We presented our vision for the future of this project to our leadership today. Among the feedback was this important point:
Humanitarian work is only part of the Secretariat's need. Much of what Secretariat does lives in a higher layer of abstraction. Diplomacy happens through dialog, which historically has meant people gathering in a room, discussing a thing, and producing a record of the thing they discussed. So, for example, over the past 70 years, this has produced a massive archive of these conversations in the form of audio recordings. These recordings capture a very important, but currently unusable, history of the United Nations.
All of this to say:
In the same way that Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information,” one of the UN's major needs is to organize the UN system's information. This opens up challenge areas including:
- How might we help diplomats have and access the right information at the right time?
- How might we help these conversations be more clear and actionable?
- How might we take the knowledge that is referenced and created and help it become a useful, thoughtful, collective brain?
Making Sense
I’m reminded of Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think,” which is a long read but probably worth revisiting. He wrote it just after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were both terribly perfect examples of how we’d learned to use our scientific research use but had not learned how to really really think carefully and critically around what we knew. We have become great at accumulating knowledge, but we are not great at putting that knowledge to use.
"Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom."
"The difficulty seems to be,” he says, "not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships."
He proposes the Memex, a collective memory machine for science. This was before the invention of the computer, so he was quite ahead of his time. We now have the technology. The challenge isn’t technological, it’s a human challenge. It’s a usability challenge. How do you create an archive that is responsive and actionable?
From data to wisdom
The Secretariat is sitting on seven decades of conversations, many of these have changed the shape of the world. And many of these have fallen through the cracks.
The brilliant astronomer Clifford Stoll said, "Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom."
How might we make better use of the piles of data the Secretariat is accumulating, and help that information turn into actionable wisdom?
PS: As a bonus, please enjoy Stroll's totally manic "Call to Learn" from TED 2008 -
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