Past and Future Collaborative Expedition Workshops    (3UYA)

Collaborative Expedition Workshop #70, February 19, 2008, at NSF    (3UYB)

NOTE - new call-in number - Remote Teleconference Access:    (3VLM)

Title: The Power of Story and Open Standards in National Preparedness    (3UYC)

A. Draft Workshop Purpose    (3UYL)

This half-day workshop provides an opportunity for participants to advance conducive conditions for national preparedness. The compelling role of business narrative will frame the subsequent introduction to the National Response Framework, an on-going initiative that includes establishment of multi-disciplinary Communities of Practice. Building on best practices from international disaster preparedness standards to on-going state and local efforts, participants will have the opportunity to learn and contribute to this on-going challenge of unprecedented scale, complexity, and significance to national health and security. The impact of open standards for national readiness at both strategic and solution levels will also be highlighted by examining the forces, timing, and artifacts by which transformative standards emerge.    (3UYM)

How can the right information and information structures support effective problem representation? How can critical information from multiple sectors and domains be right "at hand", "in place", and appropriately accessed, when needed? How can effective roles and responsibilities be established for a myriad of professionals from multiple settings who need to respond to uncertainties with effective collaboration in an ever-expanding, data and information-rich world? What is the role of business narratives in advancing the shared understanding and governance required to mitigate risks? How can effective narratives be assembled and presented for large-scale learning exercises and effective communications in real situations? How can the artifacts of large-scale learning exercises and real events be preserved with sufficient integrity relative to provenance, completeness, and bias to leverage continuous improvements in readiness? How can problem representation and knowledge emerging from multi-disciplinary efforts (e.g. public health, emergency management, public utilities, and critical infrastructures) be validated and valued as national assets? What are the weakest links relative to the unprecedented scale and mix of people, process, and technology and how can they be remediated?    (3UYN)

In addition, this workshop will demonstrate an organizing process that can be employed anytime a purpose cuts across organizational boundaries. This is timely for workshop participants who have come to appreciate that building trusted relationships is the essence of eGovernment. How people design the organizing process for potentially “collaborative” settings, existing beyond traditional boundaries, can spell the difference between “multiplicative power” and “no power” arising to achieve high performance results that matter to all.    (3UYO)

The workshop opens up dialogue to facilitate "bootstrapping" among multiple communities learning how to advance broad public service goals and leverage engagement opportunities associated with Web 2.0. Participants will share lessons learned from frontier settings that support collaborative inquiry, design and development.    (3UYP)

The President's Management Agenda (PMA) requires all federal agencies to transform the roles and relationships among people, processes, and technology in order to become a citizen-centered government. The PMA emphasizes bringing value and results to citizens, businesses, and government workers by "reducing the burden" and producing measurable improvement.    (3UYQ)

"It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet. These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human culture, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions: hence if they actually meet, that is, if they are at least so much related to each other that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that new and interesting developments may follow." Werner Heisenberg    (3UYR)

"Creativity is a process that can be observed only at the intersection where individuals, domains, and fields intersect." Csikszentmihalyi, 1999    (3UYS)

"Architecture is the thoughtful making of space." Louis Kahn    (3UYT)

"Information is the currency of democracy." Thomas Jefferson    (3UYU)

"Design is the currency of the 21st century." American Institute of Architects    (3UYV)

It is likely that how we design our physical and virtual knowledge sharing environments (including scientific knowledge that will influence policy-making and innovation) will play a pivotal role in the continued vitality and creativity of our 21st century democracy. The workshop will open up dialogue to facilitate "bootstrapping" among multiple communities and institutions committed to advancing civic design in the public realm, including scientific, educational, and national preparedness institutions. The workshop also supports information exchange among Federal Enterprise Architecture improvement activities advancing citizen-centric government in 2008, including Architecture Principles for The US Government (issued by CIO Council, effective date Aug. 24, 2007).    (3UYW)

Workshop planning provides an opportunity to experience shared stewardship around broad mission goals that include:    (3UYX)

B. Draft Workshop Questions    (3UZ2)

C. Expected Participants    (3UZN)

D. Agenda    (3UZP)

8:30 a.m. - Check-in and Coffee    (3UZQ)

8:45 a.m. - Welcome and Introductions    (3UZR)

SusanTurnbull, GSA and Co-chair, Emerging Technology Subcommittee and Co-Chair, Social, Economic and Workforce Implications of IT CG    (3UZS)

RichardSpivack, NIST and Co-chair, Emerging Technology Subcommittee    (3UZT)

9:00 a.m. - Who is Here and Who is Missing? What is your Sense of Purpose in Relation to the Overall Workshop Goals?    (3UZU)

9:30 a.m. - The Role of Business Narrative in Advancing Multi-sector Alignment Potentials for Joint Action    (3UZV)

DeniseBedford, World Bank and KM Business Narrative WG    (3UZW)

10:15 a.m. - Advancing on a National Challenge: Multi-sector Capacity-Building and Collaboration for Emergent Readiness    (3UZY)

Duane C. Caneva, MD, Director, Medical Preparedness Policy, White House Homeland Security Council    (3V0N)

11:15 a.m. - Keeping Good Ideas in the Air, and Other Findings from the Impact Project    (3V0P)

LeonJOsterweil, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and ACM, Impact Project    (3V02)

11:50 a.m. - Modeling and Simulation in Emergency Response    (3VE4)

Charles McLean, Group Leader, Modeling and Simulation, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)    (3VE5)

The focus of this work is Modeling and Simulation standards that would enable large distributed simulation training exercises in Emergency Response based on current and future hardware and software standards. An architecture for Modeling and Simulation in this area has been developed and work continues on a taxonomy for classification of Modeling and Simulation applications. A proof of concept simulation demo has been completed with modules contributed by a number of different organizations. Resources: http://www.mel.nist.gov/div826/msid/sima/simconf/mns4er.htm and http://www.mel.nist.gov/msid/    (3VE6)

12:30 noon - 1:30 p.m. - Adjourn and Networking Lunch    (3V03)

1:30 p.m. - Informal demonstrations of methods to amplify the value and usefulness of strategic plans rendered in Strategy Markup Language to leverage mission alignment for greater agility and effectiveness.    (3V04)

Questions and Suggestions from the chat rooom    (3VLV)

Michelle Raymond: Given that there are private sector personnel (even outside of hospital's covered by the Hospital AVailability Exchange (HAVE) using the Emergency Data eXchange Lanaguage - Distribution Element (EDXL-DE)) that can provide services, how can they be contacted and deployed? Example: Corporate nurses have been included in the Minnesota resource list of medical personnel, yet no contact and tracking mechanism.    (3VLW)

Michelle Raymond: Another issue are the different levels of training and how they are tracked and tasked. How can this be addressed for resource management? Example: CERT - (Community Emergency Response Teams) are trained in on scene triage.    (3VLX)

Michelle Raymond: With Decision Support technology, we work best with solid models/ontologies using common vocabulary and access to the most complete data. Decision Support tools and services are major areas of research in industry. How can we mobilize these industry research and development groups to apply their technologies to emergency management? - industry access to real data? - funding for domain user studies, infrastructure support, resource agent structures, etc., etc., etc.    (3VLY)

Michelle Raymond: Susan, can we start a story-board, scenario section to enable folks to refer to and converse about specific issues based in a common use-case? Does this already exist? - where?    (3VLZ)

PeterYim: To Dr. Osterweil: great research, thank you! Two comments: (1) the 15~20 years transition from seminal research to successful productization, I have heard longer (say 25 years), but then there are also talks about this shortening because of the present-day technology augmentation ... maybe, your team could take a re-look at this, and give us an updated look at this number again (in the context of the technologies you are tracking.) (2) ref. your slide#25, the root of your RPC Systems goes back only to DeRemer&Kron1976, you might look into the work from Doug Engelbart (Augmentation Research Center, Stanford Research Institute) and the NLS (oNLineSystem) work he and his team were doing in the late 1960's and early 1970's ... I believe they have been generally recognized as having done pioneering work on RPC.    (3VM0)

Mark Conrad: For Dr. Osterweil, I would nominate the Data Intensive Computing Environments (DICE) Group at the University of California, San Diego for another case study. For the past decade the DICE Group has been developing the Storage Resource Broker (SRB). This middleware has been widely deployed internationally. The DICE Group is now developing the next generation data management application - the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) as an open source activity.    (3VM1)

Mark Conrad: Is this some of the folks that you are dealing with in California? http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/2130809.html    (3VM2)

Michelle Raymond: Charles, will there be demos and presentations at the NIST interoperability week? April 28 ...    (3VM3)

PeterYim1: To Owen and the StratML team: looks like an effective way to gain adoption is to get the StratML vocabulary aligned with that of the DRM (Data Reference Model), besides the BRM or PRM ... is that being worked on?    (3VM4)

Owen Ambur: Peter, eventually I hope that StratML will be incorporated into the DRM as well as NIEM. In the context of the DRM, a strat plan might be considered to be an <ExchangePackage> and StratML search services might be considered to be <QueryPoints>. However, at this point, documenting StratML itself in a DRM instance document is not on the StratML Committee's agenda -- particularly not unless and until the XSD for the DRM is used. http://xml.coverpages.org/FEA-DRM-SchemaDraftV04-20060103.xsd    (3VM5)

E. Collaborative Expedition Workshop Series Background    (3V05)

Purpose and Audience: GSA's USA Services Intergovernmental Solutions Office leads monthly Collaborative Expedition workshops to advance the quality of citizen-government dialogue and collaborations at the crossroads of intergovernmental initiatives, Communities of Practice, Federal IT research and IT user agencies. The workshops seek to advance collaborative innovations in government and community services such as emergency preparedness, environmental monitoring, healthcare and law enforcement.    (3V06)

The workshops serve individuals from government, business, and non-government organizations to practice an emerging societal form, Communities of Practice (CoPs) or Communities of Interest (CoIs), that augment Government project teams, in a manner responsive to the Citizen-Centric Government goal of the President’s Management Agenda and the Public Information Access provisions of the E-government Act of 2002.    (3V07)

As Communities of Practice form around priorities (Enterprise Architecture, Semantic Interoperability, Geospatial, Community Knowledge Network, Emergency Preparedness, etc.) it is essential to gain experience in designing an organizing process to advance the human relationships that “power” the ultimate success of these endeavors. As Professor David D. Woods states, “In design, we either hobble or support people’s natural ability to express forms of expertise.” Experience gained from the design of this workshop will influence how we design future forums. Individually and as a community, we’ll be better able to appreciate and tap strategic leadership from a wide variety of sources, including local, state and regional settings where quality dialogue yields the “line of sight” connection needed by all stakeholders to engage in joint action toward shared goals.    (3V08)

Each workshop organizes participation around a common purpose, larger than any institution, including government. By learning how to appreciate multiple perspectives around potentials and realities of this larger “purpose”, subsequent actions by individuals representing many forms of expertise, can be better expressed in their home and collaborative settings. By centering around people and the "whole system" challenges they organize around, IT design and development processes can mature with less risk and greater national yield of breakthrough performance.    (3V09)

Joint workshop sponsors in addition to GSA, include the Architecture and Infrastructure Committee of the Federal CIO Council, and the National Coordination Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development, Social, Economic and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Workforce Development Coordinating Group. These organizations value this “frontier outpost” to open up quality conversations, augmented by information technology, to leverage the collaborative capacity of united, but diverse sectors of society, seeking to discover, frame, and act on national and international potentials.    (3V0A)

F. Draft Resources    (3V0E)