d the Department of Defense and the U.S. is taking the actions of Boko Haram very, very seriously. And that's all I'm going to say. But yes, it's a serious, serious threat and it's something we are very worried about. Okay? And that, I think that was it. By the way, thank you, folks, for what you're doing. And it is great to come out here and see a young crowd. Enjoy the rest of your lunch, but we will reconvene to start promptly at two o'clock the colloquy between Jane Hall-Loot and Vinsurf. So make sure you're in there for that. You don't want to miss it. All right, let's try to keep on schedule here. Welcome back from lunch. It is just such an honor to have this podium so I can introduce Melanie Greenberg, the President and CEO of the Alliance for Peaceburg. Yeah, you can clap. I don't know anyone who has been more selfless or more effective at promoting the professionalism and the growth of this still young field of conflict resolution. I know that someday, Melanie, Harvard Business School is going to be doing a case study of your leadership here. And I am not exaggerating that at all. So with that, let me turn it over to Melanie who's going to take us through the day. Thank you. And Sheldon, I'll get to embarrass you when I introduce you after this panel. I'm Melanie Greenberg, President, as Sheldon said, of the Alliance for Peacebuilding and network of 85 peacebuilding organizations working in 153 countries around the world. I'm also very honored to be the Co-Chair of the Steering Committee with Bernard Amaday of today's Peace Tech Summit and also Co-Chair of the Data Sharing Working Group of the Roundtable. And I feel so passionately about the connections between peacebuilding and technology and the work that Sheldon has done. Because peace, as you know, is more than just the absence of war. And peacebuilding is more than just people coming around a peace table and shaking hands. And what struck me so much this morning was that we talked about peace in many different contexts. And actually sometimes peace wasn't even mentioned. We were talking about agriculture, environment, entrepreneurship. But in a highly networked world, this is where peace is happening. The real excitement of the field is how to bridge peace and these other sectors, all of which we know come together to create societies that are resilient enough to resolve conflict, which is always with us, through consensus building, through problem solving, rather than through deadly violence. And technology is crucial for all of that. I was in Togo recently meeting with young peace builders who self-identify as peace builders. But in fact, what they do is work on water issues at the village level, at education, on women's empowerment, but they see that work as peace. And what's equally extraordinary is that they were using a lot of the technology that we talked about this morning, from SMS and cell phones to mapping to using Google to find new ways of thinking about their work. But for them, they don't see it as something radical. For them, it's like picking up a fork or using a shovel. The tools are there and they use them. And that's very relevant for this panel, which has a very interesting title of peace building meets technology, imagination, and necessity. But in fact, all of those are coming together in this generation that are using tools. They're highly imaginative, yet they're working out of the most dire necessity of how to end deadly violence in their own societies, whether from the bottom up or from the top down. So it is my great pleasure to introduce this panel, which has great personal meaning for me, as well as substantive meaning. The first, Robert Versigliano, who will be moderating. I've known Rob for at least 20 years. Rob shares the Alliance for Peace Building Board, was one of the founders of the Alliance for Peace Building, and is one of the great builders in our field. When he ran conflict management group at Harvard, a spin-off of Harvard's negotiation program, he merged that with Mercy Corps, the large development organization. And it was one of the first mergers that brought peace building and conflict resolution together with development, which has now become really the paradigm for the field. You can't have one without the other. As I mentioned, he founded the Alliance for Peace Building. He is now head of a revolutionary program at the University of Wisconsin that brings hard scientists, social scientists, students together to study sustainable peace building. And he has a wonderful book on the subject called Making Peace Last. So, Rob, thank you very much for moderating this panel. Jane Hall Lude has been one of my great heroes throughout my career. We actually met at Stanford more than 25 years ago when I was... Less than 25. Less less, much less, time work. Well, Jane was blazing through her PhD before going on to work on war termination with Norman Schwarzkopf. I got to know her through my husband Lawrence, who was a political science graduate student at the same time. And Jane would just start a conversation by saying, I'm just a simple soldier. And he knew that what came out of her mouth next was going to be the most profound thing that would change the whole scope of the conversation. That's very nice. I then worked with Jane at the Carnegie Commission for Preventing Deadly Conflict, where again, with David Hamburg, reshaped the whole idea of how our field thinks about conflict prevention, realizing it's not just process, but also structure. At the UN Foundation, she helped change the thinking of how we integrate peace building into programs with women, programs and innovation. And then at the United Nations itself as running their peacekeeping... As being number two with their peace building... Peacekeeping Operations Unit. And then Assistant Secretary for Peace Building. And finally, the Department of Homeland Security. I always felt comfortable knowing that Jane, in the situation that was looking at the direst consequences for our country, at the worst of the worst of potential terrorist attacks, was always bringing peace building values to that job. So I slept well at night knowing that you were there. And finally, Vint Cerf. I feel, Vint, and we just met, like introducing Mr. Gutenberg at a printing convention, or the Wright Brothers at an aviation convention. It was very hard for me to wrap my mind around how do we talk about one of the fathers of the internet. And it occurred to me last night as I was at my son's last back to school night, where the chemistry teacher, the math teacher, both said, we've thrown out textbooks. We like to go on the internet and find problems that are going to excite the kids. We just don't do teaching the same way anymore. To these peace builders in Togo who are using the internet in ways that would have been unimaginable 15 or 20 years ago. So I hope that you feel in this discussion today and meeting members of the peace building community how grateful we are for all you have done academically in your work at Google in shaping this technology that is really defining our age. So with that, thank you, and I'll look forward to the discussion. I've already made one critical decision here, which is I, Vint handed me his card and it says, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. And I thought, well, as chair of the Alliance for Peace Building, I can make the unilateral decision to change Melanie's title from President and CEO to Chief Peace Building Evangelist. So I wanted to let you know the sort of choreography of today's panel will be opening statements by Vint and Jane and then some discussion amongst the three of us. And then we'll open it up to questions from folks here in the auditorium, but also people online. And before I turn it over, I wanted to just give one sort of observation that hit me as we went through the morning and the various panels that we had. And it has to do with what's up on the screen here and a possible incompatibility, which is in the technology world. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. And I'm getting at least right is you hear about speed all the time. It's like how fast can we get to market? We want to fail fast. We want to aggregate information, create and get it out to as many people as fast as we can, rapid prototyping. And then in the peace building world, people may be thinking in sort of longer time frames. So the word durable up there, which maybe is purposely shaded a little bit for that reason, is there a conflict? And to what degree is there between just if we're trying to talk about how to get these worlds together and mutually empowering each other? Is there some fundamental incompatibility between how we think and the cycles at which we work? And what are the opportunities and the promise that you all see? So I'm hoping we'll cover some of that territory over the course of our discussion. But maybe if we start with just your opening thoughts when you think about technology and peace building and the relationship between them. Did we flip a coin earlier? I don't know if we... Yeah, she didn't. You get to go first. Are you sure? Did you flip a coin? In my mind. Yeah, I don't. Jane, one. We should take you to Las Vegas. But well, first of all, it's a special honor to appear on the stage with these two, especially with Jane. Let me tell you about Jane. This is a person who knows why she has opinions and it's not common in the administration to have somebody who has an opinion and then can explain why she has that opinion and where it came from. So I have a lot of respect for that. Second, with regard to your conundrum, let me explain that making things happen sometimes takes a lot of time even in the engineering world. Despite all of this, you know, internet time and rush to this, that, and the other, when Bob Khan and I wrote the first spec for internet, it was 1974. We didn't get to turn it on into operational form until 1983. It took nine years. The interplanetary internet's taken 15 years and it's now finally functioning, but some of these things just take time. Let me start out by observing that you can't solve these kinds of problems, peace building, peacemaking, creation of peace and the conditions under which peace can be maintained or even created without understanding what the origins of conflict are. And sometimes it has to do with resources. Sometimes it has to do with ideology. Sometimes it's as simple as you're in charge and I'm not and I don't like that. That's a tough one because there's not necessarily a good argument that lets you reverse that view that I should stay in charge and we see this all the time. So that's one point. Understanding the origins of conflict is essential to figuring out if there's a way to diffuse the conflict. The second thing is that we are faced with the politics of poverty versus the politics of plenty. And in my world, trying to create plenty to avoid the politics of poverty or the stress between abundance and scarcity, that's a big deal. Trying to create abundance where it isn't is really important. And finally, I think Jane, you and I should try in the course of this conversation to help these people understand the difference between safety and security because we've had a lot of discussion about the difference between those two terms. And I thought you articulated it extremely well in your time as Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, recognizing that the title of the organization was almost wrong given what it was you were charged to do. So I'm going to stop there and hand over to my distinguished colleague. So thanks, Vint. It's also a special pleasure for me not only to be at USIP. My Dr. Father Alexander George was a fellow here for several years. And Melanie is not only one of the kindest people on earth, one of the smartest people I know, has been a pioneer. I love your suggestion, Rob. You are Chief Peacebuilding Evangelist. I'm going to stake out what may prove to be some controversial ground on two fronts. I think we are witnessing the intersection of two very powerful trends that is probably changing the role of government in our lives. And that intersection, and that because the role of government in our lives will be changing, how we approach the prospects for peaceful coexistence, that there are implications for that. So the two trends, one is a trend of growth and one is a trend of decay. The trend of growth is what I call the global cyber awakening, which is the social consequences of the penetration of the Internet. It's not the same thing. It's the social consequences of the penetration of the Internet. In 1996, 15 or 16 million of us were online. Today, 3 billion. That's pretty substantial growth. The big money is on the O3B, the other 3 billion. It will not take them 20 years to get online the way it took the first half of the world. We are connected to each other and to ideas and to possibilities and to power in ways we were never before. And when I say we, I mean we the people. It's extraordinary, this explosion of awareness of other and of empowerment. We like it and we want more.  And this for a population in the world that is already healthier, wealthier, more mobile, more educated than it ever before in history, notwithstanding the problems we have.  And it's smashing into a trend of decay, which is the near total collapse of trust in public sector institutions and its global. People everywhere around the world are angry at their institutions.  Many of them don't like their governments and they're angry about it. There's a great deal of anger, whether it's manifest in the Occupy movement, demonstrations in Rio, in Istanbul, anywhere you like around the world. This is broad based social anger and it's targeting the public institutions of our lives, about which and in which we have lost faith. So we have an enormous trend of growth in the global cyber awakening and an enormous trend of decay in the near total collapse of trust in public sector institutions. And I think there's going to be consequences for the role of government in our lives. So I spent a lot of time these days talking about cyber security. I tell people there are only three interesting questions when it comes to cyber security. I'm not a technologist, that's why there are only three. Question number one is how do we architect systems we can trust from components we can't? Question number two, how do we maintain the integrity of our information and our identities in an open internet? And question number three is what will the role of government be in all of this? Now why is this an interesting question? Because Vint mentioned security. Governments are used to being the dominant players. In fact, they're used to being the monopolists in the security space. We assign security to governments. We want safe streets. Governments, you run the police. We want a safe country. Governments, you run the military. So governments are used to being the monopolists in this space and they are in physical space, but they're not in cyberspace. And they're not because governments don't have the power that matters. They're the dominant players in security and physical space because they have the power to protect us, but it's the power to connect us that constitutes power in cyberspace and governments are just market participants here. So I think in the backdrop of the very important, I think, and interesting things that Vint laid out on the table, a little bit of role reversal here in terms of character of conflict, I think this is a strategic and tectonic shift in the way geography matters, in the way geopolitics matters. This is really interesting. Government had a very important role to play in creating the connectedness that we now both enjoy and fear. So government did have a role to play, but James Wright, it has now gone well beyond government. The Internet is owned and operated 95 or 99% by the private sector. So this is a correct observation. The other thing that's very scary about this kind of technology is that it is apolitical to first order and therefore can be used for a bunch of different reasons, including really harmful ones. And we're seeing the power of that connectivity and communications in some of the actions by ISIS in YouTube and online videos, which are horrendous and scary. And they hit us as if they were next door because of this lack of distance. The network makes us feel like everything is happening in our own backyard, which creates a great deal of angst for a lot of people, I think. ISIS has gotten strong because people are coming from everywhere. They will go anywhere because they feel as though they belong nowhere. So what is the role of government in solving this problem? So let me ask you to step back even from that and maybe look in the vein of trying to plumb the depths of the promise. Jane, when you were talking about the nature and the order of the change and that growth phase, it strikes me that we talk a lot about as technology is helping us do things that we do marginally better, like we're faster in knowing about movements of refugees, we're faster in knowing about activities of armed groups or whatever it is. So there's that potential for technology to make a very significant contribution to doing the stuff we know. Right now we know what we need to do but do it better versus the capacity, our capacity to kind of reimagine just what the task is and what the promise is. So is the limiting factor just the ability of the technology, the state of the technology, or is it more of our ability, our human ability to sort of fundamentally rethink how we should be organizing ourselves? Because as you both were talking about, if the nature of government is fundamentally changing, that's a really profound opportunity to reimagine how we relate and how we organize ourselves. So how do you see that challenge?  A failure of imagination. I would say it depends on how you narrate the problem. I mean to me the value proposition of government is to establish threshold conditions for security, well-being, and justice. That's just sort of the going in proposition. Don't you love it the way that just roars right out? Well, but what we see now is how many people can find a measure of security or answer to their concerns about security by going online? I mean nobody interacts with their government unless they have to. Unless they have to. It's like the Department of Motor Vehicles. Virginia's got a great DMV, I'm just here to say. So let's put the problem at the center. If you want to prevent the emergence of mass violence, I mean I listened to Vin, when he laid out the problem, and of course he's right. On the other hand, we have a lot of mythologies about violent conflict. I mean calling a conflict religious or talking about poverty as the source of conflict may tell you about why there's disagreement.  So if you want to prevent the emergence of mass violence, it's a separate problem from trying to prevent the spread or contagion of violence, which is a separate problem from trying to prevent the re-emergence of violence once peace has been achieved. Is there a role for technology in helping us solve each of these problems? I think so. The problem is that not that we don't know, it's that we don't like the action implications of what we do know. Do you think that the technology has legitimized or allows people to legitimize violence? Everybody's doing it, it must be okay. I don't know, I'm not saying... Or that there's... anybody can get their narrative out there. So it's their... Everybody has a narrative, and if we... does that give legitimacy to... I think there's no question about it. What you'll find are fellow travelers.  I think one of the things the Internet has done is it completely disintegrated the notion of a minority. I mean, because you can find virtual company on for any issue and for any perspective on any issue. Well, to the extent that the minority in the past would have had difficulty finding voice, the Internet is an amplifier. Not only does it make the voice louder, but it also draws other people in who would not otherwise have known that they had fellow travelers who had the same view. So that's a big point. You know, I think one of the things that we've thought about our international institution, certainly over the course of my lifetime, is that they function to be a check on unilateral action. Right? We'll put ourselves all in a club, all in a group, and we'll keep an eye on each other, but we share principles and so we have kind of a predictable bandwidth of behavior and so it will be a check on unilateralism. But what we've seen instead is precisely what you've described, is that they become amplifiers of unilateralism. And that's... it's kind of, I think, not intended. I don't think we know what institutions now mean in the age of instant access to others who think like us. So there was a time when Esther Dyson made the observation that the antidote for bad information was not censorship, but more information. And that sounds pretty good on the surface, but I am beginning to wonder, the more information makes it sometimes harder to find the information and so even if it's there, I guess we should let's hear it for good search engines, but then we have the other problem that we get the bubble effect, the filter effect, where you find the stuff that is of interest to you and reinforces your own view and you don't see the other stuff, so you never discover there's a different argument that would have changed your mind. So this is... we definitely do not have technology as the deus ex machina in this story. It may be a tool, but it may not be the thing that saves us, unless our imaginations allow us to use it in ways that solve this problem. Pushing into the area that you mentioned, Vint at the beginning, so we look at the general sort of accepted drivers of conflict, or the traditional drivers of conflict, and we were to push into that realm and say, well where is it that technology can be of service to those that would like to see conflict go in the constructive path that's opposed to the destructive path. You mentioned if the internet can be an amplifier for unilateralism, it sort of bodes against the... as an amplifier for collaboration, but can it be... or how can it redefine what happens at that early stage of conflict? Democritization of access to information has to count for something. The notion of misunderstandings, where you take genetically modified crops, there's a lot of misunderstanding about this. People sometimes imagine that there's some guy tinkering with the molecules and they forget about the fact that cross breeding does exactly that. It's just that you might be able to do it in a more targeted way and not take quite so long to get there. There are bad sides to that too, it's like the genetically modified crops that don't have seeds or the seeds don't work unless you supply a certain additional thing and therefore you have monopoly rents on the availability of the seeds. This is the awful thing about technology is that it has the proclivity to be used and abused and there's nothing about it that prevents that. It's failure of imagination and failure of commitment to try to bend those technologies to positive ends and that's where I would like to spend my time, not necessarily in this discussion, but I mean just generally speaking, take the technology and push it in the direction of benefit. Are there some examples that strike you along those lines? Well, think about water for example. Riparian rights have been the source of huge debates all in the West in the US and of course it would be so elsewhere. We know that fresh water supplies have become seriously deficient in many parts of the world. You can imagine some day that the oil tankers of today will become the super water tankers of tomorrow. If we find a technology that allows us to produce an abundance of fresh water that would make a huge difference. Some of you may be following graphene, this funny stuff that the bucky ball then unfolds into this flat sheet. It's a single atom. If you take two sheets of graphene and you put them not quite aligned, it turns out at least in the lab you can filter out everything except the H2O and it goes through very quickly because it's such a thin membrane so there are ideas like that that could make a dramatic difference to places that otherwise would have conflict. So one might ask well what else do we have conflict over what can technology do to undo that conflict by providing abundance instead of scarcity. So that's another example. Electricity would be another good one. So I'm very attracted and interested into these these ideas. I'm not sure we have a failure of imagination. I think there's nothing more exciting than the millennial generation right now. To me they are the greatest generation. I mean and they question everything. They accept nothing. They're courageous. They're other regarding. They're inventive. I think what we're failing to do is make space. There's plenty of imagination out there and again and again I'm struck by God how come this wasn't invented before? You know you see great new things popping up all the time. It's so exciting but our generation needs to make space for this imagination that's coming up in problem solving. So it's our failure of imagination out there. Well I wouldn't say that not you. You did enough imagining for the rest of mankind with that little three, four no drawing that Bob put together. I think if you come back to this problem of violent conflict and I'm worried about violent conflict and Vince absolutely right there are ways to ward off paths towards violence. I mean it's not this inexorable march. I mean war is not the weather. You know but we behave as if it were. You know oh it's going to rain. Oh we're going to get wet. Oh it's war is going to break out. Oh well. I mean that's nuts. War is not the weather. So how do we prevent. I mean it's this toxic cocktail of things that come together and solutions like this introduced in timely ways making space so people can have some confidence in a trial. That's I think at that that's true prevention where you're really preventing the outbreak. You know I mean what's your theory of the case.  I think you need two clusters of variables to come together. You need a group that's susceptible to being led to a fight which is a pretty low bar and you need leaders determined to have a fight. If you just have the group I mean you they may riot but they're not going to engage in a systematic campaign of slaughter unless they're led. War is a phenomenon of leadership. Violent conflict on a sustained basis is a phenomenon of leadership. I'm not sure we have a technological answer for that. You know what role do you think despair plays in all this. I think what makes a group susceptible to being led to a fight the intersection of deprivation and discrimination will make a group susceptible.  That's because you're in charge and I'm not I don't like that. But it's this it's this you know why do these young men mostly young men join us they feel like they belong nowhere. You know they're in many cases you know of those that have come to this country for example they're in you know first or second generation you know communities the very insular we need to break down barriers that isolate communities. They don't feel like they belong in the old world and they're not accepted by the new world. It's an overly glib answer to what is that route a very difficult problem. So economics has to play a role here too. I mean if you think for just a second about people who have no income there's no GDP there's no jobs you can't you can't even meet the expectations as a person in a society in the absence of you know some kind of capacity. So jobs must play a role GDP must play a role investment plays a role and the big problem here is that I was asked to invest in a place which is in conflict the reaction I have is well wait a minute let me get this straight you want me to put x millions of dollars here and it's going to get blown up tomorrow why would I do that and so creating conditions in which investment in infrastructure and other capabilities is feasible and sensible is part of the of the challenge of overcoming some of these conditions. You know what we're witnessing and you know and we're living in an era where governments have lost the corner on the market on the three key things that used to distinguish them the control of lethality the control of capital and the control of rulemaking now where has that power gone I mean it has not gone to the United Nations it's it has gone into individual hands so you're private entrepreneurs who are wealthier than the vast majority of countries on the planet individual yeah absolutely stunning there's that disparity has to tell us something and and maybe even bode not well depending on how it's used so they have to give some credit to Bill Gates who's done an amazingly good job of taking the fortune he has created and doing something constructive with it and I feel compelled to credit Ted Turner who was the first of the newest generation when he gave a billion dollars to the UN it was a third of his wealth and and this is the kind of engaged social engagement that you'd like to see among the most privileged of us but when you when you think about this what then should how do we address what what responsibility should we give individuals of this of this capacity should we make you know a high net worth individuals responsible for preventing or resolving violent conflict what seems like the the we look at especially that now in the trend to looking at all these situations of these complex adaptive dynamic systems and the role of self-organization is always sort of seen as being the key lever for for change whether it for the good or for the ill what is the what is your experience with with the various technological capacities we have to abet that the sort of self-organization to the good whether it's at the the very high levels it may be a UN private sector kind of collaboration or it's in a village or an urban an urban area did you this is really an interesting observation for me in my world where technology engineering standards are so important watching this self-organizing bottom-up process by which ideas become codified and are made widely and freely available there's a it must be a sort of social belief maybe this comes out of the academic world because that's where the internet engineering task force originated in a bunch of engineers and colleges and universities that were sponsored by DARPA to do the development of arpinette and the internet and their their coin of the realm of sharing information there was no there was no notion of you have to pay me for this idea and so we gave it away because that was how you did things and I was proud of the fact that Bob and I just gave away the internet design and the expectation that if anybody could actually figure out how to build a piece of this and find somebody to connect to this thing would just kind of grow in an organic way and that seemed like the right thing to do because it was the infrastructure didn't do anything it enabled things and it's the enabling part that's so powerful so this self-organizing notion of benefit by everybody sharing this sounds like co-ops it reminds me of barn raising you know where everybody participates because they all benefit later all that stuff is partly based on the expectation that if I do something now I will have a benefit sometime in the future people who are faced with nothing faced with with no expectations have no desire to wait for anything and I I remember being in London in the early 1970s and queuing up to get something maybe it was a meal and I noticed that then a few weeks later I was in Tehran in 1975 and I watched the way people got on the plane in Maribaud they just you know they all had seats they understand that that everybody had a seat they just jam themselves into the air vent and I remember thinking okay this is the difference between people who have the expectation that there will be some for them at the end and expectations of people that there won't be enough for everybody so I need to get mine now and that led me frequently to this politics of poverty versus scarcity versus plenty so how do we how do we reinforce this notion that actually sharing stuff is is the way it's like sharing information is wonderful because it doesn't never exhaust itself there's plenty of it yeah it's right and it's an inexhaustible supply I mean one of the things that has struck me is the global cyber awakening is forcing governments to treat their publics as an asset not an obstacle to problem solving that's interesting and you know governments are kind of falling into one of three categories in my view there are and again this is a reflection of I guess the the time I spend now and in the cyber community and talking about there are governments who fear threats in cyberspace from outside their borders there are governments who fear threats in cyberspace from inside their borders and there are governments who really aren't preoccupied with threats at all but are pretty sure there's a lot of money to be made and they have not figured out a way to cash in in part because again governments have not figured out the potency the magic of data liquidity in fact I mean governments are still in some level stuck in 1947 where they think important information is hard to get you know and so you have to kind of go isn't this like the people who think they say information is power and I'm hanging onto all my information I'm not sharing with you because it makes me more powerful and you know Mike community says wait a minute information sharing is power is by sharing the information that you create power it's a non just it's a non zero-summing game yes exactly it's non-rival so let me ask you to address some issue you brought up Jane which is around I mean are those that are in the category of an ISIS or groups like that actually doing a better job of using technology to organize to attract to get their message out than those who are trying to feed more people generate more power bridge gaps between yeah well the bars I mean the bar there is what's the where's the bar there is no bar I mean what they've done is is find that they've mobilized again mostly angry young man they they're a particular organization with a particular taste for violence that attracts a particular type of person again who will come from everywhere to go anywhere and have they done a better job I'm not sure that's it's sort of not the question I I would rather you have asked me I would say answer the question I've asked yeah this is going I mean all violence is some manifestation of lawlessness right it's either no order it's contested order it's alternative order take your pick I mean you can categorize all violence into one set of it and this is going on in the face of an obvious capacity to act and an equally obvious apparent inability to organize for the action that's necessary so why is that the case and how can technology I mean you we have private individuals who can mobilize satellite assets to take pictures of refugee movements of burned villages of of violent group tracking whether it's in the Sahel or Sudan or or South Sudan or anywhere else why aren't governments doing this same kind of thing to mobilize the outrage what are the effective measures that stop this violence those are those are the questions that we have I think as a public's right to expect some answers and the question comes down to doing again it's not that we don't know it's that we don't like the action implications of what we do know say a little more about that Jane what don't we like about the action implications you have to do it if you know if you know about it you have to take action you have to do something about it look and you know we we talked for a long time on the work on preventing violent preventing deadly conflict with David Hamburg and Syvance and that Melanie referred to it did change the dialogue in our field when when I first started doing this work in 1994 people laughed at me said Jane there's always been violent conflict you know you lost your way I mean what's going on and and I remember being struck by that now you can't talk about violent conflict without talking about whether and how it might have been prevented and who should have done who should do the work you know and and we talk about triggers you know what's going to you know we want to know what's going to trigger us to act look at trigger as a policy choice you choose whether or not 200 young girls in Nigeria being captured by Boko Haram and imprisoned for all effect is going to call you to act or not so trigger is a policy choice again here what technology has done what information sharing has done what this what the social engagement with this technology has done has narrowed this the room for governments to do nothing with impunity so this raises a really interesting point it's related to the action question you have to go back and ask what are the incentives that lead you to one choice or another and unless you understand incentives of the various actors in these plays you can't really understand what leads to their actions so I think we need to bore bore in deeper now on what the incentives are I'll give you an example and this may not be politically correct to say but I'm going to say it anyway think about Hamas for a moment and think about the apparent fact that they were losing a certain amount of their authority and and the ability to control the situation and one view of this is that in order to regain the ability to take authoritarian measures you trigger a response from the party that you need to point to and say they are the threat and you need me to protect you so you trigger something that causes a response that you can then use to say you need me to protect you from those guys and this this sort of incentive to maintain the threat in order for you to retain power or some other thing you want is part of the incentive matrix that leads to some kinds of actions and I think unless we understand that kind of thing we won't understand what tactics make sense to defuse it so Paul Collier known to many in this room the scholar in the UK you know written very interesting done very interesting research on you know why do incipient rebellions become full-fledged insurgencies because young men join them so at some level if you want to understand you know this is to your point you know you look at the microeconomic decision-making of the potential rebel but that I don't think carries you the whole way of course I mean so this is you know more to your point I agree that you know incentives matter you know but when you want to do something any excuse will do when you don't want to do something any excuse will do so it's it's a can we construct incentives so I want to go back to your observation about millennials for a moment I'm not sure that I have the right generation here but my son participated in something called utopia in four movements it was a performance thing and it talked about these grand visions that didn't quite work out one of them was Esperanto another one was communism you know a third one was Cuba and a fourth one was the biggest mall shopping mall in the world in China and the guy that built it was very you know wealthy entrepreneur and they told him you should build roads to get there or nobody will go there didn't build any roads so there's this giant mall and it's empty so they he and his partners conveyed this through sound commentary video and the like and in the end I said well so what was your point and he said well every one of the people who were involved in these efforts had a vision that was bigger than themselves and they wanted to commit themselves to this big vision like the Esperanto case if everybody spoke the same language surely the world would be more peaceful that's sort of like saying that the telegraph would make the world more peaceful or the internet would make the world more peaceful but so they had this vision that they committed themselves to and his comment was in the 21st century he's not seeing people with positive visions that are drawing people together and that the absence of that constructive larger than yourself objective may be contributing to some of the problems we're having people want to be part of something bigger than themselves to know that their efforts get amplified by everything else and that amplification cuts both ways I want to open our conversation up to the audience I wanted to just give you one more question if you if you want to take it up which is is there a priority an action an issue that you think would help most unlock the potential for technologists and peace builders to come together in a constructive way whether it's to address incentives or address structures like governance or whatever it is is there is there something that stands out to you as being a priority for us I have some ideas well you know you can't really solve problems unless you understand the nature of the problem and the possible nature of solution that's just a platitude obviously but what I want to get at is that information can help a lot and measurement and observation the accumulation of data and its analysis understanding how why things interact the way they do and how you can change those things to give you a concrete example when you look at a virus for example well take Ebola if you know how viruses reproduce and you understand what the sequence of events is and you know that there is a way to interfere with that it's all that information is needed in order to figure out where to stick the monkey wrench in the gear and so the idea that we provide people with enough knowledge enough measured information to and and modeling to understand what opportunity they have to change the outcome can be really powerful but we have to harness our ability to understand and model phenomena whether it's social phenomena or or you know mechanical and natural phenomena in order to figure out how to respond so the technology community and the and the scientific and research community can contribute most by helping people understand why you know what's going on and why and what things you could do to make a difference right I think that the this is not going to be a spectacular answer I think that the again the answer resides somewhere in making space when I was at Homeland Security I we had what was called Cyber Wednesdays we'd have a three-hour meeting every Wednesday morning rain or shine you know do routine things routinely one of my things I'd like to live by and we had this on Cyber Wednesdays and the format of the meeting was always the same the first hour was a tour de table everybody and it became must-see TV I mean because everybody wants to know what everybody else was saying about everybody and the second hour was a deep dive into a particular subject for example you know you know using technology at the border or some other problem that we were trying to solve and the third hour was for the young people in Department of Homeland Security working on interesting things to come present to the cyber leadership of the department it was known as the third hour and they they they kind of you know jostled to to get in to get slotted for that third hour and we would sit there for you know one young woman invented the app for tracking food trucks in DC I mean it's very cool I mean that's the other thing you need so you so you need to make space to become aware of what's what's going on if you don't do it as a boss it's not going to it's not going to get done because people are buried under you know a ton of their own work and Vince absolutely right they want to connect to meaning it's why they come into public service for that connection to meaning but if they work for a jerk you know it's kind of over and so you can't be that jerk I mean you've got to create space for for these ideas really to grab hold that to me and and bringing technologists into the conversation because they do things policymakers do not policymakers say what problem are we trying to solve and they put the problem in and they're trying to solve this problem solve this problem I mean technologists and engineers do that but they also do things like vint did which is they sit there and they say well wouldn't it be cool if it wouldn't be cool if we could carry all our music around in our hand yeah that'd be pretty cool you know can policymakers don't usually go wouldn't it be cool if I've not I've been in policy a long time we don't have that conversation great um so if nothing else comes out of this we know the key is don't be a jerk so let me open up to the audience folks have questions for for for event and for their microphone we also know we have some questions the hand up already and we have a hand up already yeah great the volume is not on it how many engineers is it taking turn on a microphone that's still not working no they speak loudly well now for our next you know I was a signal officer in the army for a long time it's your worst nightmare yeah so what is it easier to organize around people or issues when it comes to using technology what's the tendency actually I don't think that that's necessary I think that sounds like one of those false dichotomies that let me try to give you an example do you remember the ice bucket the big thing for ALS that was all about an issue people and this crazy action of dumping ice all over yourself and I don't know about you but I got challenged multiple times during the course of this thing and after a while I got tired of doing the ice bucket so I just wrote a check I was thinking more of let's say a decent living wage something a little more abstract but meaningful to a political consumer I think personifying an issue is powerful and an issue by itself is less motivating than a person that you resonate with that you relate to that you respect that that either personifies or articulates that issue and so for me it's almost always about people and it even though it's bound to an issue people really seem to count in this space especially I don't know how I absolutely agree I think it's a false dichotomy but it's a really an interesting way to frame the problem I think people are very because people want to connect to meaning they associate with ideas but then after a while their energy dissipates unless they are led there is there is something magical about the about connecting leadership to issues that causes action I mean you can prevent deadly conflict with a rave I suppose but I think you're you're immeasurably increase your odds if it organizes you know with leadership and whether that leadership tends to get personified I mean in the Arab Spring you know Tahir Square they were looking I mean not only was the international community look who is the leader here but the people themselves exactly so did Twitter I mean but who would be the face you know to carry this movement forward around whom people could rally because they were they took on the responsibilities and that's what leadership is it's about responsibility it's not about authority it's not about power it's about responsibility I think you need both what's the most powerful discovery you can ever imagine it's very simple I am not alone and when you discover you're not alone you are empowered and that's these media really help you with that discovery process thank you here we have to get you there is it a non-working microphone check there's a microphone this is really for you when I look back at your career to the degree I know it you have worked at it only at places where Jane's question wouldn't it be cool if is the operating question so let me ask that question to you in your current role where you work with very creative people what contribution can the IT community not Google but the IT community is a whole play to help us do our job better as I'm Melanie's deputy evangelist for peacebuilding so actually I don't even know whether we said what wouldn't it be cool if it was more like what if you could X so this is going to sound corny as hell but I really believe it if you look at Google's motto organize the world's information and make it accessible and useful we really believe that I really believe that I think it's stunning to imagine that you know barring some restraints like well somehow it's copyrighted you have to pay for it the idea that I could get access to the entire brainpower and knowledge of the whole world all the knowledge that we have at my fingertips if I could just find it that's the most beguiling notion and the accessibility part by the way is equally important to me I'm hearing impaired I have friends who are blind or have motor problems accessible here doesn't mean just being able to get to it but getting at getting to it despite these various you know impairments of interference but I still believe that's one of the most powerful means in our 21st century and if if we could make that really true think of how empowering that can be you don't have to wait you don't have to there are no barriers to your ability to discover what people know and then apply it so I mean that's like I say it sounds corny but I really believe that's right I love it so I'm gonna don't be a jerk and if it's okay to be corny if you really believe it you know I used to when again when as a DHS I would I would walk around and I would talk to the senior leadership in the various components that we have and I would I would always ask them what's at the top of your if only list and don't tell me more money okay let's just take that one off just tell me if only if only what because you know when you're the number two in the department the story goes you have some authority to change a few things but it's a very empowering question actually but it's also a responsibleizing question suddenly they have to think about oh my gosh if only uh and they often didn't know what would be at the top of their if only list and what are you doing about it that's the next tough one right well once you get them warmed up you know so so I think you know there's I'm going to try and flip this whole conversation on our own heads here and and ask you what percentage of your problems would go away if you could cherry pick the team you worked with and put in place a by name exactly whom who you wanted to be in each position what percentage of your problems would go away 95 96 97 percent of your problems it sounds like an auction it's one of my bid for 98 but it's extra when you think about it that way then suddenly you know you're not looking for the technological solution you're it's a it's this interaction has been said at the top you know of people and ideas and things um that I think comes into this I mean we know what a durable pieces right what are the elements you know representative governance market economic activity that gives opportunity to the greatest number robust civil society based on the rule of law we know what the pieces are you know it's the it's the the architecting and the maintenance and the this sounds like a great title for a book or a paper putting the pieces of peace together yeah putting the pieces of peace together another question yeah hi seeing peace um will you be on my team you said I got to pick I pick you um my name is sally smith I started an organization called the nexus fund uh to end genocide and mass atrocities a couple of years ago just a really low-key organization um and we believe in supporting civil society um to help solve their own problems um by giving them the help that they need as they tell us they need it not as we think that they need it um and my question for you is uh around innovation and technology because like usip the nexus fund is interested in making connections between what we see as a gap the people on the ground who have needs that could potentially be met with technological solutions and then you know what I just generally refer to as technologists in silicon valley who have the technology available and from my limited conversations with those kinds of companies like google are interested in helping but may not have uh what I have called a tech sherpa to help them reach the people on the ground to provide those solutions or at least to help those people build their own solutions so my my question is really to you and and or to either of you of how can we best do that how can we best play the role of tech sherpa and getting and asking these people in silicon valley and even if I may um for the wealth piece as well you know is there is there a desire in silicon valley to contribute some of that wealth to technology building in um conflict zones or prevention areas so the answer is absolutely yes I can't I won't speak for any one company not even for google in this instance but um you know about code for america as an example this is a an effort to get people to help solve problems that could be solved by software um a related notion here is lowering barriers to exercising your ability to solve problems so finding ways of producing infrastructure that is widely accessible and the example of this is mobile phone and the application is bazillions of them now that are have been implemented for them the reason that that has worked is that we've standardized the interfaces the application programming interface the people who write the applications on the mobile don't know anything about how does the mobile actually work and they don't have to that's the important part they lowered the barrier to your ability to implement something to try something out and if you you want to remove um barriers to exploration and experimentation you want to remove the risk so um those sorts of things silicon valley can do the maker movement is another example of this sort of thing there are some kids in this area at a place called nova labs who are using 3d printers to build more 3d printers they build the parts from the 3d printer and then they put the you know it's like the sorcerer's apprentice and they're worried about that um but that's an important movement by the way this is this is you know in the business world there's this notion of jujitsu business tactics where you take your opponent's momentum and you use it against them well in the positive sense kids are getting very excited about concrete results of what they're doing i mean the fact that you could make something and you could hold it and i made that is a lot more satisfying than you wrote a piece of code nobody can see it because it's just starting floating out there someplace so um i have this this sense that in our current world we have technology that's removing barriers to solving problems or exploring solutions to problems and even and it's you know what is the right thing here it makes it cheap to fail and that's good because it's okay to fail it's terrible not to try anything it's okay to fail as long as a you learn something from it and you don't keep doing the same thing over and over again like the Einstein definition of insanity so uh although this doesn't solve all problems these themes i think are really important guidelines to tactics that you want to introduce for enabling people to solve more problems so i think there is value in the high payoff intervention i mean what is it i mean we suffer in our field um as what my colleague tony seger at the council on cyber security talks about when we talk about cyber security says we're you know we're suffering from the fog of more you know we've got more more more more more you know more offerings technology checklists all kinds of things we suffer from the same thing to a certain extent in the peace building world the fog of more you know what are the high payoff interventions there are two educate young women employ young men the rest is commentary that's really good she's just full of these incredible sound bites man that's amazing i hope somebody takes my field melody said we've known each other a long time um those are the high payoff interventions you know and so everybody to a certain extent in our world you know governments are competing not only with each other not only with groups of them they're competing with the non-governmental world as well it's and it's and it's it's really contested space so to whom should societies turn they're you know we're i mean i've heard of your organization it's really incredibly creative and interesting i let's i love what's going on out there in the world today why aren't governments wrapping their arms around more of this making space for these kinds of initiatives it's governments can't do all that needs doing and all that needs doing can't be done alone and you have to treat people however they organize whether it's a small NGO or a movement around an idea you know whose whose time has come you know governments have a role to play here and we shouldn't let them off the hook before we take another question from the audience i want to see check in on the folks who are monitoring twitter if there's any online questions i sense there is one this is so tightly woven there are no questions actually the the bad thing about getting a no answer to your question is does that mean nobody's paying attention that's really painful people are paying attention i promise we had some questions on twitter about tools like google translate so i want to know our efforts like google translate or the broader effort to catalog all of human knowledge as audacious as esparanto and what are the implications if we fail i didn't hear so google translate okay um and the and the aspiration yeah to harness all the world's knowledge is it really as audacious i mean is it is that really the agenda i think it is i mean look google is also a business and it's in in the business to make money and its stock price shows that but what's astonishing about this is that it's allowed us to do things that a lot of other companies would never consider doing i mean we've got what larry page calls moon shots like the self-driving cars and the contact wounds that measures the level of sugar in the tears of your eyes and relates that to the blood sugar levels so you don't have to keep sticking your finger uh we you know calico the company that wants to figure out why we die and how do we stop that uh you know we won't get there but it might extend life but these are all crazy ideas and larry likes that because he has the wherewithal because of the business model that the company has but the company really believes that getting information out there in people's hands is important so google translates an interesting example it's by no means perfect those of you who speak anything other than english uh will recognize that the translation from anything into english and google translate is often amusing uh it's better than what it was in the 60s though i was at stanford and we were trying we poured a russian english dictionary into the computer thinking boy this is easy and we stuck in out of sight out of mind and it translated into russian and came back invisible idiot okay maybe we have some work to do here so so i mean we've we've taken advantage of statistics and large corpora full of duplicate documents and two different languages we even gone to the business of going through multiple languages to get from one translation to another and nobody's going to be ever perfect at this space at least not in the near term but it helps you get just at least and figure out do i really want to dig deeper into i want to find a better translation and so on uh so i really the company really believes in this idea and it's invested very very heavily in a lot of these technologies in in aid of that belief you know i've been um thank you for a long time that there are only five things that i can think of that claim a billion the active affiliation of a billion or more people on the planet in being indian being chinese being catholic being muslim and being on facebook um and and yahoo religion and yahoo is not far behind and and yahoo and facebook know a lot more about their subscribers than any government or those religions know about their their populations and so we know a lot about people online but we know them mostly as consumers uh i think that's beginning to change i think we're beginning to know them now as citizens and so the organization is in your citizen identity how much of your online experience do you do as a citizen you do a lot of it as a consumer you do some of it as a as a mom dad student sister brother worker how much of it do you do as a citizen in the rest of the world they do a lot they do a lot as citizens online um we need to pay attention to that there we need to embrace the notion that publics are becoming much more actively involved i love vince um what he said earlier when he said the democratization of access to information has got to count for something whether we want it to or not it will um and i i think there's just a ton to grab onto here are these audacious ideas they are i mean at some level and i'm not an economist but it seems to me that that facebook is offering a different economic model than one that most of our societies are used i mean most of our societies are kind of based on the notion of family you know as the basic economic model right well facebook has introduced the friendship as a different economic model and google has introduced you as an as an economic model because it pivots around you i mean it's a really interesting change in perspective on how we relate to each other and to the structures that we've set up and that we've been living in you know i i wonder if we're not witnessing sort of the transitional era you know some say we're seeing the change in the nature of money we're seeing the change in the nature of government um so jane jane has has really hit on something that i resonate with very strongly this notion of online citizenship uh is fascinating to me i mean think about civil society think about the technology world about government and so on these are all segments of our society the question is how do they manifest in this online environment there's a term that's used in my world called netizen and you know that a person who is a citizen of the net uh but i think uh jane's point here is really worth scrutinizing how can we enable online citizenship in a way that is constructive and productive it's not just a question of the government telling you what to do and i i have to say i was very amused watching the american um members of congress discover the internet the first thing they discovered was wow this is a way for me to tell my constituents everything that i'm doing then they discovered it was a two-way medium you mean they actually can talk back and say yes congressman that's that's right um so this this idea that jane has planted now which is to look outside of the u.s. at how this online citizenship is manifesting is probably a very worthwhile thing for us to understand and then ask how can i enable that more effectively what else can i enable about this online-ness as a citizen in a a society think about the rousseau and the social contract i went back and reread that i'm in in translation my french isn't that good but i was very excited about the idea that there is such a notion as a contract i will give up some of my freedom in exchange for certain safeties and and conditions of course i don't want to give up too much and there's a big argument about where that line should be but this idea of of social citizenry online bears some serious examination so thank you for bringing that up so one of the things that i just in your example in your response around the google translate which may be another attitude that that we the technology world may bring into the peace building world just like the the what if list that you mentioned jane is the is the non-linearity of strategy so that the idea of we're going to set a goal out here we we're pretty sure we're not going to get there we're not going to stop people from dying but we only get the whole bunch of other good places and how a lot of times i think in our field in the peace building field we tend to want to confine ourselves to only those things we know we can do and think of it all as being a one two three four when we know it's actually not going to work out this is such a good point there's a question on the audience yeah so with the velocity of change and all the things are happening some subset of the people are going to get this and thrive in it and whatever there's going to be another subset that just isn't going to and as things are changing so rapidly and this group kind of gets left behind what do you do with them how do you compensate essentially for the digital disenfranchisement if you will perhaps by their own choice but nonetheless not feeling part of this new world so this this reminds me of something that came up in an AARP meeting it was the the the assertion was that us old folks don't know how to use technology and my reaction to this was i have news for you some of us invented it so that's a great laugh but however to be fair you know we were a lot younger at the time that this was going on so i think lin's question is very legitimate i'm going to argue that this is a potentially false meme it's a very attractive argument to make everybody kind of gets it wow things are running really faster and you can't run that fast so you're going to be left behind and yet i see how quickly people have grabbed the use of new technology smartphones are only eight years old and they are in the hands of a lot of people of all ages a lot of these things are designed with interfaces that are intentionally simple to use technologists have a responsibility to make these things accessible to everybody and we don't always do a great job of that but you know being able to poke a button because it's got somebody's picture on it and it makes a phone call that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do and some of the contact systems get really close to that i don't know if your contact list and your mobile has a little picture of wherever it is and you you poke that and it makes a phone call so you're right that things are moving very quickly but i keep thinking okay it's 1900 let's think about this for a minute it's 1900 and what's happening well somewhere around 1898 or 1895 somebody discovered uh radiation right you know uranium and then in 1898 uh all mobiles start popping up in some weird places and three years from now the Wright brothers are going to fly a thing that's heavier than air five years from now Einstein's going to blow us all up with his unbelievable four papers little short you know two three page things that utterly changed the view of physics and then of course the the physicists come along and the quantum guys come along they blow up Einstein and then the quantum guys get blown up by the guys who are doing string theory i would venture deal there's television there's radio me all those things were happening after 1900 in an agrarian society and so i think of myself put i try to project myself back and i think holy moly what would i have felt about the rate of change the pace the the utterly impossible things that i was seeing jets and television and so on i'm not persuaded yet that everything is running faster than it was before i think that the pace of technological changes is very much the way it has been and we've all managed to adapt to it for the most part so this is so interesting i i was listening to someone the other day he said you know all of us actually should be dead um you know all of us who like came of age in the 60s should be dead because of you know either through nuclear confrontation or smoking or polluting our water and you know the you know spread of unchecked diseases and things like that and somehow we're not um so there is this constant catching up you know there there there is a correction that's going that's going on um i was had a very interesting conversation in europe recently with colleagues over the snowden revelations and they said to me you know why aren't americans outraged you know you know the difference between europeans and the americans that the europeans are outraged i said there's plenty of outraged americans number one number two most of us believe our system will correct itself i mean you know they're they're proven to be some excesses our system will correct itself and they said yeah that's the difference we don't have that faith in our governments when our governments move to extremes they stay there it's fascinating there is no corrective so it's not just so we have only one set of problems are the people who are left behind there's people who are leading the way we need to worry about as well you know the scottish vote shows that that system is at least self-correcting 55 to 45 it's a little scary on the other hand it was the public site it was the people who helped to introduce the correction fact and a pretty gracious acceptance of the reality of the vote a question here um my native american father always told me if you want peace work for justice now you can you can see why a native american would think justice was an issue but um i also think that justice is in the eyes of the beholder you know if you see all those rich people who don't pay taxes or you see all those people who don't believe in your religion or whatever it is and i i just want to know what you think about the relationship between justice and peace and how you think social media might help with that well lack of justice will surely interfere with the peace um i think i want to make one comment about technology and justice uh it's been drilled into me by a good friend of mine down horowitz who's a former superior court judge in the state of washington that access to justice may be denied unless you have access to the internet and its technology and the information that's available we don't want anyone to be denied access to justice because they don't have access to the information that could be available to them and so uh your question triggers uh for me anyway a kind of imperative that says at least with regard to information that's needed to achieve justice we have to assure equality of access and if that means investing in infrastructure to do that then it's incumbent upon us to do that jane may have a much more profound no i i um you know this is something that's it's at the heart obviously of a durable piece it's a it's a sense that most of the time we get most of the issues mostly right um and it's it justice isn't isn't a state of nature i mean it's an it's a conversation it's a negotiation it's an it's an evolution it's a society it's a society coming to grips with its sameness and its differences i mean we talk about the rule of law all the time sort of in interchangeably with the notion of justice they are separate but our our notion of you know justice um is you know it's it's not currently a jump ball i mean i think there's a there is a great deal of the institution of the institutionalization of the rule of law that's given us a a finally an ability to have a conversation about justice what are those things i mean it's it's a corpus of laws that have been legitimately derived widely promulgated understood and accepted it's a set of institutions to uphold the law um and it's a transparent process through which you know which is sort of an energy absorbing institution for disputes so you know we have alternate ways of resolving our differences and and we call that justice being done um is it is it right all the time justice doesn't equal right doesn't doesn't equal just i mean it's there are i don't think there are easy answers i think it's deeply embedded in the notion of a durable piece that there are processes for just resolution of disputes one of the most insidious factors that impede impede the creation of conditions for peace is impunity is you know there are factions who can act with impunity and and so certainly your question brings out the heart of of a durable piece which is the presence of of what a society can roughly call justice for its members so i have an example that i just saw on youtube right it was two chimpanzees and the and the keeper what it goes to is the notion of justice and fairness and the fact that this is not just a human artifact okay so here's the here's the deal the the zookeeper hands one of the chimpanzees a little food pellet okay and he hands the other one a food pellet and they both eat the food pellet that's all cool then the next time he hands one of the chimpanzees a grape and the other one he hands the food pellet and you know that works the first time and then he does it again he keeps giving grapes to the one chimpanzee and these crappy little food pellets to the other guy and eventually the other chimpanzee is throwing the food pellets back at them this chimpanzee has some sense of fairness it's not just that he should get the food pellet when the other guy gets the grapes and so he was reacting really badly to that and i thought wow that tells us something about how core in our psyches and our you know where brains work that this notion of fairness must be buried really really deep which is why i think we all resonate with the notion of justice so but i think it's really important to understand who who are you with respect to the the issue in dispute you know it mentioned earlier that you're not going to solve conflict unless you get to the root causes you know i've got kids i've solved lots of conflicts without understanding the root causes you know i don't and and what do i say i don't care why you are fighting stop stop okay so so you have to be able to enforce that though because otherwise i've been confident in my ability to do so but but but but but i think it frankly function our our search is outsiders to a conflict we we and we develop we develop opinions on the justness of a solution um when frankly we have neither the equities or the incentives or the comparative advantage for an even an opinion on the justness of underlying solutions to a conflict but can we create the conditions so that the parties themselves can address it that's i think our greater role it's also i mean you coming back to just how technology information can help us actually in a way either amplify that in just or enable the the finding of that just solution we've got time for one more quick question why don't we've got one up right up here here we are um so uh my name is jessica deer and i'm founded an organization called social media exchange and we're based and work in the middle east and so throughout fascinating conversation but throughout i keep hearing governments governments governments as if all governments act the same and all governments are um you know have come to some agreement about rule of law and i can state pretty categorically that that is not the case in the region where we work especially with regard to digital rights with freedom of expression and privacy things that are very important in the online space that we're talking about in the piece in the technology space and specifically um there have been with with regard to cyber security and sort of the conversation around that in the middle east in the past three years there have been um at least a dozen either draft or laws passed um that are doing exactly what you were saying they can't monopolize um cyber um control in cyberspace they're trying and they are doing it through cyber crime laws through things and so what's interesting and the question i want to pose is actually a much bigger question which is cyber crime is this sort of manifestation of the globalization of law somehow and and the idea that we're moving to another paradigm of of um of law of rule of law when we're talking about cyberspace so i'm wondering what the implications you think are for a couple of things one sovereignty and governments responsibilities to hold other governments accountable for creating peace for intergovernmental institutions responsibility for holding other governments accountable and i asked this because i was reading recently or and i and i believe this strongly having worked a lot in the region um that it's it's an impossible situation to ask activists to advocate only on their own for these rights when these rights are when when all the tools that they need to be able to do this advocacy are being stripped away so how can we as these big corporations big governments intergovernmental institutions um sort of go with this trend of of all things changing so we save the the quickest question for the last one maybe i'll go and then give vint the last word i would say a couple of a couple of things um i talked about the global cyber awakening um i've been has spoken before about the power of the internet i mean governments are moving in all over the planet to try and take back the internet in some way i mean you know it's and it's not restricted to that region i mean it's happening sort of everywhere you know that's the bad news the good news is there's 193 members of the united nations no two of them are approaching it in the same way so it's but they're all they're all moving into the game in some significant way they will alter the landscape as governments move in with the power and authority that governments have they will alter the landscape of the internet but i talked earlier about the global cyber awakening and it's happening against the backdrop of four very powerful norms that i think have been moving through the global population for 150 years the norm of inclusivity transparency reciprocity and accountability inclusivity nothing about me without me people are demanding to be included again and again and again and if i'm not i don't have voice there will be people around the world who will give me voice that's a very powerful norm people want in on the action i mean that's in part with the globe the arab spring was all about nothing about us without us anymore i mean transparency and it's not that everybody gets to know everything about everything all the time it's it's how is how is what are the processes i want to be able to see how you arrived at your decision because it's no longer enough for me to be presented with with a decision i need to know how it was made and so transparency very powerful norm reciprocity if you're going to make me do it are you going to make him do it and if and if you get to do that do i get to do that as well very powerful and accountability i mean we are seeing levels of accountability countries are now not only accountable to each other but for the past 20 years easily they've been accountable to each other for what's going on inside their countries which some people say sovereignty is changing to me sovereignty is exactly what it's always been not what you say you are but what we say you are sometimes in spite of what you say you are so i i mean yes is the work getting easier because of technology yes it's also getting harder wow well it'd be hard to add a lot to that so let me try just a bit uh first of all i think in the with regard to cyberspace we are in a post-westphalian environment the things that happen on the internet have impact wherever the internet goes and it doesn't stop at any borders in fact the design was intended intentionally done to be borderless so this causes us to need cooperation and agreement about what harms occur on the net because the perpetrator may be in one jurisdiction and the victim in another to the extent that we can do anything about redressing harms that occur in this online environment we're going to need lot of multilateral agreements among countries to respond and if we don't do that it will be very very hard to do anything about it that's why you see all these various cyber attacks coming from countries that don't actually have a great deal of uh or willingness to deal with the problem a lot of attacks come from china they come from russia they come from the ukraine and they probably come from the us too and the problem here is that we don't have agreements to deal with that problem so i also believe that this is not just a government problem to deal with you use the word cyber crime i want to be very careful about the term because not all harms that occur in the net are necessarily crimes and more important just because it happened on the net doesn't create the crime i mean if i commit fraud it's fraud regardless of what means i use to to commit it but there is a shared responsibility here for dealing with these harms and problems that arise if you are if you choose bad passwords and people crack into your account and then do harms with it you're partly at fault for that you should have been more aware of or we should have helped you be more aware of how to do a better job with passwords or provide you with something else like two factor authentication the people who write the software that has bugs they have a responsibility to not not make the bugs or fix the bugs the people who should be you know doing updates on their software who don't do that or also respond this is almost like um uh public health in a way if you're infected and your machine even if you didn't cause the infection but your machine is infected and you're now going around doing nothing about it then you're like typhoid mary you're causing a bad problem we need in the technology world we need to help people actually act on that view it's not the way just point the finger at you and say your machine's infected so you know you're you're all at fault and you're saying what should i do and you should get a good answer back to that as opposed to we don't know too bad but you're infected so you're bad so we have a lot of work to do i think in this space to make it more um more settled than the wild west and so we do need the rule of law in this space and it's not entirely settled at this point so thank you both tremendously i mean for any number of insights i've sure i know i've taken i know our audience has taken i particularly am grateful for the the inspiration the insight around the notion of creating these spaces to bring people technology and imagination together it just was impressed and a lot of what you said that really seemed to be the key and i'm also happy that i think sheldon is going to say a little bit about that when he talks about the peace tech lab before we get to that please join me in thanking vent surf and i want to join robin our thanks for this absolutely fascinating and deep and insightful conversation i have to say i felt sorry for any of the usip interns who might have been in charge of the twitter feed for this for trying to to capture this as we went along so so thank you all so much and this is really the moment that i've been waiting for all day which is to introduce sheldon himlfarb though many of us in this room know and love him the breadth and the depth of the conversation today the people that you've had in the room the intersections of all these different fields are just a little taste of what will come in the peace tech lab and i just want before sheldon comes up to thank him for this vision that for the last at least five years he has been talking to so many communities corporations governments activists entrepreneurs scholars and i was really struck this morning by the idea of a white space or third space and our field needs that these ideas are so important and yes often they do proliferate in wonderful ways around the world as we've seen but our field needs a dedicated space where we can test these ideas in a safe way build the connections we've been talking about hammer out the new kinds of principles around sovereignty accountability reciprocity that our panel here was just talking about and sheldon has us in his mind he's been perfectly i think equipped through the course of his career to do this as a scholar at oxford he has studied in academia he has been in one of the most creative companies the corporate advice corporate yes executive board helping catalyze the change that they've made was at search for common ground one of the most innovative peacebuilding organizations and then here at usip and the creativity of all those spaces is in large part due to sheldon so he will come and talk with you about peace tech lab this is something i think will be crucial for the peacebuilding field i feel deeply responsible personally to making this happen um sheldon also also said to let you know that uh we won't have further questions that he will really be inspiring us with his vision but there will be ways to continue this conversation um certainly through usip did you say there'd be a url coming up there'll be a url i would mention the publication building piece which is a joint publication of afp and usip the current issue that came out just yesterday is on conflicts of the future many of which we talked about today the next issue is on peacebuilding and technology so many of the ideas we've talked about that will come up in the first stages of the lab have a place there so sheldon is with great gratitude and love and respect and admiration that i welcome you to talk about the peace tech lab thank you so so much melanie for that introduction i just wish my mom were here to hear it before i talk about the lab i want to make sure we since while we're all still together thank a couple of people who really made today's you know there's a lot of people to make an event like this happen and um let me begin with thanking all of our guests and our moderators who did such a terrific job all day thank you very very much and our partner national academy of engineers uh engineering proctor reed has been our thought partner from the beginning for the last really five years at the round table as well as today's events so thank you proctor and at usip the folks that really organized today fred tipson kelly victor french nancy pain and then they had the help from the whole team so it was a big team effort thank you all um so it's been a long and rich day and this is going to be the last piece of it um at its conclusion as melanie said i'll give you a a way of getting in touch with us to ask more questions i know you're going to have questions to give us your suggestions this is as you heard from steve hadley the chairman of our board at the top of the day it was just uh recently in the end of july that our board approved one of the few resolutions it's ever approved in its history to create the p-stack lab as a spin-off from usip so we've got a lot of support there but it's still very much a work in progress i'm going to put some ideas out here i hope they're provocative thought-provoking and we'll hear from you so keep your ideas and thoughts coming but i am going to try to get us out of here in time for friday happy hour and in the same spirit as our lightning rounds this morning meet ground views a citizen journalism website created by this man sanjana the first attempt in shrillanka to create a way for citizens to share their views on the war call out humanitarian emergencies and security conditions and debate alternatives meet again rachel brown who's right here who was here today yes rachel brown created peace text at sessinia mani um which uses as you heard today mobile messaging to help stop deadly violence in communities in kenya meet louis no robyard who's using crowdsourced mapping in hades city slay slums to place solar powered light strategically to reduce gender and gang violence and deshade who you also met earlier i don't know if deshade's still here today deshade is the brilliant mind behind aimta the um a mobile app that tracks the trajectory of missiles um and sends out a warning to those in its path meet the enough project if you haven't heard it you probably have because it's funded in part by george cloney and it used satellite imagery to track janjui terror in darfur region of sudan and the lord's and the lord's resistance army tracker the lra tracker being used in congo to try and catch joseph coney meet yalla an online network of israeli and palestinian youth to promote peaceful problem solving meet agi who was created by this guy michael best a social media aggregator and monitoring software countering hate speech and election violence in africa meet front line sms and ken banks who created this tool to reach populations in danger front line sms via text message this is peace tech innovations in data in technology and in media born out of the danger of violent conflicts innovate or be silenced innovate or be shelled innovate or be imprisoned innovate or die conflict has often been a crucible for innovation the internet for goodness sakes was born out of darpa in the department of defense but this burst of innovation that i tried to capture in that run in the run that we had at the start of the day this burst of innovation in new approaches to tackling age old drivers of violence is as i think you heard in that panel as well it's unprecedented in human history so you think that these would be the best of times in our field but they are most certainly not from ukraine to afghanistan from iraq to gaza conflict rains and nearly every recent study on the role of technology in preventing or resolving its causes is ambivalent at best so this was a recent n d i study of nine countries the use of technology for civic participation its conclusion little data available when the impacts another study by ipi terrific study on conflict in a conflict prevention and technology potential rather than results another study by transparency international recently about the use of icts for corruption tackling corruption little evidence but positive signs why is this what's needed to increase the real impact of peace tech in conflict zones as the nation's center for conflict resolution conflict resolution and peace building we at usip we have a responsibility indeed we've got this charge from congress that i mentioned at the start of the day to answer that question so for more than five years our team here at usip and it really has been a team effort working in iraq in afghanistan in south sudan in berma with experts and activists alike and their answers to this question how can peace tech be more impactful have provided the inspiration for usip's new peace tech lab and the four pillars on which it will be based convene connect build and inspire let me break these down convene conflict we know is about complex human dynamics which are often culturally specific so we've heard time and time again that effective solutions require deep local knowledge of the conflict the geography and the technology environment so the peace tech lab needs to be a model of radical collaboration across disciplines across technology platforms and across generations engineers and technologists working every day alongside experts on peace building data scientists working alongside social scientists it will have peace tech fellows from the conflict zones themselves and a young engineers program to ensure intergenerational collaboration so we're making sure we're drawing upon the talents of young people like this this is maryan bechtel a 17-year-old who drew upon her piano lessons to come up with a new way to find landmines using sonar young people relate differently to technology and i don't know if any of you saw this study not too long ago by i think it was commissioned by intel it's fascinating it talked about how people over 25 on average ring the doorbell with their forefinger and people under 25 on average ring the doorbell with their thumb the dominant digit is changing but it also talks speaks volumes about the different ways the next generation and i know this from coming home every day to my kids how they connect with technology is totally different from other generations the next pillar of the lab is connect speed matters as you see from those stunning numbers that are coming up and the probability of reaching nonviolent solutions instead of military ones are highest in what's called the early gestation phase of a conflict so imagine the lab as a data hub having partnerships with social media and big data companies developing early warning mechanisms that can alert our in-country partners to imminent threats and lifesaving information so they can take early action and usip has a huge network of in-country partners it's developed over the last 30 years has do so many of the organizations that we've heard about today so that's the vision for the labs open situation room exchange you heard about it earlier from knoll the town this town is full of closed situation rooms and government right white house has one dod has one state department has one ours has to be an open working 24 seven operation that monitors tweets youtube uploads most importantly proactively connects with our civil society partners in the field over video skype whether it's whatsapp or chat or whatever platform works best because we live today in a world where the internet gets uploads from battle zones before the generals themselves know about it and the lab needs to be connected to that dynamic nature of conflict with a working rhythm as urgent as war itself if we are going to really provide timely assistance in our field but we also know we're going to need private sector know how to get there because i'm that's where big data has been influencing decision making for well over a decade we have so far to go to catch up in our field so we need to make sure we're bringing the private sector know how into our work with big data which brings me to a third attribute of the lab and that is the build piece so unlike most tech developers in the west the lab has to be focused like a laser when building solutions for those one g low bandwidth low power and dangerous environments where violent where violence occurs we heard time and time again how local technologists the hackers and the coders in conflict zones are frustrated with technology they really can't use sometimes it's a lack of documentation in local languages we heard a little bit about that this morning and sometimes it's that smartphone app in a dumb phone world right now too much peace tech gets built without intimate knowledge of those local constraints so imagine bringing together a mobile phone specialist for motor role an election specialist from afghanistan to collaborate on using usip's preventing election violence curriculum and turning it into a mobile phone application for voter ed and what we learned doing this for afghanistan we know we can then apply in berm or in nigeria or the next election in a conflict zone because we know that elections are often flashpoints for violence we understand that as one of the causes of violence and this needs to set the lab apart from other innovation labs around the world instead of creating new to the world tools bending electrons like they do and so many other of the new innovation labs we need to be looking for gaps that can be filled by adopting mashing up hacking off the self low-cost consumer technologies for local consumption and we'll also be nurturing other builders to do exactly the same by providing startup grants as well as space for incubating peace tech startups who can prototype this in with this input we can provide from the field finally the fourth pillar of the peace diet lab and really our most important one really the north star for what we're going to be doing and kind of the sub text from so much of what was talked about here today that's inspire as in inspire and industry we're put another way we need to scale this work far beyond the projects that we've got listed there the projects that we showed earlier that we had earlier in the lightning rounds as one of our leading activists in this field help Helena Puge put it co-founder of the build peace conference she wrote pilot projects are popular and common in tech for the in the tech for peace field great for uncovering new ideas but most don't have rigorous measures and often lack the support to scale up so how do we change this and scale up to realize the potential impact of peace tech let me suggest that the answer is not where you'd expect it was about a hundred years ago that the U.S. government turned for help to the private sector and specifically to research labs like those pioneered by Thomas Edison George Westinghouse because the tools of national defense from automatic firearms and mechanized armor to aircraft and missiles they required increasingly specialized knowledge and technology in order to build them and the defense industry was born but today's conflicts require a different kind of strategy and a different kind of specialized knowledge and if you don't believe me listen to what the guys who are fighting these wars are saying secretary gates we must focus our energies beyond the guns and steals a steal of the military admiral mullen u.s foreign policy is still too dominated by the military too dependent upon the generals and admirals general portray us any conceivable operation in the future is still going to have to support the establishment of local governance rule of law capability foster economic development counter corruption train host nation security forces and reintegrate reconcilable belligerence these leaders and many others are asking really tough questions important questions about why we're spending over two trillion dollars in iraq and afghanistan and that's really a fairly conservative estimate and not getting the results we all want they know that conflicts are increasingly localized fragmented and culturally specific and yet how do we seek to resolve them some say follow the money 500 billion for defense 46.2 billion for both diplomacy and development don't forget the annual appropriations of the nation's global conflict management center usip you see you catch that you see the move if you if you blink you might have missed our 39 39 million there as a nation our predominant method of conflict resolution is still war tech and it hasn't been working the alternative a secretary gates and admiral mullen suggest is to shift our focus beyond the guns and steel to a strategy like p-tech p-stech that is a much lower investment of capital than conventional war fighting that's built by entrepreneurs themselves from the conflict zones that's self organized and mobilized by sheer necessity and that's adaptable and deployable and rapidly deployable according to changing local conditions now some of you might think that what i'm suggesting here is that we redirect monies from the defense budget into things like the p-stech lab and i am not though i wouldn't say no to a billion or two um and i'm quite sure by the way that by demonstrating greater success in preventing conflict as a field than we have to date through initiatives like the p-stech lab that we will attract greater government funding and grow the pie for the p-stech field in general i'm sure of that but more government funding is not a viable strategy in today's world actually we're suggesting something really different that we developed the p-stech lab from the very start in order to learn from what do done do d has done with unparalleled success and that is they spawned an industry what can we learn from one of the most enduring partnerships in history between the military and the private sector in order to inspire this the p-stech industry why for example did governments continue to invest in private sector defense contractors even after the major wars were over one reason i already mentioned it was that specialized technology that was required but the other factor was even more powerful and again it's kind of in the subtext of a lot of things people have said today because the defense industry became a major employer in nearly every part of america and when an industry puts people to work governments and corporations large and small invest in it so let's think of the p-stech lab as a way to inspire an industry where people innovate and build products that both save lives and alleviate unemployment which as you've heard today is currently of epidemic proportions in most conflict zones particularly among young men creating such an industry obviously begins like any other that is identifying critical needs and the buyers who are willing to pay for the products and services that meet those needs so what kinds of critical needs do p-stech products and services meet right this is all about buyers and sellers and what i said earlier the three big business lines would be tech media and data so data think about that the conflict zone data the lab collects in order to analyze and better anticipate violence during the elections in say nigeria or congo that information has a great deal of value to companies like shell or chevron that are doing business there or in hp and intel who need to know about their supply chains and getting minerals out of the ground when it comes to tech the p-stech industry might create mobile devices that can protect local activists from the prying eyes of dictators in fact we're already seeing some really really innovative products coming out of the p-stech field to do that you may have heard of the labrio tablet the guardian project developed the labrio tablet to allow activists to surf the web anonymously and safely why not think about making those products available in best buy media the p-stech field has already launched a number of successful tv radio shows just ask search for common ground about their hit show nashimalo in the Balkans or the team in kenya usip has one village a thousand voices our radio drama in afghanistan is doing very well in sawish abab in south sudan and we've got a reality tv show in iraq why not think about marketing strategies behind them just like those used by other nonprofit media companies that are intent on social change and making money sesame workshops come to mind national geographic is another i could go on and on because these three business lines have countless products and services within them and customers who are willing to pay for them we just haven't thought about it this way yet and that's one of the things we will be doing in the lab so now you see our plan for world domination and it begins with a p-stech lab that's designed specifically to bolster the impact of the p-stech potential that we know we all know is there a lab that's designed for specifically for the nature of conflict today a world where anyone can send information around the globe with a push of a glut with a push of a button using those cell phones that it are nearly ubiquitous even in afghanistan where there's 65 percent illiteracy 72 percent cell phone penetration folks have been talking about that all day a world where not only are mobile phones ubiquitous but the barriers to entrepreneurship are fall are falling you heard about the use of kick starter to raise money i saw 35 000 kickstarter campaign to start a hacker space in bagdad a lab that's designed for sorry a lab that's designed for those four principles convene for radical collaboration connect for speed and agility build for local adoption and inspire a global industry we actually have a good foundation the team here has already begun to build the largest online network of young iraqi peace builders to design they've also worked on designing tools to crowd map attacks on journalists they're working with local burmese to develop systems to track and counter hate speech but we know we have a long way to go to scale this kind of work as we've been describing and we're going to need a lot of help to do that so we invite you go to that url you'll be able to see how to get in touch with us to provide your input to provide your ideas to ask questions contact us about the peace tech lab as i said we need you to join us in creating the peace tech lab as well as in starting to create a global industry thank you all for listening thank you all for being here it's been a long day i know that thank you all for being here today and with that i hope i'm going to get you out for happy hour thanks very much