other bases for the experimental validation can possibly be direct role-play simulation (a half-way house between total in vivo experiment and totally detached laboratory experimentation).

It is a sign of the new science that it has the potential to re-order how we view and prosecute our existence; this is to process the dynamics of thought and its abstract values. At a real level this is “the power of the people” engaged, empowered and enabled. Re-order is synonymous with morphogenesis.

Living Labs for Socio-technology It automatically follows from the concept of socio-technology as being embedded in ‘life’ that it partakes in that ‘life’ and therefore all manifestations occurring. What this means is more significant than saying the technology permeates society, and is an on-going experiment, it mimics life so completely as to ‘take-over’ the thing itself as many technologies have done already and no-one can contemplate life in their absence. This change is at the level of paradigm change; everyone everywhere, everyday will be engaged, empowered and enabled to live complex societal change and this cannot be slipped in silently, on the nod, or without people noticing. It will be partly embraced for the opportunity it presents; partly adopted as the only way to deal with presenting problems and challenges; partly embraced as a new way of becoming involved in life itself – much as modern communications, social computing, the internet and media, have joined up everyone across the world. The Kondratiev shift called Computable Society remains to be demonstrated but it is a worthy successor to The Information Age, going beyond that to enabling a new holistic social order that people can design because they have the means to do so. The experiments have started across several fronts, all directed towards the 2020 vision of a fully involved and served (serviced?) society; CSG/M is their affordance: Future Internet stresses the societal dimension, requiring a new societal science basis; Future Internet Enterprise

Systems (FInES) has stated that complexity is a baseline component of its new science-base The Paradiso 2020 society vision endorses complexity science as a key driver

59 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

60 James Lovelock GAIA hypothesis

61 Sylvie Ocelli IRES Foundation for public policy research, Piedmont



European Network of Living Labs (EnoLL) is a further candidate to become involved in global societal complexity framework methodology.

Living Labs (specifically their computational model, Metaloger Labs) will be the comprehensive FOCAS delivery General Systems Theory (GST)

General Systems Theory (GST) (and now-a-days General Complexity Theory), are compendium theories about how things work, applying different theoretical disciplines, modelling, and experimental perspectives which have to be tailored to the target domain and outcome required, e.g. in the design of a computer system or, more generally how to carry out any intervention in a domain; the GST model and the target system must be equivalent for each to lead to useful outcomes. For S/DyM-CS the spread of useful methodologies spans social, complexity, computing, sciences and applied science as in business, management, and operational domains (for example). GST offers a useful meta-framework for the formalism underlying S/DyM-CS for both practical applications and the preceding systems analysis and design, i.e it enables CSG/M (complex society and its computable model) to be designed, built and applied). It can also help discourse between practitioners working on the DyM-CS Call by providing a common baseline from which to build cross-fertilisation between approaches. The outcome is the computable basis of a complex-systems lingua franca (Viable Systems Model (VSM) being one such a configuration); GST is a practical framework of formalisms, methods, techniques etc for modelling and conducting experiments in complexity science, where a subset is testable against defined benefits that are sufficient62, fit for purpose and reconcilable with multiple competing versions of the same - criteria operating at meta-levels and forming the core of complexity i.e. requiring meta-meta levels to adjudicate the resolution. The strength of GST is its potential to model scenarios where everything is potentially connected to everything else, the whole lot is evolving, and someone wants to get a handle on how some bit works so as to make a useful intervention in this - only some other interested party may have an interest at the same time and not be inherently willing to play the same game. Cooperation/competition are both about perturbation of the system and values decide if the morphogenesis is worthwhile.

Mathematical formalisms

Category Theory & Memory Evolutive Systems

Mathematics has a central role in S/DyM-CS because of the requirement to render society computable; however its scope is unclear and requires research. The mathematical formalisms to compute social complexity need to model features of how societal systems work, to process higher thought and derive useful conclusions as a basis for decision and action. Two main directions are identified: how to represent the logic of multi-level working systems and how these are rendered computable including translation back to societal enactments; how to assign these models to multiple interacting societal ‘members’, ie what is the model of individual and group interactions. We shall see that the engine of multi-level systems is about correlating social action into grouped action because this is efficient, non repetitive, and provides what we call a template, i.e. a Meta Frame of Reference (MetaFor) to save repeating over and over again all earlier micro enactments. Sometimes called ‘learning’, it can also be seen as the efficiency of societal evolution: human higher thought enables our species to categorise what matters into pigeon-holes63 for recovery and re-use. The most challenging aspect is not defining this process but getting agreement to accept, i.e share, its consequences.

A starting discussion from the perspective of S/DyM-CS is that it is about deriving meaning in what we do, as individuals, groups and so up the ladder of hierarchy to some driving force that causes experience to happen and be felt as ‘meaningful’. We have located this hierarchy in systems of values and it is the nature of this hierarchy we are interested in: on the one hand we have incredible variety, what can be termed the ‘bottom-up’ view, whereby the billions of individual interactions generate meanings and everyone strives to understand some significant commonality in it all; on the other hand there is the top-down perspective when all the mass of meanings are somehow ‘processed’ and the nugget of meaning is extracted and possibly further refined. This process appears colloquially in statements such as “ ... we can say, quite categorically, that this is significant because...”. We shall return to the word ‘categorically’ again and again.

The concept of categories is essential to ordered human understanding and behaviour, to computer science, (possibly to the efficiency of the human brain), and certainly to that fundamental quantum process of ascribing order and meaning to a set of random entropic events. This is the familiar world of ‘abstractions’ in which the label is a shorthand, the detail is in the particular member of the abstracted class, and it is necessary continuously to move between the abstraction and the detail – a requirement expressed in the colloquial expression “the devil is in the detail”.

62 Simon

63 What a good name for a new social site, eh?



The overall discipline for these considerations is category theory, widely used in philosophy, and spawning systems of abstractions such as Nicolai Hartman’s 7-layer theory. From this we have extended the discussion to how category theory translates into ordered social behaviour, and this is Meta Modelling, i.e. CSG/M. From this it is a small but significant step to locating the dynamics of this in human action and our ability to store and retrieve ‘experience’ (as opposed to the blind process of survival of the fittest): The mathematics called Memory Evolutive Systems (MES)64 addresses the broad sweep of societal systems that have

the capacity to learn from the past i.e. using this to formulate action now. This includes classifying the nature of past experience as part of today’s repertoire of past guides to guide action

Correlation of systems enactments that depend on different levels: the meaning of this concept is to be analysed, specifically meta-levels denoting abstractions of what systems behaviour means. MES ascribes some higher value to these levels and this could reflect the purposeful imperative, possibly what Meta Frames of Reference assign as greater power to exert influence

Treatment of anticipatory systems such as is typical of future strategic planning and generally policy determination and purposeful behaviour

Varying value and significance in certain patterns of the same data as this reflects a reinforcement of the power of data to perturb the system. Also what MES calls the ‘multiplicity principle’

An interesting line of research is how the cognitive powers of humans can amplify the retained significance preferentially according to some learned pattern of response.

The abstractions and underlying system of categories at multiple levels of abstraction provide the structure of meaning behind Computational Socio-geonomics and are the computational basis for Metaloger; Metaloger Labs are the dynamics similarly made meaningful as the basis for action bottom-up and top-down.

Information as a computable Force

The force exerted by ‘information’ is a most interesting and valuable concept, discussed by Issar/Sorek65The Possible Dimension, Additional to Space-Time, which Physicists Ignore, is Shannon’s information but considered as a force able to be described according to laws familiar to classical and quantum mechanics, operating as a 5th dimension to space-time, and propagated as a wave, but so small as to be a virtually dimensionless particle. The Authors survey the evidence of this as the ‘missing link‘ in accounting for the phenomenon of human intellectual evolution, the mystery of how (more precisely what) genes/DNA contribute as the driving force of evolution - beyond random survival – and the ultimate quantum mystery namely the observer changes the experiment. The concept of this further dimension beyond space/time has led to string-theory (and the logical 11-dimensional model).

What this portends for ‘On Computable Society’ is the possibility of being able to compute the forces across the 4-dimensional space time, plus the 5th dimension of information, and reach a computable account of the potency of information.

Socio-cybernetics – the illusion of scientific reification

‘Cybernetics’ the science and art of control, is more pertinently derived from the Greek word for ‘Steersman’, which identifies the social dimension of purposeful direction . We know control is about feedback that applies force to restrain or to accelerate change in a target systems components.

The study of social control is well set out in any cursory reading starting with Wikipedia. It will show that even the more organic evolutionary and self-critical viewpoints still treat ‘societal phenomena’ as things to be extracted and treated as either self-regulating systems or ones controlled from outside. The reverse of this characterises cooperative societal behaviour, but it is the same. We can note that the same argument applies to norms and normality: the ‘extracted’ standard, norm, and phenomenon are a short-hand for conclusions drawn from the past; dynamics are the present that perturbs the past; meta-level analysis of the patterns of perturbation point to possible future scenarios. Possibly the moment of instantiation of a decision and action is the social tipping point, or step in an emergent new social order and some extreme form of this is the sudden jump to a radical new scenario. But this is a post-hoc trap: more granular identification of the atomic components is necessary.

What are the forces and what do they act upon in the societal domain? The missing link is that elusive ‘target behaviour’ – although it is far from simple to identify the almost equally elusive ‘force’. Actually they are both embedded in the on-going

64 Prof.Andree Erehsmann

65 J. Mod. Phys., 2010, 1, 70‐76 “The Possible Dimension, Additional to Space‐Time, which Physicists Ignore” Arie S. Issar, Shaul Sorek

Ben‐Gurion University of the Negev Israel



dynamics but since the dawn of time the focus has been on extracting these and trying to define them as some external, extraneous system. The reality is both are a myriad of tiny components of interacting force and target swirling about in an entropic whirlstrom called the human condition. Our tentative finding is the systems of abstract values are both the force and target but these have no real-world ‘substance’ that can be examined, measured, experimented on. There is therefore an intermediate step whereby this process creates a tangible reality called society’s systems, artefacts, and linkages to other systems such as the biological, or natural, or even quantum worlds; this world is the reification of the other and it is dodgy to see it as the thing itself because this means focussing our attention onto the reification rather than the dynamics: both constitute the domain of society.

The social quantum collapse is the set of multi-level interacting values and their surrogate ‘realities’ instantiated in an infinite set of human moments of behaviour, decision action and perturbed world. The illusion of order and meaning is modelled and experimented on in life and in the science of CSG/M. But first establish the formalisms that will enable the abstract and corporeal worlds to be somehow explicated. The proposal is that meta-modelling is the practice and MetaFoRs are the combination of force and substance.

We propose to consider this significant field of research findings from the perspective that it can yield useful experimental techniques but always under the meta-level control that any findings are open to being perturbed by other systems that have a different agenda. The aim is to extend the field of socio-cybernetics into a field of multi-level controls i.e. to answer the question ‘quis custodiet ipsos custodes’. Again this leaves open the question of how to reconcile multiple control findings.

It is very probable that socio-cybernetics is synonymous with complex systems, and we shall arrive at the conclusion that what matters is the practical application of requisite variety, its local control regimes, and the overall guiding control inherent in a multi-level reconciliation of Metaphors. Perhaps most important outcome will be separating the granular agents of all this from tempting but illusory reifications whether consumerism or consumption of false systems of power and control, in favour of a meaningful constant search for ‘fitness for purpose’.

Methods, processes, rules, cybernetics & stability, perturbation and morphogenesis

This bag can be seen as the nitty-gritty of dealing with complex systems under living conditions; they are the pragmatics of their workings whenever mankind makes a purposeful (or accidental) intervention in any complex system, whether in furtherance of some stable option (seen as beneficial) or some new option that may be a new form of stability, or an attempt to counter some instability (whether there are some control possibilities or not). The canvas includes the full spectrum of exposure to change defined as ‘the only certainty’, i.e. complex social conditions are the norm that has to be dealt with: The current Business as Usual set of on-going societal activity (increasingly subject to global change conditions, i.e.

high levels of perturbation of the status-quo) All forms of deliberate planned change (increasingly subject to global change conditions, i.e. high levels of perturbation

of the status-quo) Laboratory complexity experiments often simulate complex systems to investigate limits live CSG/M experiments

simulate alternative scenarios as an ongoing process of contemplating change

The S/DyM-CS baseline always starts from what possibilities exist to exercise control and then how to marshal and deploy resources to exert control. We start from the perspective that on the whole mankind has the power to do this S/DyM-CS is an investigation into the limits of this and ultimately what scope of means can be made available within current affordable strategic parameters from the smallest scenario up to the global level. This is the policy, planning and simulation assessment bag.

Methods/processes/rules/cybernetics are efficient means to design and operate any system; efficiency goes down when there are options in the design and operation and particularly when there is uncertainty also: the uncertainty has to be addressed, where this can have almost any dimensions. The complexity kind is different to deterministic rules methods and processes, complex systems are interested in exploiting indeterminacy to spot some opportunity (c.f. the aphorism ‘one man’s metier is another man’s posture66). It shows up in the dynamic patterns of meaning, significance and multiple flavours of these. There is only yesterday’s significance until the system has settled down into a new identifiable state - equilibrium or alternatively it could be the extent and rate of instability that matters. Behind such considerations is the meaning of ‘instability’ which is definitely not an error situation necessarily, but recognition that something is triggering change; that ‘something’ is called a perturbation. During this phase, the system has to switch from BAU to dealing with some new (and to some extent unknown) situation. These are problematic from a Turing machine view of computability – both the computational and social aspects: we do not much like uncertainty as human animals, being fundamentally lazy – idly

66 Jsb Thesis 1999 Metaloger: Design of a generic socio‐technocratic system



thinking is our forte. The rate of fluctuation is critical to considering degrees of perturbation and the identification of morphogenesis opportunities: untidy it might seem but this vacillation is a feature of all human social activity generally – from the menu to the mathematics of decision. Richness of meaning and multiple meanings requires methods of complexity to resolve the uncertainty and support dis-ambiguation, steps to the next stability.

For the study of S/DyM-CS, this bag seems to be the fashioning of tools that open up and handle the difficult area of change, uncertainty, breakdown in established orders, but also creativity, lateral-thinking67, innovation, experiment. These form the working-parts of a particular class of MetaFoRs sometimes called Agents of Change. The practical aspect of Metaloger Labs is how these interact with ‘normal’ i.e. non-complex Methods/ processes/rules/cybernetics that form the basis of operational systems. This is identified as the function that is responsible for a watching brief, or is sensitive to, any incipient signs of possible perturbation (one such sub-system is the Level 4 function in Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model; though this model was not clear enough on the essential ubiquity of a generic process of perturbation and change in the model of the human condition: it is preferable to be in control of this rather than just driven by it).

We can comment at this stage that Methods/processes/rules/cybernetics are not intrinsically different as between BAU and change-watching; for both there is the new component of identifying the tipping point that requires a switch from one to the other (this is the essential but difficult part of processing the Boston grid for strategic business planning).

The rationale for CSG/M is: that it saves re-inventing the wheel; it captures and makes available the common pool of experience across a wider canvas than is possible within the finite resources of most sub-domains; it targets and focuses decision and action for its participants; it provides reassurance through being a holistic and comprehensive portrayal of the human condition.

This Methods, processes, rules, cybernetics & stability, perturbation and morphogenesis bag is the nitty-gritty of a FOCAS environment, as it is for Business Process Emergent Engineering (BPEE), at the heart of which is Ubiquitous Complex Event Processing (U-CEP), NGN X NGN (ref Occelli op cit).

The Multi-Scale/multi-level/micro/meso/macro bag

Multi-scale has such a precise mathematical meaning that it is not easy to realise even the need to question what this means for S/DyM-CS; also the concepts of micro/meso/macro which are very much misunderstood: Multi-scale seems to encompass any connected phenomena where observation suggests each has to be considered

according to its own relevant scale(s), then what it means to consider them together, and finally how to show these matter to each sub-domain. The tipping point of the strange-attractor function is a case in point, hence the plural word ‘scales’. The fundamental point is the non-equivalence of ‘power’ across scales

Multi-level seems to be the aspect already discussed under various topic-headings: meta-levels, abstractions, generically the parts-and-the-whole question, i.e. when does a collection of things cease to be just a numeric multiple and become something different – while still comprising the primitive components

Micro/meso/macro is a fancy set of terms from the Greek which denotes that most experience is about being a small fish in a big pond, or a big fish in a small pond - in practice variations of this constantly shifting as societal structures evolve and reform to meet situations. The phenomena that all three merge into one another is overlooked in the practicalities that different resources, methods etc can be conveniently deployed according to the scale of the specific phenomena forming the experiment.

The general conclusion is not only that the meaning of these terms is specific to a domain or a sub-domain, but may be different for an assembly of sub-domains – this is the Bill of Materials (BoM) dilemma. Every individual component has to be built to the standard of the ‘most critical’ level of the assembly. This is part of control theory. Of course criticality can be designed out to some extent – the resilience dimension.

Nor should our social perspective mean we discount this mechanistic analogy: as all complex systems, ultimately we function using all the resources available and these are constantly designed to interface (often with difficulty) to the human scales levels etc. The art is rather in how the assemblage reinforces each other and never replaces each other entirely. The concepts under discussion have subtly different meanings across different domains and analogy is generally useful and dodgy at the same time. Continuous experiment and validation and verification is required to establish useful and true cross-synergy out of complexity.

67 De Bono – Malta University De Bono Institute



The reifications matter but not of themselves, only as part of the whole, embodying all that constitutes the whole, in the constantly interacting dynamic and changing scene. Discovering a new symbiosis between mind and body is part of our scene.

Multiple experiments are the hallmark of society from the bottom-up and top-down. Society operates on many different scales from the individual upwards but collections are always a new entity, purposefully designed, exploiting the dominant human intellectual capability (within which we include, for S/DyM-CS, the flowering of science, technology, and all forms of human creativity etc). They function as billions of hybrid species, proxy for their controlling value system(s), actually complex interacting systems where value system and human agent are together too diverse to be manipulated – the counter to the Orwellian nightmare: humans choose their preferred multiple values, and guard, nurture and exploit them. The complex outcomes are free-will, responsibility, higher drives. The opposite rarely survive in the long scale of human intellectual achievement but before that happens lays the mayhem of contended systems, ranging from competitive to predatory behaviours. All exploit levels of complex power to achieve control, building meso and macro levels of control – always hybrid structures – that consume fewer resources and energy.

We suggest these are all connected with trying to get some simplifying order into the complexity experiment before resources run out – the ‘something needs to be done; this is something, then let us do it’ imperative68. This aspect of complexity seems to denote a multiple set of concepts all having the common feature of doing something in many different ways all of which have slightly different meanings as drivers of action; they all leave open the question of limit of validity. In the CSG/M environment similar issues of computing resources obtain and always the need to justify how open-ended the experiment is versus directed to solve a local problem. Governance manages this, and is key to the FOCAS roll-out it is the top-level of CSG/M.

In summary, this bag is further indication that complexity is a tool rather than a scientific explanation. In fact it is both given its ubiquity and property of shedding new light on how to run our World and understand it.

This Paper discusses later the special case of instinctual biological-social drives which, together with intellectual drivers call into question any simple comparison with the herd, the hive, or the hunter.

Game-theoretic approaches

One perspective on game-theory is that it is a formal vehicle to enable separation of the transient ‘thing’ from its underlying meaning – what ‘matters’. This perspective recognises the danger of substituting the reified ‘thing’ for some larger view of the tournament. Even in competitive games the chosen goal is not always to strive to win and games in reality rarely present any absolute logic sequence guaranteed to prevail: they exhibit the more subtle considerations of the ‘tournament’ super-ordinate goal, strategies to conserve resources, or even just a perverse satisfaction in preventing ones opponents from winning69. It seems clear that S/DyM-CS is a game-theoretic canvas and the focus of the experiment is where does the game originate, how has its present evolutionary state come about, and is it the game the World needs now. The top-down view would focus on the mandarins of the game-plan, aka Policy and Governance bodies (even here there are multiple versions of the game around the world with uncoordinated sets of rules); in all actual games under-way the bottom-up version is playing by local rules which pay scant attention to the laid-down version even though they may both have some goals in common – that is until the red card is shown.

CSG/M is a goal-oriented modelling system (GOMS)70 where the canvas is not even a fixed game but multiple interacting different games where any progress requires reconciliation of the various game-types running simultaneously.

One trap in the social domain is to reify the logic itself and then suggest the ‘thing’ behaves like that. The actuality is the constant intertwined rope of both (Vickers); the extraordinary dynamics that ensures neither the rules nor the game gain pre-eminence but only a subtle synthesis.

This is not to suggest there is even some super-league of societal meaning, only keeping the ball in-play and agreeing to find the process fun and worthwhile. The fun lies in perturbing each other’s game and discovering new ploys and strategies that take both teams forward so they can re- tell the story of each game from the past. Or even from the side-line can be a fun pastime.

Agent Based Modelling

68 Yes, Minister (BBC satirical series about Government and the Civil Service)

69 Croquet is sometimes cited....

70 Warren, Mannesmann ipulsys, director of early Metaloger development



Several or perhaps all contributors to the debate emphasise the computing technique called ABM (or variants on this acronym). This is not surprising since the field clearly tries to replicate populations of interacting entities able to exhibit some range of adaptive behaviour. The field requires radical extension to enable all the range of complexity concepts to come into the field of the model. Examples mentioned are predictably things already being discussed: interacting structures (proxy agents for groups of people, themselves interesting structures for embodying abstract values... ), multi-levels (can these be considered as some kind of proxy agent, a S/DyM-CS foreman, shop-steward, boss, or Big Brother) – I merely enjoy asking such questions and starting the debate as to what we mean. The canvas for all this has been limited up to now by a few (important) fields of enquiry such as socio-economic domain71 and 72. The fundamental question is inevitably that a true complex ABS cannot function with an externally devised set of rules, and not even using evolutionary algorithms of some sort since these are largely pre-defined as to scope. Even emerging ABS modelling including super-agents pre-supposes the super-ordinate set of rules, but this is definitely part of the envisaged schema for Metaloger: it is all a matter of degree and given the present computational paradigm, the nearest we can get to emulating what is ultimately a quantum-scale dilemma. We consider the effort to render human thought computable gets near the heart of the problem; add the GOMS aspect of anticipatory evolution of goals and we are nearer to the mind, and add the spice of destiny perhaps even consciousness.

The single determining feature of this area for CSG/M is the intention to model systems of abstract values and probably as some type of even more than usually disembodied agent roaming the Metaloger landscape. Already discussion of these rather arcane entities generates excitement, mirth, and discussion of the more profound as well as challenging questions of the limits of SCSG/M – and how to address these, usually as some even more arcane entity understood only by the philosophers on the team. As such they still accept the discipline of finding a way to relate such concepts to our real-world now, as writers have done for several thousand year so far.

At this stage of investigation we consider that modelling everything as a ‘species’ offers the most inclusive model and this avoids the question of what exists in reality rather than being a subjective figment of human imagination. We do not pursue questions that are circular as to what is real and what abstract; life and experience decides that as a convenience: included in experience is simulation, trial and error, and modelling. Metaloger has this ambiguity, the power of human contemplation before acting.

Statistical patterns

The exhibited complex behaviour of the social domain, demonstrated in the Metaloger multi-level enactments, will result in extraordinary patterns of behaviour analysed over various scales. But what will they mean; how can they be exploited; what is the ordering, search, filter equivalent in the Metaloger domain; how can they be integrated into societal processes? These are examples of the kind of research needed to model and apply the ‘engagement’ bag, i.e. to turn the raw science into usable concepts for everyday life. We have no doubt these are meaningless without the practitioners art of translating a concept into a practical way forward.

The data will be there to observe complex dynamics at work; there will be multiple Frames of Reference each putting some kind of label on each pattern; it is clear that the inferencing engine cannot be required to come up with some total set of patterns, for the obvious reasons to do with resources, overload etc. We are back to the origins and ordering of the raw data, and the significance(s) behind the MetaFoRs underlying the instantiated enactments. Meaning is subjective and temporal the result of those MetaFoRs in vogue just now.

There seems no doubt that as huge agglomerations of interacting autonomous entities get going there will be significant and interesting patterns of outcomes, varying according to their exercise of decision-making, resources available to sustain them, game-plans, constraints set by super-ordinate entities ( modified by any predilection to flout them), possible sub-strategies for collaboration and competition (symbiotic and predatory behaviours). Already the tone of this discussion is focussing on specifically human abilities to moderate behaviours according to value-systems. At this point we should add the bio-world since we inherit much of its features. These patterns are not generally usefully elicited by looking at real-life data because: firstly it is degraded by the lack of in-depth contextual qualification; secondly it is extremely difficult to capture the data concerning its dynamic aetiology; and thirdly its significance resides not in the base-data, but the multi-level context, dynamics, and their association with other relevant interactions. The means to this data are the full dynamic record captured in real-time as ‘societal enactments’. Already we are envisaging not just one statistical view but several, compiling a rich set of relevant patterns; although we have no view yet on whether the entire subject has to have the same dynamic structure and processing capabilities of Metaloger itself, we think this is likely since Control Theory states that a control

71 Beinhoker, Strategy World Congress Oxford 2000

72 Gotts, James Hutton institute/Lancaster Environment Centre



system has to have as many degrees of control as there are possible degrees of freedom in the system itself73. It is clear from such a perspective there is no limit to the dilemma since every control added modifies the system necessitating (in theory) a new control circuit. The answer of course resides in the inescapable external adjudicator, whose job is a kind of moderator seeking an answer of optimum yield rather than absolute precision, to which has to be added some view of the nature of risk attendant on the chosen level of control. There are interesting philosophical questions concerning these limits of complexity processing that concern sufficity versus ‘absolute truth’.

Whilst we are unlikely to agree on the concept of socio-physics as discussed in Cyberemotions74 we consider its ideas an important starting point for examining the limits of socio-technology also.

Topologies , ontologies, classifications

The Topology of Data is widely recognised as a feature relevant to Multi-level Complex Systems75, pervasive in real-life and the laboratory. Indeed, as ref 20 points out, its generalisation seems to pervade all problem domains from the fundamental particle up to the FuturICT Living Earth simulator. The first consideration is what topological features apply to what problem areas; the cited author points out the answers are different in the natural, the Biological, and the Human systems domains: but what this means does not have any obvious answers; discussion of natural systems often ends up using the language of intentionality albeit metaphorically. The strict mathematical definition of topologies as the geometric properties of a set of shapes that have a relationship with each other, unaffected by scaling has to be re-interpreted in a metaphorical sense to make it understandable and relevant to multi-level complex systems. Especially in societal dynamics we are interested in the topologies of multiple interacting abstract values and so the strict meaning has to be applied figuratively. This is the question concerning both ‘levels’ which have already been stated to have nothing to do necessarily with hierarchies and any other purely spatial characteristics but some more general definition of ‘relationship’ that has a pseudo or metaphorical ‘distance’ property; we are just starting to explore this general ‘translation’ aspect of modelling. I have started wondering if this is Prof.Plamen Simeonov’s Wandering Logic .

We offer a tentative starting definition to stimulate discussion. ‘Topology’ seems to be a synonym for ‘that measure governing the linkage between interacting things – as examples, distance, temporal, purpose, some scientific measure according to a relevant classification; more generically, something that denotes the extent and power of a linkage to affect the whole, where this is defined according to specific observable features, measures both quantitative and qualitative (the difficult types) and testable empirically.

The social domain is only just starting to receive enough interest, perhaps because of the need to address it numerically at the same time as logically. The author cites many examples and identifies some external measurement system as relevant (the interesting example is ‘Norms’; and we can note that such systems are as much bound up with vague but important qualities such as of extreme interest or concern, which starts to get us nearer to the area of complex human purpose and goals. Hence the observation that the subject is as much part of the practitioners art as the detached scientist: in the goal-oriented world it is usually necessary to choreograph the desired outcome in line with the team dancing to a result. Measure is a short-hand for ‘power’ and we know this is a crucial area of complex evolution. I think topology in society is the study of ‘power’, i.e. the application of some MetaFoR to exert influence over a different one. It may be obvious to those experiencing it, but how to define it in measurable and experimental terms is a challenge at the heart of computable society. Any ideas? The management industry spends a lot of time pondering this difficulty.

Possibly a new infrastructure of computable significance will come about from empirical observation of MetaFoRs in operation and the patterns of significance these reveal. The relation of these to numbers seems less useful than to logical significances (see mathematical formalisms earlier).

Network Theory

This area exhibits most starkly the difficulty of moving between the physical and figurative domains of science. As spatial and scale problems they are straightforward; as manifestations of human interconnectedness it is less easy to converse in the language of networks except by sticking in one or other of the science silos. Yet the topic seems one of the key bridges in CSG/M, as it has become in the world of electronic communication including social computing. The term ‘Network of Excellence’ has become universal in EU circles (sic!) but how many people can say what this means other than a figurative term of approval? The same question can be asked of ‘Network of Hate’; or of ‘Influence and corruption’; or of concern and action. So, instead of meaning ‘joined up’ its real significance lies in what the join means, i.e. the meta-level construct that is

73 Ashby & experts on control theory

74The EU 7

th Framework project “Cyberemotions”, http://www.cyberemotions.eu/links.html

75 Rasetti, ISI Torino (et al)



so difficult to pin down and apply. We know that the entire world of MetaFoRs is a network of interacting complex system components, and despite the diversity possibly the single computable network measurement is the force that any network component is able to marshal by group effects in order to apply itself to some other group of system components, in order to effect some change in the overall network topology.

Ecologies: viability & sustainability of Technology & Society entanglement

Ricardo Goncalves has identified the pervasiveness of technology as itself a formalism of complex adaptive systems, namely technology, including socio-technology, is a human designed component that itself constrains the behaviour of its sub-domain of the CAS. There is ample evidence currently of technology itself dictating the outcome of the complex adaptive system of which it is part. The mechanism of this is the ubiquitous appeal of technology at levels ranging from nostalgia, to awe, to practicalities of familiarity, to cost/investment and so on and so forth; society’s needs are not always paramount, dynamics both force change and sometimes suppress it. As Goncalves has pointed out, ‘technology’ is a critical operational component of most of modern society’s functioning as itself a constraint as well as an enabler; as JSB has said, technology is always an outdated paradigm. An operational problem is related with society’s readiness and willingness to evaluate and judge when the equation of change becomes inevitable; for example, today’s integrated use of heterogeneous applications and software tools that were not designed specifically to promote sustainable interaction, still are inherently suitable for limited cooperation support, even as their shelf-life of usefulness becomes unsustainable. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the science of change; systems interoperability needs to address goals that embrace near, medium-term, and strategic dimensions. This is another example of the micro/meso/macro bag. The current networked enterprise systems domain (i.e. FInES) has been designed from a complex technical business systems inter-connectedness/interoperability perspective but this is increasingly overtaken by global issues of the larger domain with multiple dimensions and multidisciplinary issues, and needs to be addressed using a more systemic and holistic way. The new focus is the ecology of systems. In a FInES, companies and the networks which they are part of, tend to follow a dynamic and evolutionary behaviour as in complex adaptive systems. Awareness of the known landscape or market dynamism tends to condition organization's behaviour which organizations wish to adapt themselves accordingly to the market demands and the availability of new systems and applications; the communities of networked organizations are very dynamic virtual environments, that in the advent of changes and updates require proper method to ensure the viability/sustainability of the interoperable ecosystem. However, the sustainability of the interoperable networked collaborative environment has not been systematically implemented, although it has been identified as a priority to keep the interoperability and deal with the dynamics of the network and its components. A major challenge is to have proper methodology and tools, introducing the innovative concept of life cycle management of interoperability for the sustainability of interoperable networks of enterprises, providing discovery capabilities through the methodology for detecting likely harmonisation breaking in Multi-level Complex Systems. There is no silver bullet or free lunch (I always like this comment....). Stafford Beer’s seminal Viable Systems Model (VSM)76 is a classic forerunner of this need.

Further Aspects: the limits of Socio-technology

This section goes beyond the mainstream aim of understanding and managing society’s dynamics, to the requirement to consider its limits: should we play God? The argument of this Paper is that mankind and her construction called society have the capability to mould her environment to continue the march of progress aka dominance of the world and the greatest imperative is to do this better. That is the human-centred arrogant view. The hypothesis is that CSG/M is a living design that can be continuously changed to get nearer to the abstract standard of ‘fitness for purpose’. This is the imperative of science and all human striving and society and all its components shows the greatest capacity for continuous change as a complex adaptive system. We also interface pervasively with the two other principle domains of CAS, the natural and the biological worlds. They are least susceptible to the treatment despite local advances and, moreover have greater come-back properties than the human species if we continue to put our world at risk: the higher the level of interference the greater the risk run. We have already highlighted the various dimensions amenable to achieve a symbiosis that will move towards a sustainable planet; sufficient to highlight these are almost universally to do with curbing mankind’s headlong selfish pursuits of his own ends at the expense of the natural and biological world. They are the least understood dimensions of CSG/M principally because their CAS evolves on a scale not within man’s ability to influence it. The most pernicious of society’s foolhardiness is to believe in progress in a direction that suits himself. The reverse is the case: Mankind’s biological inheritance and its pervasive influence on his/her ability to follow a rational thinking model of action The natural worlds pervasive capacity to operate on a scale that is virtually unamenable to change to suit mankind’s

designed ambitions

76 JSB Thesis ibid and see work of St Gallen University



The Third Man in this uncomfortable vista is the belief that technology will somehow be a continuous pervasive adaptation yielding an even greater super-race to come to mankind’s rescue (leaving people to merely consume the fruits of this new Garden of Eden.

All these uncomfortable dimensions of the human condition are relevant but unlikely to form part of the initial study and experiment described in S/DyM-CS, except where they form a limiting case that requires what in the systems world is called a legacy work-around, or in risk analysis a ‘watching brief’, or in society a return to basics.

Mankind’s biological inheritance

CSG/M will model aspects of our biological make-up where these have significant effects on the societal models (whether at a rational, behavioural, emotional, cognitive level). It is possible to view these areas as a reverse-meta model operation, or even a reverse-design constraint. Considerable focus is given to biological parallels in human make-up where what matters is how these vestigial aspects can conflict with the higher-levels of human understanding and action. Correspondingly they can be used to reinforce action when they become potentially pernicious. This is a very important limiting/boundary issue for CSG/M. It is summed up as how does our biological inheritance contribute to our functioning, whether for good or ill? It is hardly possible to dispense with the main biological drives, or even transmute these (except in the fantasies or satires of science fiction) but they are a real and potent force to be brought into the orbit of society – as they are already.

A strong affective component of all human action is the emotional dimension, as in most animals, associated chiefly with rearing off-spring, but additionally strongly carried over into ‘nurturing’ the intellectual capacity generally. The most important contribution of CSG/M is to reflect the twin poles of positive contribution and its reverse, as in manipulative MetaFoRs, using the biological urges to achieve undesirable control. So too as MetaFoRs demonstrate, is the tendency to manipulate this strong force to achieve individual and selfish ends, as in crowd behaviour and manipulation, from regimented activity, to circuses to all forms of propaganda, and modern consumerism. The only antidote is to become empowered oneself.

We can note that most forms of manipulation start by destroying the ability to feel a unique person that matters and whose contribution is valued. The positive outcome of Advanced technology and communication is the individual is enabled to side-step the official line and not become a hive or crowd resource.

The GAIA Hypothesis

This paper notes the consistent message of irreversible risk. It also notes that most attempts to address the problem area start from an assumption that we can somehow have our cake and eat it. To be even more pointed, the analysis is almost always ‘we’ can continue to have our cake and someone else will go hungry.

The contribution of CSG/M comes from universal involvement which breaks down these pernicious barriers and makes it harder to ignore the total consequences of decisions and actions.

The societal hypothesis behind CSG/M elevates human concern to a new kind of one-ness with the interconnected world ecology of which we are a part, with the greatest ability to act for the overall good.

The March of Technology and the Hubris of Man

This failure of the proper symbiosis of technology and thinking is a kind of reverse blindness: the social view is unimportant and not necessary to the inevitable march of technology and its exploitation by a grateful world.

The conspicuous absence of the societal component in addressing complexity is a reflection of the stand-off between soft and hard science and the uneasy adoption of technology in its resolution: the underlying difficulty is the lack of any paradigm of computable society and a supporting dominance of humanistic and cultural methods. Both critical dimensions to the domain of social complexity arise because of the fear of the unknown and of what a possible marriage of them both might bring. Each actually resents the other which is a manifestation of inferiority or hubris, or both reinforcing each other. CSG/M aims to fundamentally reverse this rather than just seek accommodations between them.

The model is shown in the Cyber-emotions project where technology is explored for the limits (if any) to technology becoming the dominant contributor to well-being, “avatars giving emotional advice to the people they model”. The model is techno-social, emotionally intelligent ICT, methods of ‘socio-physics’, exploring how far the electronic avatar can supplant the human. We can note, wryly, that the avatars display human stereo-types: females have breasts, bottoms, boots and legs. The males have chests muscles, and uniforms. CSG/M seeks a different model and this is crucial to the symbiotic interface between the electronic computable structure of society and the human roots of real affective behaviour of the human species. Neither needs to exploit people as clever and robotic but leverage the one thing the human animal is good at: to contemplate how to improve our lot. CSG/M is a billion miles from the panopticon or even the Taylorist vision



Conclusions: a working and evolving experiment

It is clear there is no silver-bullet, but only patient engagement with the complexity of society because it is our best resource as the pressure grows to find global solutions to our world. Although we might like to achieve a kind of big-bang this is unworkable given the scale of change contemplated and envisaged. The best strategy is to select components and cases that will demonstrate do-ability and even forewarn of the dimensions of scaling up. Some pointers might include: Immediate engagement in society to establish the new paradigm of people, engaged, enabled and empowered A deliberate contrast between the old traditional model of [enlightened?] top-down authority determining the future and

how we behave and act and the new bottom-up model of involvement The focus could be to take the models of 2020 society and ask for formal cooperation in validating CSG/M The expectation of the technology including socio-technology is that of pilot trials without expectation of immediate big-

bang gains

The effort at this stage is a workable experiment that validates the approach: scaling up is a standard issue in all complexity scenarios since a scaled up model does not work on a mathematical basis since some entities have built-in scientific limits – as is well known and continuously experienced in real life. Eventually the game-plan would start to fail as it exceeds the capacity of the field-of-play to accommodate all the performers at the same time. That would be time for serious attention to the real scales of the paradigm change.

No one even knew if the Manhattan project would deliver first time.

Meta-Modelling, Tools and Problem solving: the limits of DyM-CS/FOCAS/& Science of Global Systems

The list of formalisms discussed are only as good as practical use shows them to be, which is itself an evolving applied science. Meta-Modelling, Tools and Problem solving likewise is a progressive take-up of the socio-technology that will enable us to fulfil this destiny; it will empower, enable, and engage us all in the societies of our World.

S/DyM-CS has been shown to be a specification of how complex society works, and a limited experiment at the level of a prototype (whether working or artificial is an open question at this stage).

A working CSG/M able to autonomously function is the goal of FOCAS (and “the Science of Global Systems”)

A “Science of Global Systems” is the test of Kondratiev Shift, more precisely not sitting back and announcing retrospectively “it has happened” (or not), but bringing it about, using socio-technology to the utmost limits of its potential77.

The argument of this final section is it is all as good as we want it to be.

We suggest that this troika of Calls investigating Complexity Science be considered as a single holistic challenge when the subject is ‘society whilst following the schema to meet the bounded scope of each successive Call. It also has a fall-back resilience benefit since the timescale for the first Call is very short, the second follows on its heel, (and the third is arguably something of nothing, a kind of ‘also ran’ in the race to pin down complexity.

DyM-CS

One of the most significant features of the discussions so far across the field of DyM-CS is that of how formalisms and methods can be turned into practical tools to apply complexity science; indeed the proposal for a “Unified Theory & Computational Tools”78 makes this connection explicit: it recognises that the process of theory and application is essential to complexity studies. As with several other initiatives we are all inventing new things; the concept of Geometric super-structures, multi-scale Trees being stated as able to shed light on how complexity works, supporting explication of social phenomena. The extent of working-up so far achieved (as with other proposals) is important to making a selection of lines to pursue, and also indicative of the need to collaborate since combinations of tools is necessary to delivering results. This line of discussion emphasises the need to communicate and translate across ideas, schemas and their application in pursuit of problem solving (the goal of all science, not just applied science). Any method, formalism has to be replicated on real-world problems to test the outputs.

77 T S Eliot, An Essay on Poetry defines it as “Words charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree”

78 Yahia et al INRIA/CMIMA/LEGOS, France



The S/DyM-CS experiment has a steep up-front R&D phase which we conjecture will benefit all DyM-CS work in its quest to relate formalisms to life; it has to design and build experimental environments for every domain; as this ramps up, they all form an invisibly linked increasingly dynamic test-bed. The operation and control of this test bed replicates real-world operational life: real people, processes, problems to be tackled, training and trials to get to grips with an explicitly defined complexity enactment, and (the fun stage) role playing the simulation through both formal, informal and what-if scenarios to see what emerges – i.e. prove the operation of complexity using the tools etc on the specified problems. It is a new computational paradigm but like most such movements it is built from existing tools put together in new ways as well as exploiting innovation (Metaloger could well be a candidate for the novel computation Call; we should consider this.)

Meta-modelling is the tool to integrate effort across disparate fields of endeavour joined up by complexity. Whilst different domains have different conceptual understandings of the word ‘meta’, we postulate it is the defining key to all complexity and each domain will have a unique flavour of this but in some way to be worked-out all can be reconciled in some grand unifying theory – actually we believe unifying practical effort the reconciliation is a practitioners art79 Society is a super-ordinate structure for this, doing it all the time to devise what should be the model for human activity and life generally, tomorrow. S/DyM-CS takes this idea to its limits and these will need to be rigorously and completely exercised to yield convincing proof of societal dynamics. As in a theatrical performance, a controlled simulated environment has to be created on the stage of the experiment in a similar manner to (say) an aircraft simulator; the scenarios are realistic even though contrived (there is an argument that simulation is more challenging than real-life because it can be designed to be more intense). The up-front work is to create the performance and the realistic environment and the means to run through its enactments. Meta-models are the up-front design as in any organisations systems: A vignette of CSG/M will help give an idea of its in vivo nature; this living world has to be created as the living

simulation for S/DyM-CS proof of societal dynamics: o Practical conduct of life generates a picture of common constructs forming a baseline template to deliver results

efficiently, economically, displaying ‘fitness for purpose’; called Computational Socio-geonomics (CSG) these formalisms represent a rigorous definition of what is in actuality disparate: it attempts to solve the Tower of Babel syndrome. The schemas of CSG constitute a formal definition of the Meta Frames of Reference (Meta-FoRs) operating at any moment in the past, present and simulated future. The congruence with Metaphor is deliberate, (try entering the word MetaFoR into an automatic spell checker). Proof of concept requires a huge participatory involvement including a mix of real and doctored simulated scenarios

o Metaloger is an environment (actually an ecology system) that enables the templates to be processed and kept up to date as a living representation of the evolution of the ecology; the area of interest is everything to do with the rate of evolution and its significance, from improving it to its overall governance i.e. do we want it to evolve in this way

o The living aspect of Metaloger is the sum of actual systems enactments and the results these generate - billions of them in actuality every second. These are the real-life operational systems of the world. They generate the data for S/DyM-CS through individual participation in the huge Metaloger experiment. This is generated by individual Metaloger Labs that are a partnership between Metaloger and Society (enterprises, organisations and people). Simplistically the data is the dynamics of the fundamental systems of values; the practical world is many levels of real-world interest across societal sectors from individuals, through organisations and enterprises, up to government

Whether the experiment is the gradual build-up of real-life Metaloger (the deployment and industrial ramp up process) or bounded simulations of real-life the initial phase is construction of the infrastructure of the instantiations, using pre-defined components which will generate the behaviour targeted. In the case of CSG/M much effort goes into the engagement aspect, i.e. the involvement of real-people playing roles o The focus of interest is evolutionary, emergent, or catastrophic change, triggered by (mostly) tiny actions and their

cumulative effect. Experience shows people diverge all the time from standard templates for many reasons (elucidated by S/DyM-CS dynamics and processing of these by inferencing systems). The raw material of these divergences arises in the sum of all living enactments of the models by people – everyone, everyday, everywhere, involving everything. These are operational systems of the world, now almost universally computerised. The policy issue is what rate of change to target; the reality is this is a chaotic set of perturbations, ultimately leading to new templates representing a new (temporary) stability

o What stability and change signify is external to CSG/M, driven by the maturity of the experiment, its learned experience, and super-ordinate goals. The future and destiny are not processable by computational means (or any other for that matter). They are the best estimates of thinking (Wo)mankind. CSG/M gives some handle on this through its inclusive structuring of evidence, called On Computable Society

79 ? ref to be checked out



o CSG/M and instantiations of Metaloger Labs have the potential to provide a unifying experimental method across many fields of complexity. An initial experiment has to choose the scope that will elucidate and validate the working of S-DyM-CS, i.e. - Depending on decisions by the EU it may be possible to take one domain and use it as a

research/development and test bed - At least one and possibly more in vivo experiments are proposed where the real-life scenario will still need to

be embellished with either simulated enactments and or legacy real-live data be used with simulated user scenarios. The whole issue of the design of the experiments is a difficult question and will require controlled work-arounds to rigorously demonstrate and prove S/DyM-CS

- Possibly other scenarios or domains will come forward from the rest of the DyM-CS Community and these would test the real-life linkages more objectively

The design, experiment and proof-of-concept of Meta-modelling is the main focus of S/DyM-CS. It will deliver a specification for the next phase of the journey: FOCAS will be the extrapolation of this to a unified model of the totality of Society, tested and applied across the systems of the world.



FOCAS

FET has emphasised a logical progression in research into complexity that distinguishes the theory of the formalisms of dynamics; the operating principles of any complex adaptive system, and the methods by which control is exercised over both the former aspects. The middle topic in this troika is FOCAS. However the question to be addressed is whether this troika is either useful, or correct, or is amenable in practice to being a workable division of labour. I would argue it fails the same tests as the Taylorist industrial model, it alienates and ultimately fails, as the Panopticon did; above all you cannot divide and rule people; you can only motivate them by aligning the goals perceived as desirable with their own motivations. Failure to observe this truth generally confounds interference in any holistic system. Success only happens by optimising the whole system and to do this means constant alignment of the entire component parts – not necessarily what an immediate goal might desire.

We propose this principle is thought through at every stage of ramping up roll-out of CSG/M which we equate with delivering a Proposal for the FOCAS Call. What does it ask for and what is needed?

Objective ICT-2011 9.10: FET Proactive: Fundamentals of Collective Adaptive Systems (FOCAS)

The socio-technical fabric of our society more and more depends on systems that are constructed as a collective of heterogeneous components and that are tightly entangled with humans and social structures. Their components increasingly need to be able to evolve, collaborate and function as a part of an artificial society. A key feature of Collective Adaptive Systems (CASs) is that they comprise many units/nodes, which have their own individual properties, objectives and actions. Decision-making is distributed and possibly highly dispersed, and interaction between the units may lead to the emergence of unexpected phenomena. They are open, in that nodes may enter or leave the collective at any time, and boundaries between CASs are fluid. The units can be highly heterogeneous (computers, robots, agents, devices, biological entities, etc), each operating at different temporal and spatial scales, and having different (potentially conflicting) objectives and goals. The objective is to establish a foundational framework for CASs.

Target outcomes

a) Operating Principles: principles by which CASs can operate. These should go beyond existing control and optimisation theories, taking into account the diversity of objectives within the system, conflicts resolution, long term stability, and the need to reason in the presence of partial, noisy, out-of-date and inaccurate information

b) Design Principles: principles necessary to build and manage CASs, such as enabling the emergence of behaviour and facilitating prediction and control of those behaviours. These principles should exploit the inherent concurrency and include methods for system validation.

c) Evolutionary Properties: properties concerning the evolutionary nature of CASs, e.g. open-ended (unbounded) evolutionary systems, the trade-off and interaction between learning and evolution, and the effect of evolution on operating and design principles.

FOCAS can be seen as a specification of sponsor requirements for CSG/M and the Consortium will respond to the Call by showing that the experiment called CSG/M will deliver everything asked for in the Call; it will go further by showing that our FOCAS response is an integrated and holistic one rather than any extent of entangled mix. The match is complete barring some mainly philosophical disagreements over the terminology, e.g. the entire basis of society envisaged in this Paper is itself the complex adaptive system entirely represented in the tool-set CSG/M : this is more than ‘depends on’ or ‘tightly entangled’; the concept and its operation is not an artificial society; it would be potentially dangerous for computers, robots, agents, devices to be able to have “different (potentially conflicting) objectives and goals” – except that these would all be a total failure of proper governance which would not be possible nor succeed in a human governed solution; operating principles are entirely and completely the purview of human purposeful behaviour (whether we are good at it or not yet); all the language of concern and control is inherent and not an add-on however well intentioned; put starkly, the purpose of CSG/M is for (wo)mankind to at last take full responsibility for the evolution of our world, our behaviours; external control is an outdated classic response, whether the system is of God or Man (ignoring the Marxist view).

What is not philosophical is that FOCAS is about the essential and unalterable responsibility of the human species to use in a fit and proper manner its unique capacity for abstract thought and operation of systems of value. The systems view must not and will not separate either the socio-technic, or the techno-social dimensions: there is only a single socio-technology. The entirety of the operating, design, and evolutionary principles and practices form a single programme which will never be static but continuously evolving – including purposefully regressing (a special case). We will completely move from the current paradigm of systems being somehow separated from their target operational domain, usually devised externally, and then ‘handed over’ to the ‘Users’. The problem we have and recognise is that of adapting to change: that is the fundamental challenge of socio-technology (the stand-off between hard and soft science has been a collusion to avoid its message); the real challenge is embracing our role to optimise our world, future, and destiny rather than hand this over to authority or a system of the Gods.



The Science of Global Systems

This canvas of the research into CSG/M leaves open the full extent of paradigm change and the potential to be Kondratiev shift 6 “On Computable Society”. That requires full roll-out of a 'Science of Global Systems'. This focus is a specific application of CSG/M and will serve as a test-bed.

Objective ICT-2011.9.14 'Science of Global Systems'

Progress in global systems dynamics is required to better understand the interactions between ecological and socio-economic systems and to better respond to global environmental change. Global coordination requires new developments in science based on global system models that span the whole range from local regional to global multi-national decision making. A science of global systems must pay special attention to the interface with policy and society to better ground the scientific tools. IT will support the massive needs in computing and data handling and help establishing new links between science, policy and society.

Target outcomes: a) Improve use of data and knowledge from the past to choose between options for the future: Tools to represent

uncertainty and to construct chains of causality (narratives) from models and data to outcomes for use in socio-political decision processes

b) ICT tools for better use- and user centred modelling techniques, data collection and user model interaction. Methods to address use of system models in a policy decision context

c) Understanding of distributed multilevel policy decision processes. Identify system patterns relevant for properties like resilience, vulnerability, and regime shift tendencies

d) Use and develop formal languages, constructive type theory and domain specific languages to make policy interfaces of models more adaptable to changing contexts.

Expected impact:

��Better links between modellers and stakeholders facilitated by new policy-relevant concepts in modelling of global systems;

��Overcome fragmentation in research in various policy-relevant models resulting in a better uptake of modelling results for global coordination of policies;

��Policy uptake in targeted areas: socio-ecological system and climate change impacts, innovation as a global system, dynamics of the financial system and new models for economy

The above is not so much a “Science” as a “practice” that differentiates this Call from the two preceding ones; the extrapolation of societal dynamics up to the global level is not different in concept but more scary in practice: it leaves no room for manoeuvre or fall-back – but we already know this is the stake. It probably forms a useful specification of principles and practices that need to be in place to have a chance of achieving a Kondratiev Shift as envisioned. Put bluntly, there is little room for alternative solutions in the CSG/M world; either the players join in the game and compete openly for the truth or we continue and perpetuate the fragmented world where the outcome is not the truth but the power of the strongest. This is an important difference in perspective that goes beyond mere terminology: we regard it as unhelpful to emphasise any distinction between global and local dynamics; there is no difference between local and global systems that matters; the range is continuous and largely illusory – one man’s metier is another man’s posture; governance and policy (an ingredient of governance) does not in any sense ground scientific tools (they are either fit for purpose or not worth using): governance determines that fitness according to criteria that operate continuously from the smallest bottom-up action to the top-down view of Final Causes, and has already been discussed as the mover and shaker of dynamics. IT is definitely not the old model of clever computing but part (and the subservient part) of a new paradigm identified as “Computable Society” (we agree there are ICT challenges that will be instrumental in enabling the vision of CSG/M as leading to a Kondratiev shift; this is a scale and paradigm issue); most fundamental of all is the phenomenon that it is not extrapolation to any global level of power or the exercise of it that determines the final outcome of our world but the myriad of tiny actions contributing to a global outcome because ‘they’ believe in it and are empowered enabled, and engaged to get on with it. ‘They’ is both people and somehow any agency of purposeful dynamics [discuss – 2 marks]

The new science is the applied science of “Computable Society” and top of that hierarchy is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and these are values operating continuously from our earliest biological needs up to the highest levels of world ecology, concern for sustainability, fairness, well-being – already identified, especially by FuturICT. These determine the effort we put into understanding and applying the new science and its practical manifestations, properties and operation. It is not an external nor ever an extraneous system of systems but a holistic expression of mankind’s ability to fashion and prosecute a decent world order. The expected impacts are all typical signs of becoming empowered engaged, and enabled in this dance of the systems and not compliant ‘users’. The dance concerns the successful expression of Metaloger tapestries onto the canvas of life; the efficacy of the tools listed is merely a property of getting the toolset correct, honed, into use, and working



well. The tool never dictates the outcome (the tail wagging the dog syndrome). The Call identifies criteria that give an indication of fitness for purpose, but at the wrong level: they blame the tools (heard that one before!) when the real issue is getting the system of values working well (the oldest challenge of mankind). Society and ourselves are the only tools of socio-technology at our disposal.

The call suggests some useful criteria dimensioning fitness for purpose. It can be noted these are all societal and people oriented criteria (which is what we would expect); the challenge is how to assign computable measures to these. At this stage we can only make statements of intent: we are entering a new field of computation, data, meaning and measurement. The Call gets it right when it refers to [target a)] chains of causality.... narratives... The meaning of ‘life’ is still not adequately understood so as to enable mensuration of human volition; ultimately this is a property of desire, consumption of resources and sense of satisfaction – sounds familiar? That it is easier and more profitable to feed the lower levels of desire is well shown by modern western values; all we can do is register the alternative perspective which is the fuller and more meaningful set of values underpinning what is worthwhile. We expect to locate answers in deeper study of memes as but one component of a MetaFoR and to find they are synonymous with them (an interesting part-for-the-whole type of phenomenon).

The Science of Global Systems will be the roll-out of S/DyM-CS and FOCAS on an irreversible and total scale (which is the definition of a Kondratiev Shift). The shift is that every facet of developing a sustainable planet is the outcome of a common evolutionary system of systems integrating the entirety of purposeful values underpinning the actions of Mankind. This is never a foregone conclusion.



APROGRAMMEFOREUGLOBALOPPORTUNITY

CSG/M is a simulator of society; its limits are only the pace of research and of take-up. S/DyM-CS addresses that aspect as the formalism and experimental environment for eliciting understanding of how societal complex dynamics work; the long term aim is as a living affordance for applying this understanding to real-world systems. Society is a Living Lab; complexity research needs to exploit this. Neither S/DyM-CS nor the real world can get the answer correct first time, but evolution of the experiment has the potential for continuous co-evolution of answers within a strategic goal and tactical plan. This is the same challenge for S/DyM-CS and real-world take up.

All society its enterprises organisations, informal groups, governmental bodies, individuals, pressure groups, managers, decision-makers, policy and planning specialists can be expected to have an interest in the new world projected since everyone is interested in solving their own perceived pressing problems – as current world conditions are starkly showing. The S/DyM-CS research scope can be defined as how much will generate sufficient simulated dynamics to yield valid results; the real-world can define its scope in terms such as ‘fitness for purpose’; these are synonymous. The practical research dimension is society’s choices in how far to go with the living experiment: for S/DyM-CS this is a bounded CSG/M experiment sufficient to exercise a ‘game-plan’ behind the chosen bounded

experiment to show complexity in society can be validly and usefully modelled for real-life SMART SOCIETY the scenarios constituting the game-plan are real life strategies for success following

rules appropriate to the domain of the game, and interacting with other games. This is real-life meta-modelling. The whole thing constitutes a complex game of life. The abstraction into a logical formulation that can be computed is the goal of the mathematical aspect of rendering the game computable. Simplistically and colloquially the grounded set of rules are specific to each enterprise scenario, its processes, and real-life constraints and rules. The scope to be proven is the ability to abstract up all levels of interest a coherent model-able set of logic rules (and to be able to translate these back to the full richness of the original presenting scenario). For this to succeed the twin domains of logical formalism and real-life scenarios have to develop a workable language of communication between their two formalisms in order to advance each sides contribution to the simulation.

The data for this is continuous multi-level living societal enactments. The experiment takes place in vivo and on itself. But, the affordance is not an application. CSG/M is a generic emulator of society, based on a toolset that will further our findings in complexity science. It is neutral itself and does not judge societal value; only specific instantiations do that; these will eventually be the local applications conducted in what we call Metaloger Labs; participating in and informing the Grand Design which is the SOCIONOME component of CSG/M. It can be seen as the first open source EU research experiment. The toolset contains a designed set of evolutionary meta-models which are enacted in pursuing the game-plan. There is an huge industry to design the game rules of every participating enterprise, sector, organisation, group, and ‘people’, engaged, empowered and enabled.

The limits of CSG/M are not knowable in theoretical or practical technology terms (apart from the quantum limits on available energy and information processability). The practical aspects of sufficity versus simulating ever more arcane futures already begin to appear necessary (for survival). Within such boundaries is always the potential for some critical event and computable action – even if only extinction. S/DyM-CS will ensure an improved set of options for survival until further break-throughs might become realistic. Simulation in the societal domain is about constantly re-enacting this drama of opportunity versus problem. Control presupposes a fixed trajectory; cybernetics looks for how to steer towards a shifting goal as well as a shifting set of journey options. The key to this is thinking oneself out of trouble – and not relying on any magic solution. It is a living canvas where the only certainty is change.

None of this in any way diminishes the moral, ethical, social, and GAIA responsibility common to all mankind and pursued with varying degrees of success already. The dilemma is that the pace of change and impact exceeds the capacity of the current control systems. Complexity science will increase the capacity qualitatively and quantitatively. CSG/M is merely a toolset to support this, although this is the fundamental skill also of (Wo)man-kind.

Complexity in the Real World – from Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS) intelligence to intelligent Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS)

THE PEOPLES’ TOOLKIT – GOVERNANCE/POLICY/STANDARDS (GPS) MODELLING FOR ALL: A PROPOSED PRACTICAL FRAMEWORK FOR

GOVERNANCE/POLICY/STANDARDS (GPS) IN A COMPLEX WORLD


8. OUTCOME

The output of this response to the DyM-CS Call followed by the ramp-up over the two subsequent Calls, will bring together a range of expert scientist and practitioner skills in the domains of complexity, society, and technology to re-fashion these domains into a single tool-set to process S/DyM-CS. The inversion identified above will be a new type of technology called socio-technology which is in an important sense a socio-technocratic vision of society which we assert is how it should be. It recaptures an integration perhaps only seen in a few of society’s models over the entire span of human existence, but with the whole benefits of modern technological capabilities. It is the final frontier in an evolutionary process identified by Darwin’s collaborator in 1864 [ ref 2 earlier].

The scale of the experiment is everything, everywhere, everyday, everybody. The progression from tentative experiment and prototype trial to universal exploitation within the systems called society will be a product of the efforts of science and society. The industrial opportunity for EU is to deliver the framework for this which is far more than new ICT (it is this), it is a new kind of co-evolution, to be delivered to its global participating Community of Practice. It is not fanciful to anticipate paradigm change (that is the product of endeavour); society will determine whether this work in complexity science heralds Kondratiev shift 6 “On Computable Society”.

9. TIMELINE

The timeline for CSG/M is not governed primarily by the S/DyM-CS experiment; that is simply the initial tentative step in a new world everyone finds difficult to pin down. Society however has the capability (and right) to demand action to change an unacceptable situation and force change. There are already several initiatives with an interest in SMART SOCIETY and we should anticipate further perturbation of the research agenda to open up this issue; a possible timeline needs to be on the EU Research Strategy Agenda now; it should not need to wait for the DyM-CS Call outcome which should be incremental. We suggest (tentatively): 6. S/DyM-CS: Societal engagement, proof-of concept, Specification and Prototyping phase: 3-4 yrs 7. S/FOCAS: First-follower trials & roll-out the CSG/M infrastructure of societal complexity: 4-8 yrs

1. Component interest groups include: FInES Science base; Paradiso; FuturICT 2. Industrial interest is currently being solicited 3. EnoLL is an obvious group to be consulted 4. International reach is an obvious priority for action given the societal dimension 5. The 2020 canvas needs to take note of the societal potential from this work.

8. S/Science of Global Systems EU led, Industrial grade, global deployment, tuning global society: 10-15 yrs 9. A flagship-scale effort could do all phases simultaneously, delivering paradigm change: ≤ 12-20 yrs 10. Kondratiev shift can be targeted to radically influence our vision for a new world FUTURE: ≤ 50 YRS

10. CONCLUSION

On Computable Society can provide the new basis for a world that needs to break the excesses of the industrial age, the interim information age deluge, and self-destructive obsessions in many guises: this is enablement, engagement and empowerment to be involved in complex human purposefulness. The DyM-CS Community can be the spearhead for this, but SMART SOCIETY is the real owner. The tentative framework for this research needs to explain how it will all be coordinated; it needs to shift up a gear; most of all it needs a grand vision that can drive the whole thing. A complexity focus is the ultimate energising stimulus, that can leverage the whole collection of individual research initiatives: It is essential to either wake-up FuturICT or strike out for an alternative game plan originating in Society An immediate action is to lobby for a scale of Coordination and Support Action (CSA) that will from the start focus towards

exploitation and build the essential society lobby and participation. Can we afford not to succeed in this quest? That is the Khunian/Popper answer to why this work is necessary; you can neither falsify human purpose nor prove it will succeed. You can only put the Genie back in the bottle and get on with it.