Information Technological Innovation and Global

Governance
Victor Galaz
Stockholm Resilience Centre
Stockholm University
Twitter Updates “Good Morning!”
by Jer Thorp (via Vimeo)
 What are the long term institutional and
organizational implications of information
technology in the Anthropocene?

Decreasing costs for Mass Self-Communication

information
"Communications tools don't get socially
interesting until they get technologically
boring"
Clay Shirky
Emerging and re-emerging infectious disease
 Bubonic Plage, Surat (India)1994

In 1994 the spread of bubonic plague

in the city of Surat deaths of 57
people, significant economic
losses, and social and political
effects. Over 300,000 people
deserted the city (in two days!)
Late warnings, information overload
and collapse
 Development of web crawler
GPHIN at Health Canada (1995)

ProMED - moderated e-mail list

hosted by the International Society
for Infectious Diseases (1994).
“atypical pneumonia”, “unknown respiratory disease”
PNEUMONIA - CHINA (GUANGDONG): RFI
**********************************
Date: 10 Feb 2003
From: Stephen O. Cunnion, MD, PhD, MPH
<cunnion@erols.com>

This morning I received this e-mail and then searched your

archives
and found nothing that pertained to it. Does anyone know
anything
about this problem?

"Have you heard of an epidemic in Guangzhou? An

acquaintance of mine
from a teacher's chat room lives there and reports that the
hospitals there have been closed and people are dying."

--
Stephen O. Cunnion, MD, PhD, MPH
International Consultants in Health, Inc
Member ASTM&H, ISTM
<cunnion@erols.com>
“All of the sudden, we had a very powerful system that brought
in much more information from more countries, and we where
able to go to countries confidentially and validate what was
going on, and if they needed help, we provided help. And we
provided help by bringing together many different institutions
from around the world that started to work with us.”

David Heymann, WHO

Breaking down of the information pyramid
 Three new phenomena

“Supernetworks”
“Small“Collective
World Networks”
Intelligence”
 There is a bigger "networks of networks" […]. In GOARN
you have CDC, MSF and Red Cross. Which you also have in
the different coordination groups for meningitis vaccine and
yellow fever vaccine. Or in global polio eradication. These
are enormous, but some are very small and, you would
bring in the global influenza with laboratories and national
influenza centers. But that is the “network of networks”
which has no substance, no defined substance. It's there,
the function, but in a highly chaotic, very undefined way.

Patrick Drury, GOARN/WHO.

 European Centre for
Disease Control,
EpiNorth
US-CDC

Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN)

over 120 actors and others!
Asian Rotavirus
Surveillance Network

Southern Cone EID

Surveillance Network
 David wanted to take the GPHIN business and what WHO
was doing, and develop a "network of networks". These would
be highly unformalized, highly unstructured, as chaotic as
possible, because if we allowed it to coagulate or set down at
any part of the WHO, the apparatus of the organization, […]
would start to drag it down […]. All of these rules would just
slow down what was trying to be done.

Patrick Drury, GOARN/WHO

 Information Technology and
Global Governance
Supernetworks expand, have the
capacity to create collective intelligence.
This is an intentional strategy. Allows
flexibility, but builds on tapping resources
from formal rules, mandates and
resources. They build on the
combination btw ICT and personal
connections.
 THANK YOU

victor.galaz@stockholmresilience.su.se
twitter.com/vgalaz