Trust Networks Working Group

Trust Networks are social networks comprised of cross-cultural individuals and institutions with special proclivities toward identifying problems early and taking action to resolve conflicts in advance of violence and the cycles of mistrust lead to social degradation, social crisis, or war.

Both of the attached chapters provide useful background for the Trust Networks discourse. The theoretical approach appears to be independent of targeted disease entity or intervention. So it looks to me as if the methods could also be applied to populations needing to change their behavior to address risks of climate change, risk of economic change due to peak oil, threats to livelihood associated with displacement due to war or ecosystem collapse, or immunization to prevent an epidemic. Obviously, on top of the general methodologies, there would need to be very specific content and methodologies to address the unique attributes of the targeted threat and adaptive behavior, as well as the socio-ecological and political environment the prevention effort or intervention is taking place within. Perhaps you can respond to this email with a two to five paragraph overview of how you are seeing trust networks being developed, organized, and replicated, for example to address Millennium goals. Then Alenka, can share her perspectives from her DARPA program on trust networks and other work with human interoperability with the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Marshia Glazebrook , a board member of the Temple of Understanding (ToU) can then also weigh in with the work that she is doing with the interfaith community and the United States with their humanization campaigns (using Jonas Salk's words) to avoid social conflict and war. Marshia may also want to bring in some of the ToU discourse regarding the use of gaming with youth to help them understand and engage Trust Networks with the benefit of seeing how environments of trust are built and are susceptible to being destroyed in simulation. Janine Rees can help with graphics, if necessary, and making the discourse more understandable for general audiences. Suzi Peel can help with editing. The goal is to have an open discourse for seven to ten days and then use the next two weeks to shape a chapter within the U.S. Resilience Summit Report. If it is not produced in time to be included in the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008 Report, we will include it in the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure Initiative Report to the National Security Council. Feel free to have fun with this in the open discourse, even though the topic is obviously very complex and serious. Try to avoid acronyms, because the initial participants in this discourse are coming from very different backgrounds. As soon as the initial email discussion gets too complex to stay in the group email context, we will move the discussion to the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008 Collaboratories or the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure initiative Collaboratories. You are all welcome to bring in other parties to the discourse. Keep in mind that roughly two weeks from now there will be a chapter production panel organized to produce the chapter from the Collaboratory raw materials.