Enabling Collective Intelligence in Response to Emergencies
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 14 Jun 2010
Anthony Judge – TRANSCEND Media Service
Illustrated by the Case of Deep Oil Spill Containment
Introduction
The response to the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill (2010), acknowledged as the greatest recent environmental disaster, is used here to summarize and illustrate the challenge of enabling collective intelligence in response to emergencies. The focus is therefore less on the oil spill disaster and more on how intelligence is gathered of relevance to emergencies for which no immediate solution is found.
The argument follows from work over an extended period on the Global Strategies Project. This profiled strategies advocated or undertaken by international constituencies in response to world problems — themselves profiled in a related World Problems Project.
Expertise and arrogant assumptions
In the case of technical disasters, it is typically assumed that there is a wide pool of relevant expertise which can be tapped. This has been evident in the case of the BP oil spill in which many subcontractors had obligations activated by the crisis and into which other oil industry companies were drawn — if only to protect the industry against loss of reputation and subsequent restrictive legislation.
The crisis has however made evident that the expertise involved in deep water drilling was not adequate to the the procedures used. However a case is made that they were indeed adequate but that the operating procedures had not been appropriately followed. Also emerging are indications that the materials used were insufficiently strong in terms of requirements — in order to reduce costs. It has also become apparent that government agencies were complicit in waiving an appropriate level of oversight — in the interests of facilitating the drilling process.
Clearly such endeavours are undertaken in the light of a number of known risks and in the expectation that unforeseen risks can be managed appropriately. It is also clear that these assumptions were mistaken. It remains to be discovered to what extent they reflect a culture of arrogance and indifference within the oil industry.
More generally the disasters highlights that such mindsets and conditions may be associated with other uses of technology. Examples include: genetic engineering, satellites (especially in terms of the huge accumulation of dangerous space debris), pharmaceutical initiatives (as with recent controversy surrounding the flu vaccine), failures of supposedly secure information systems (release of confidential data, etc). New technologies enthusiastically proposed repeatedly appear to ignore such possibilities.
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This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 14 Jun 2010.
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