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

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

WHITE PAPER discussion on:

Governance, Policy, Standards: Support for Complexity in the Real World
EU Research – Integrating our way out of silos: purposeful Federation
Complexity Science & Society; EU Calls: CAPS; FI Science/FInES/FIRE; Global Systems;
(also COSI‐ICT; DyM‐CS; FOCAS; FuturICT)
Society: people, purpose & complex behaviour modelling (simulation & dissimulation)
The Peoples’ Toolkit: Computational Socio‐Geonomics/Metaloger (CSG/M)
ICT ‐ A new Kondratiev Shift: On Computable Society
SOCIO‐TECHNOLOGY

.

Author John Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, PublicComputing BV
Email john.sutcli@btconnect.com
Tel: +44 (0)7973 31-51-77

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


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

FLUX 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’)

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’



Figure Zero
Abstract
a proposal for federation between Future Internet Science/FInES &
(STEeP)
CAPS to design, deliver, and deploy an affordance called
THE PEOPLES’ TOOLKIT whose rationale is:
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

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


1 White Paper‐EU Complexity Research‐an integrated approach‐THE PEOPLES TOOLKIT

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): Support for Complexity in the Real World (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 EU Research – Integrating our way out of silos: purposeful Federation
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 Complexity Science & Society; EU Calls: CAPS; FI Science/FInES/FIRE; Global Systems;
(also COSI‐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 & complex behaviour modelling (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 The Peoples’ Toolkit: Computational Socio‐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
99
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 ‐ A new Kondratiev Shift: On Computable Society
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 Outline Computable Society Systems Requirements
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 Dimensioning The Problem ‘space’ ‐ micro level
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 Dimensioning The Problem ‘space’ ‐ macro level
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 Dimensioning The Solution ‘space’ ‐ a meso level enquiry
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 2
an assemblage is the orderly collection of everything that is put together to accomplish something in ‘life’ i.e. both collective and complex – CAS


1.4.6 Dimensioning The Solution ‘space’ ‐ the micro level
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 Disruptive Change, tipping points, decision & action: Closing the ‘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 Core Concepts of the People’s Toolkit Socio‐Technology Engineering
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



COMPLEXITY THEORY: INFORMATION-PROCESS-STRUCTURE-PERTURBATION-MORPHOGENESIS
Knowledge/ information FInES
QUANTA
events Technology artefacts FUTURE INTERNET
E N E R G Y
I o TPS Artificial societies
are Organisations/
PERTURBATIONS processes SMART SOCIETY
CHAOTIC
events Human & PEOPLE
computer
DESTINY L I F E M A T T E R systems
ORGANISATIONS
PARTIALLY ENTROPIC
ORDERED U–CEP
Eventful life is a constant
Ultimate destiny –
enactment of human volition & events
outside our scope
meaning LIVING LABS
M E A N I N G (Meta) information Meta-
it generates the M E T A L O G E R L A B S modelling, Meta FoR’s
meta-values MES/HES
CAS called
NATURAL WORLD events
‘society’
Computational
socio-geonomics simulated Society,
“Yes, we compute our Culture & cognitive computing
Cells, chemistry, World” & can change it for
reproduction the better
Symbiosis of thought,
G A I A Future ICT values, purpose,
Food, water, survival, decision & action
habitat, resource depletion
Knowledge
SCIENCE
accelerator dynamics
Evolution &
progress: Survival of Crisis
events
the fittest v. fitness management Global
for purpose ? sustainability fairness
events
cooperation governance
HUMAN–COGNITIVE SPECIES
Integration conflict resolution innovation
LIVING EARTH ECOLOGY progress well-being happiness

Meta-FoRs are the strange attractors of human volitional computation

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


Figure 2
THE SCIENCE: Computational socio-geonomics
The platform for World Society Modeller (S-GAIA), a FuturIcT federation
Domain of computational socio-geonomics
SOCIONOME

Complex
events
PROPERTIES OF
SOCIAL SYSTEMS
METALOGER
• framework platform of
• fundamental sciences
LIFE • rigorous formalism
processable MetaFORs
• evolutionary aspects
• layers of abstraction
Computer • emergent/CASS “purposeful
Sciences goal seeking
(selfish)”
Social
Sciences
METALOGER Real World Social
ENVIRONMENTS Governance Systems
Σ (social systems in Cultural
organisations) Individual & group
behaviour

Engagement V.OSS

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

COMPLEX S-GAIA – THE ULTIMATE ERM PLATFORM


R ich P ictu re: TH E C O M P LE X R EA L W O R LD O F P R O B LE M ‐SO LV IN G

Th e co m p lexity a n d so p h istica tio n o f m e ta‐m o d e ls lies in th eir d ea lin g w ith a ll th e d yn a m ics o f
rea l‐life, d e fin ed in su ch te rm s as asyn ch ro n icity, d isco n tin u ity, m u ltip le p atte rn s o f sign ifica n ce,
Th e m a n age r a n d B u sin ess an d m e an in g ‐ in sh o rt a ll th e va ga ries o f rea l m a n a ge m en t life.
Pro cess En gin ee r d e sign th e B PE a s a n o ve rla y o n an o rga n isa tio n's life to ch a n ge th e w a y it d o es
o p e ratio n al p ro ce sses. th in gs, b y m o d ellin g an d ch an gin g th e 'p ro cess'.  Th e p ictu re sh o w s
p ro cess m o d e ls a s a se t o f in terlo ckin g p ieces o f a jigsa w p u zzle:  get
th em all in p la ce a n d th e fu ll p ictu re is cle ar.   B P E en gin e ers th ese
p ro cesse s to im p ro ve th e m .

w e a re a ll p a rt o f a w eb o f  m eta ‐m o d els

p ro b lem s
va lu e & s u p p ly c h a in s p ro b lem EV EN TS glo b a l
PU R P O S E EV EN TS
unknowns
PU R PO S ES

o th e r d e c isio n m a k in g D EC ISIO N S YS TEM 1
sy ste m s D EC IS IO N S YS TEM (S ) n
gro u p s
Th e m a n age r h a s to re ach

+
O rgan isatio n b eh a vio u r is n o t ea sily d e cisio n s w ith in a co n te xt
b e h a vio u rs
o f m a n y o verla p p in g
in clu d e d in 'p ro cesse s' b e ca u se it is
IC T fo re ca s tin g m o d e ls sp an n in g:
su b jective an d irratio n al.  Yet it is a cru cia l
p a rt ‐ o rd in a ry p e o p le can see it, an d th at
b e ha vio u rs IC T O U TC O M ES
in d u stry, sp e cialism ,
it is so m e tim e s a d efective p art ‐ o th e r n a tio n a l, re gu lato ry,
en ge n d e rin g w o rk‐a ro u n d s m o d els in fo rm a tio n in te rn atio n a l ‐ as w ell a s
stake h o ld er va lu es.

C h e ck
d a ta 1
EV A LU A TIO N A C TIO N
A C TIO N

D EC ISIO N ££
D EC IS IO N £

c a sh

co n tin u o u s ch an ge

Th e m a n a gem en t p ro cess is M o d els are a se t o f p ictu re s o f life o f w h ich th e m a n age m e n t
d yn am ic w ith in a rea l‐tim e 'cu ltu re ' is o n e p a rt o f a jigsa w o f d ecisio n m o d els (w h ich is th e
en ve lo p e co n sistin g o f m a n y m eta p h o r b e h in d th e ico n fo r 'm o d e l' in th e d iagra m).  Th e
system s in te ra ctin g acro ss m o d e llin g p a rtake s o f a ll th e va ga ries o f h u m a n activities,
d isco n tin u o u s an d a syn ch ro n o u s b e h a vio u rs a n d o rgan isatio n a l d im en sio n s;  th e se d im e n sio n s ca n
in terfa ces as w e ll a s a p u rp o se a lso b e m eta‐m o d e lle d.
d rive n o n e

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

WP3 - (CAS)2 & CSG/M THEORETICAL SOLUTION/FRAMEWORK (CAS)2’s: THE SCIENCE &
Development: Evolutionary principles – GST/SOCIONOME/Values PRACTICE OF THE
ECOLOGICAL BASIS OF
Design principles – Metaloger: Meta modelling/Meta-FoRs/Networks SOCIO-TECHNOLOGY
SOCIO-TECHNOLOGY (iteration 1 & 2)
Operating principles – Metaloger Labs Instantiations/Social Enactments

WP4. SOCIO-TECHNOLOGY:Generic (CAS)2’s Framework+CSG/M Toolkit: science practice & integration samples
Complex Change Viability/cybernetics dynamics Emergent Society/social (CAS)2 GOMS/action

Governance/Policy/Standards Innovation/Problem-solving Fitness for Purpose Pathology

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

inter-operability Engagement & Lingua-franca BRAID Innovation & Problem solving

Legacy & Transition Inter-operability
Instantiations Reference & Normative models Catalogues

Complexity Inferencing U-CEP
Legacy transition Resources, Power, Triggers

Complexity Inferencing
WP6. (CAS)2 & CSG/M ECOSYSTEMS ENGINEERING
Engagement with ecologies Metaloger Ecologies operations Meta-Lab(s) Ecosystem Tapestries

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

WP7.SOCIETAL INVOLVEMENT WP8.(CAS)2’s SIMULATOR TRIALS

Piedmont Trial Macro-level Setting the Agenda

CoP Experiments etc
Meso-level Whose priorities?

WP9. Metaloger Governance/Policy/Standards (GPS), Micro-level the ‘movers & shakers’
Planning & Governance

WP10. Metaloger Tapestries : (CAS)2’s Topology WP11.Cell-Biology & bio-domain Societies:
Inferencing Services & U-CEP Comparative reference study

(iteration 4) WP 12 – S-GAIA GOVERNANCE/POLICY/STANDARDS (GPS), STRATEGY & FUTURES - Global Pathway
etc
(Iteration 4) Dissemination, exploitation & commercialisation to address the S-GAIA Mission:
Society Involvement:
“S-GAIA is committed to furthering the paradigm of Computable Society; for CSG/M to be a world-
SWOT, Stakeholder Review;
beating application; to the Change focus & The Master Builder/Inventor role to contribute to the well-
Socio-economic impact &
being of our world; to pervasive societal involvement; & to the research effort to achieve this.”
implications

Figure 4 WORK PACKAGE STRUCTURE


THE METALOGER PARADIGM SHIFT

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

People Power

Schumpeter basic research paradigm change exploitation Schmookler

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.

(CAS2;s)
IDEAS information & cognition management models practical applications

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

TECHNOLOGY systems theory Metaloger/virtual reality specific products

paradigm‐shift vers 1

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


JSB Metaloger Thesis
1999/2000

.
31
Figure 6 “The Social Group Paradigm” points to personal psychological factors driving social groups & needing to be part of the Socionome


S‐GAIA   “securing a better world”   – opportunity space
“Everyone part of the Model”
Models/tools/methods/processes
Emergent properties of society Simulation environments & trials
Complexity science/Emergence Universal semantics of ‘life’
Ecology & Evolutionary patterns Society/people engagement
Mathematics/Statistical Physics Cultural bridges & understanding
Collective social dynamics Complexity science
Social sciences & Socio‐cybernetics Computational socionomics
Social unrest/conflict Emergence
Psychology & Cognition World ecology
Greed/selfishness Evolutionary patterns
Social meta‐theory
Social pathology
World orders
Society/people
institutions: government/global bodies
We are the experiment
ICT/computer science
“Internet”
First cure ourselves
Infrastructures
FuturICT: the universal emergence toolset Voluntary sector
Economic collapse Belief & passion Internet science
ICT/computer science/Infrastructures Business/industry/services
Resource scarcity/destruction Humility not hubrisLiving data
Internet science Personal providers
Demographic imbalance Meta‐modeling/abstractions
Living data/reverse engineering Organisations/professions
globalisation Species Agents ecologies
Meta‐modelling/abstractions Academia/FET/research coordinators
Peoples alienation Species Agents ecologies Alternative worlds:  global knowledge
Unworkable systems Metaloger Instantiations Metaloger Web Supervisory Body
Information overload Living engagement technologies
Substitutes for engagement Understanding difficulties Media/avatars/soft robotics EMERGENCE SIMULATION: living laboratory
Meaning v manipulation Power & Politics of protest •Crisis/risk management monitoring/prediction/mitigation
Education/training •Innovation, creativity, problem solving tool
Contribution & reward •Emergent Internet/wikipedia/social web sites
False prophets •Ubiquitous organisation systems
Collective social dynamics •New institutions
Management •World resources/logistics/ownership bank
Validation & verification •Thinking/problem solving/decision taking/action patterns
Futures anticipation & •Values/purpose/management & Governance laboratory
causality •Universal simulation tool‐set:  everyone connected
Surveillance/privacy Sustainability
Big Brother Fairness & initiative
Misuse Creativity & synergy
Social engineering Innovation risk & Implementing new technologies
Availability /control reliability Harnessing  scientific research
Moving the social goalposts
Taguchi: quality is inversely propor onal to the ∑total of loss to mankind Partnering with people to change the world
Sharing the fruits of industrial progress
Governing a sustainable world
space meta‐jousting – not wars

Kondratiev shift 6: complexity science, emergence & ICT facilitate a new social order:  Virtual model Society(VmS)
Figure 7 – S-GAIA Strategic FuturICT Federation to build the Paradigm Change called ‘Computable Society’

32


2 ANNEXES

34

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

2.1 Extended extract from the DYM‐CS Submission
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”

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

 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, . in figure 2, … multiple agents with differing goals, which can
that …make decisions, … influenced by … other agents and/or the come into conflict … Strategic considerations … considerations
environment, and … which can affect the agent’s survival, or some of institutional design and the articulation of arguments and
other measure of success, such as inclusive fitness, wealth, or belief-structures.
happiness.
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 There are no constraints or enablers foreseen provided the programme tackles the huge ethical aspects
Political/regulatory/ openly and effectively. Long term applications will each be further evaluated. CSG/M will tackle the obverse
legal) 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.



White Paper:

2.2 An R & D Perspective for Computational Socio‐Geonomics/Metaloger(CSG/M)
Contents
1. Introduction page 3
2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY page 4
3. ABSTRACT page 6
4. DyM‐CS THEORETICAL DISCUSSION page 7
5. THE DOMAIN OF (COMPUTATIONAL) SOCIETY IS UNIQUE: S/DyM‐CS page 8
6. COMPUTATIONAL SOCIO‐GEONOMICS/METALOGER(CSG/M): SIMULATING LIFE p10
7. TECHNOLOGIES FOR S/DyM‐CS page 11
a. Socio‐technology p13
b. General Systems Theory (GST) p15
c. Mathematical Formalisms p16
d. Socio‐cybernetics p17
e. Methods, processes, rules p18
f. Multi‐level/multi‐scale bag p19
g. Game‐theoretic approaches p20
h. Agent Based Modelling (ABM) p20
i. Statistical Patterns p21
j. Topologies/ontologies/classifications p21
k. Network Theory p23
l. Ecology of Technology & Society p23
m. (Other domain cross‐overs) p23
n. Meta‐modelling, Tools, Problem solving p25
8. A PROGRAMME FOR EU GLOBAL OPPORTUNITY page 31
9. OUTCOME page 32
10. TIMELINE page 32
11. CONCLUSION page 32
12. APPENDIX A: EU ISTAG Key Recommendations page 34
13. APPENDIX B: Primer on “On Computable Society”(see over) page 40

Author: John Sutcliffe‐Braithwaite, MA(Cantab), MBCS, C.Eng, MBA (Technology Management) OU
Research Director, Metaloger Technologies, PublicComputing BV
Email: john.sutcli@btconnect.com
Telephone +44 (0)7973 31 51 77

Circulation: unrestricted



Appendix B Contents: Diagrams/Notes in Primer on “On Computable Society”

Section I – Complexity & Society: page 41
1. Complexity Theory Information/Process/Structure/Perturbation/Morphogenesis
2. Scenarios: Problems to Policy
3. Complexity Chaos Emergence and Metaloger Labs
4. DyM‐CS – integrating complexity science & Society: Where to Start?
5. Computational socio‐geonomics and GAIA

Section II – S/DyM‐CS and SMART SOCIETY page 48
6. FuturICT and SMART SOCIETY Research scope
7. Metaloger Research Challenges
8. FInES Research cooperation

Section III – New Scientific Paradigm page 59
9. Science of Computational Socio‐geonomics
10. General Theory & practice: S/DyM‐CS & Society
11. Dynamic Network Model of Society
12. World‐Society‐Modeller (S‐GAIA)

Section IV – Complex World Society page 68
13.Metaloger Paradigm Shift “People Power”
14. Meta‐Web: The Macro Canvas of SMART SOCIETY
15. the Complex Social meta‐world
16. Emergence & Change: Triggers and Strange Attracters
17. Complex Systems Science: Governance & Management Science
18. Complex Systems Science: The Meso View

Section V – People and Organisational behaviours page 81
19. The Social Group paradigm
20. World Ecology: Quality of Life Health/sickness & Well‐being

Section VI – Meta‐Modelling page 86
21. Socionome‐Metaloger Research Space
22. General Systems Theory (GST) Model
23. Socionome ‐phenotype processing: Metaloger Labs
24. Business Complex Event processing (CEP)
25. Business Ecologies


Section VII – Technologies page 97
26. Metaloger Platform Schematic
27. Metaloger Systems Architecture
28. U‐CEP & Cloud Event processing
29. Metaloger Labs & FI Systems overlay
30. Emergent Computational Socio‐geonomic Ecology
31. The GAIA Genie in the bottle


1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
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‐CS THEORETICAL DISCUSSION

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. THE DOMAIN OF (COMPUTATIONAL) SOCIETY IS UNIQUE: 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. COMPUTATIONAL SOCIO‐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 th
Senge, the 5 discipline;  hysteresis is a similar ‘catch‐up’ effect in the physical world


7. TECHNOLOGIES FOR S/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 (m.piunti@reply.it


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
74 th
The EU 7 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.



A PROGRAMME FOR EU GLOBAL OPPORTUNITY
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.


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

More Related Content

What's hot

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

More from Digital Business Innovation Community

Recently uploaded

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