World leaders crowd source solutions to global security

World leaders who took part in a recent online debate about global security reached agreement that 5 percent of all donations to major disasters should be set aside for a United Nations international crisis preparedness fund, according to recommendations released on Monday by a Brussels-based think tank.

The group developed its recommendations using a unique methodology, which involved culling ideas from more than 3,800 international experts, government policymakers and activists during a five-day online dialogue. Participants deliberated ways the European Union and NATO could cooperate to protect the world from rapidly evolving threats. Some global security experts said this technique, often called crowd-sourcing, also could be applied to guide American foreign policy.

The disaster preparedness fund was one of 10 recommendations in a report released by the Security and Defense Agenda in Brussels and backed by the EU and NATO.

A team of 26 online hosts -- all subject matter experts or government officials -- moderated the debates, or, in this case, conversation threads, from Feb. 4 to Feb. 9. The event, which organizers called a jam, differed from a virtual conference or online brainstorming meeting in that the 4,000 posts were mined by analytical software IBM developed to identify the best ideas. Other partners included the European Commission, the U.S. Mission to NATO, the Munich Security Conference, the Defense Ministry in France and the U.S. State Department.

"We had all this material after the jam," said James Kevin Mac Goris, head of communications for the Security and Defense Agenda. The resulting report is a combination of computer-generated and human analysis by SDA researchers and IBM specialists. "Essentially, the computer data-mining gave us the rough cut and then it was the researchers who made the final [analysis] to find the diamonds," he said.

For example, with some manual assistance, the software ranked the proposals based on the expertise of the person who submitted the post, as well as on the similarities between the proposal's words and words in other comments. In one instance, the tool initially indicated that the most popular concepts were "NATO" and "EU," because those words showed up most frequently. Staff then manually downgraded the significance of the two words to uncover more telling words such as "collaboration" and "citizens."

Most participants in the jam worked at research institutions and in government, but members of the private sector, advocacy groups and the media also were allowed to contribute.

The conversation had its moments of levity, as well. An official with the program recounted one episode in which an ambassador to NATO, who often opposes the organization's policies, said in jest "that NATO might as well go home."

Among the more serious recommendations incorporated into the 10 released on Monday were suggestions that NATO develop a civilian wing to manage nonmilitary aspects of operations and the EU use new media to consult European experts and the public on security threats.

Most of the online discourse focused on coordination between the EU and NATO (360 posts), followed by a better use of civilian and military capabilities (238 posts), a strategy for the stabilization of Afghanistan (144 posts), and the options for improving relations with Russia (129 posts).

The purpose of the crises preparedness reserve would be to capitalize on the fleeting media attention to humanitarian disasters for funding long-term readiness initiatives, according to the report.

During large-scale crises such as the earthquake in Haiti, "when the camera teams have left, local governments have seldom enough support" to bolster their defenses with modern tools such as tsunami warning systems, the report stated.

"The problem I see is that the country gets the money after something has happened, not before," Gen. Alois Hirschmugl, humanitarian affairs adviser to the Austrian chief of defense staff, wrote during the jam.

Mac Goris said participants seemed to censor themselves less when speaking online than they do when speaking in public. In the federal government, members of the military often strategize in secure rooms where civilians cannot listen to conversations.

"Certainly in the United States, there is normally a tendency to wall off meetings that have active-duty personnel. . . . So it's difficult to get that kind of interaction" that the jam elicited, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a military research group based in n Alexandria, Va. He did not participate in the jam, but praised the effort.

Commentators had to sign up for the event using e-mail addresses associated with the organizations they would represent, but they also could add personal Web mail addresses, which allowed them to write from home on the weekend.

"It's far from social media. It's quite a structured system," Mac Goris explained. "You establish what the subject is. You establish your areas of conversation. You establish who is going to turn up."

This approach to decision-making could help solve U.S. foreign affairs problems as well, some American-based security specialists said. "Jams can be useful tools for busy U.S. policymakers to ensure that internal policy reviews and decisions don't suffer from the limits of group think or bureaucratic stovepipes," said Damon Wilson, vice president and director of international security at The Atlantic Council, which helped organize the event. Before joining the Washington-headquartered think tank, he served as special assistant to the president and senior director for European Affairs at the National Security Council.

But Wilson cautioned jams are not a substitute for formal deliberative discussions -- instead they can serve as useful reality check.

Computer security, a strategic priority for the United States, was not a major area of analysis. "The idea of cybersecurity was touched on, but it wasn't actually mined in detail," Mac Goris said. Participants did note, however, the world's growing reliance on the Internet for economic and military communications creates new risks.

The paper and various posts alluded to the notion that online social networking can promote trust among international parties -- trust that can then be applied to real-world ground operations. "The technology exists now to effectively collaborate and share information, but what often stands in the way are cultural and organizational trust issues between players," wrote Navy Cmdr. Chad Hixson with the U.S. Joint Forces Command.

Some outside researchers who reviewed the report applauded the effort to address international security through controlled crowd-sourcing. "In my way of thinking, it's certainly a great improvement" compared to attending a conference, Pike said. "I was never a big fan of meetings."

U.S. Adm. James G. Stavridis, NATO's supreme allied commander in Europe, logged into the event from a jet traveling at 33,000 feet high en route to a NATO ministerial meeting in Istanbul.

Overall, the jam seemed to achieve accord on areas of soft power, or influence gained through attraction rather than coercion, but some differences of perspective among EU and NATO countries are unavoidable, Pike said.

"Norway has a much more activist foreign policy than Bosnia, and Poland is worried about Russia in a way that Portugal is not," he said. "Once we start talking about the European Union, the talk tends to turn to low impact, soft power topics because otherwise there wouldn't be too much to talk about. If we think about the last half millennium of history, that's the good news. If you can get the French and the Germans together and that's just happy talk, that's a major accomplishment."