musings of an itinerant lover

Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down with a number of colleagues at the NASA Ames Research Center for an all-day meeting related to understanding a coherent approach to global water sustainability. One of the themes that seemed to run throughout the day was that we have put our efforts (in this particular case for water sustainability efforts) into fragmented silos that often remain isolated. This, of course, reflects a fragmented approach to the generation of knowledge whereby we have put knowledge in these silos and have gone to great lengths to keep them separate. One university professor in the group referred to his own division where he spoke of 3 different chairs of different areas of water management that never interacted with each other. For any of us that have spent any length of time in academic institutions this comes as no surprise.

If we believe that reality is an integrated whole, then a fragmented approach to the generation of knowledge will never approximate an accurate understanding of the underlying structure of reality. No wonder then that our social systems (i.e. governance, economies, etc.), built upon our perception of the structure of reality, often don’t seem in line with the rest of the biosphere.

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I’ve had the incredible opportunity of late via SecondMuse to collaborate with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, World Bank and NASA in an initiative that brings together disaster relief experts and software engineers to work on identifying key challenges to disaster relief and developing solutions to these critical issues. These codejams are a series of Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) events that will bring the best and brightest together for a “give camp” to solve real world-problems related to Crisis/Disaster Relief.

The thrill for me is not just that this is an incredible partnership between the disaster risk community and the software engineering community, but that it involves three of the world’s largest corporations who are generally known to compete aggressively with each other. In this endeavor, however, they are not only co-sponsoring this event, but actually co-organizing it. The organizing team is composed of champions in these organizations who are looking beyond strict allegiance to the corporations they represent and instead choosing a wider allegiance. The challenges, of course, are clear in that this collaboration is happening in an environment that expects and often encourages competition between the organizations but then again…what noble effort has not met with challenge at its inception.

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