Collaborative ecosystems. I love to be with Scott. It was about finance. I can't talk about finance. It's not my thing. But we found something that we have in common.
So I've, I hope this hits the spot. So if we can go to the next slide, 'cause we wanna know on the next slide again, I'll catch up again. Let's go quickly through this. So collaborative ecosystems. We have a lot of similarities between what we do in defense and what the systems that we have for humanitarian aid, disaster relief and so on. So what we want to explore is, can, what emerging technology is, are they gonna help us? Are they gonna hinder us?
So where, where do I aiming at here?
Okay, this is me. We'll skip past this 'cause you don't wanna hear about me, but I've been doing identity for a long time and it's great to be here amongst all of these people. There's huge amounts going on that's gonna help us. Where's the click go? Here we go. So I have to do this really quickly. We have an election coming up. I'm a civil servant. I ha must be impartial. So I'm only gonna talk about identity architecture, which is my role. So if I'm stray from the path, I have some friends at the back here that will keep me in line.
Let's crack on with the content, you know, it's coming along. So crisis management, the goals are just get, we need to do it better. We have to be efficient, we have to make it so that we can get benefits to the people that need it and not waste effort just getting it there. Year by year, there are fewer and fewer people in poverty. Things are not getting as bad as people think. On a previous panel session, I referenced Hans Rollins and Factful, things are getting better, but we still have big challenges. So despite significant efforts, things are still making it difficult for some people.
And we must keep going with more efforts to build up better systems so that we can do help more people around us. So here are just a few slides that show what sort of things are going on here. This is
A joint dashboard, which is showing how connected our global systems are. And this is up to date here. You can see this week it rained a lot in some parts of Germany and, and, and by and large countries sort their own problems out, but sometimes they get overwhelmed just as we do as individuals. We're very resilient, but sometimes we have to draw on friends for help.
So here we see this week what happened in Stuttgart and where the areas are. This is an some enabling technology from European Union satellite Copernicus. This is mapping and GIS information, but not everybody has these resources around the world, but these are the sorts of information streams that we can bring together to provide help where it is needed. And you can see that from a defense point of view. We do this sort of thing around the world. We have these sorts of capabilities.
So, but some nation states that are in vulnerable positions don't have the resources to do this kind of thing. You can imagine small island states in the Pacific, which will maybe overwhelmed by climate change.
How do they afford a satellite network to look after themselves?
So we, we have these sorts of capabilities, we can use it to help people around the world. So I'm not gonna talk about particular agencies and so that's not my thing. But here this is illustrating the typical set of processes that happen at to on, on the right hand side at an international level, a national level. And these mechanisms that we have are standard operational processes, which are very similar between organizations. And you can see that there are multiple agencies involved here. They need to work well at a local level, but sometimes they need help.
There are private sector, there's media, there are well established agencies and smaller agencies all coming together. So to be able to build interoperability with systems like this on demand is really challenging. We find it challenging to build our own systems in an enterprise.
Sometimes it takes years to make those work. And here the imperative people's lives and livelihoods are at stake if we don't get this right and we have to do it just in an instant. So this is what the humanitarian emergency relief coordinator would have to do.
There are people in the loop and how we do this is to rely on specialists that cluster together and help each other and practice and build standard ways of working that is repeatable for their specialism. So we have communities of interest, they build clusters, geographic clusters that span specialisms, local clusters of specialisms, and then we have to connect them to their global counterparts.
Now I, when I go back from here at the end of this month, is the Glastonbury International of Performing Arts. It's a music festival predominantly. What relevance does this have?
Well, temporarily in the month of June, Glastonbury will be the 24th biggest city in the uk. It dis if you, if you're familiar with the, the, the urban era of reading just outside London, it displaces that into 25th place.
Last week, one of my colleagues, because I have another persona I used to work and I will be with my friends for the medical services 30 days before the event starts, we start building our hospitals.
I worked it and, and I will be, I've sort of retired from those jobs now I do the litter picking, but we have 30 days to build the hospitals and care centers for a town, which is the 24th biggest in England. And we have to give the first hour help. We only have 30 days to do it. So we must be systematic. We have practiced. They practice and practice and practice. We have stuffing containers, it all comes out. We know what to do and we get on with it. Okay? So that's the way that we fix these problems.
So despite seemingly a lot of complication here in these processes are challenging, but if you practice them, that's great. The challenge comes though, when you're dealing with people that you haven't dealt with before. Glastonbury, we tend to deal with the same people. It is predictable. We just have to do it and practice it. But here you have quite some semantic issues because you're dealing with people different languages, you're dealing with organizations you don't know very much about.
So just I, we can represent this quite easily here, but the reality of it is that it's a load of disconnected systems with a lot of challenge.
So how does this compare to the military world?
Well, there are a lot of similarities and in fact, humanitarian relief do rely on the civil military collaboration. And, and it's part of nato and there are coordinating committees that make this happen. It important thing here is that on the left hand side is the collaboration and cooperation side, but I, when things get difficult, we have less and less cooperation because, or you are put in more and more danger and it's less safe for us to cooperate. And we get into this state of sort of coexistence. So there on the left hand side, we have a fairly stable environment.
There is more certainty, not so much on the right hand side. So it's really difficult to know what's going on. And we have some serious constraints here is because that when things are stable on the left, you, you may well have some infrastructure, but when the disaster first hits, as you can see in this left hand picture, you're unlikely to have any electricity or infrastructure.
So you have to, you have to be prepared to be completely disconnected and quite austere conditions. And we have this thing of denied, disrupted, intermittent and limited connectivity and systems.
So this puts you under a lot of challenge. So this is a, a, a, a familiar use case, which works in both conditions. Here we have a really austere conditions in role.
One, we have to get people who have been in danger back to safety and ultimately handed out to national infrastructures sometimes in other countries. So neighboring countries all have to lend a hand. And this is a tough thing to do in, in a digital sense, nevermind a practical sense. So this shows how there's quite, there is lots of similarities we've got, but we have multimodal, and this is again, a significant challenge for us. We need these emerging technologies to be analog, digital, mixed media, not just data.
We hear a lot about data, but there are other forms of technology that we use every day that we don't hear about AI being directed towards those things. But fundamentally this is command and control, but it's the fact that these are, we hear about distributed, centralized, all of those discussions, but we need all of those. It's not one or the other.
It's all, and it's not just always connected. Not everybody is connected. So we need all of the modes, all of the times in all those shapes and the sizes. So still lots of challenges.
So, but our biggest problem for these systems in distributed systems is this Byzantine general problem.
We talk about trust and certainty, but the world is a messy place. Stephen Pinker is a, a linguist philosopher and he says that it's just a messy place. Humans are messy, unpredictable. So building consensus is one of our biggest challenges and we've talked about a lot. Truth and trust. I'm a fan of Lego, these are all different representations of me, but which one is true? But this is, these systems fail. We have to build better systems. We have to be able to deal with failure.
So what's it look like? Well, we've got a whole lot of system constraints that we've talked about. We've had previous characteristics put upon us, but we know that we need to get better. We have target architectures now. Now these bottom two of the different, you see this bottom one here is fit to purpose. It doesn't say fit for purpose because fit for purpose really means someone's purpose. But we need to make these fit for the target audience, not the, not the designer. This is fit for savings people li keeping people safe.
So we have a, we nearly need to raise our game here because we have to make sure that actually delivering value to the people that need it. So what might it look like? This is how we see what a collaborative ecosystem factory looks like.
The dotted line is a is your service wrapper can't do anything unless you can keep it running.
So, and that one of our challenges is that people leave those things out. Oh, we'll add that on later, but it, it is really important. So you see, you saw the diagrams showing that we have this collaborative system that has global policy that needs to span across the world and between partners. And we need to inject all of the strategy, standards, requirements make to make it interoperable into the system that builds them.
We need to build identity systems which are global compatible and then build access systems that work at whatever level they need to because we have hostile open internet, but we still need to have very secure things to make these things work. Then when we know what communities of interest need to do, we can roll on demand an ecosystem for each of those communities of interest so that they can get their job done using the tools that they need without interference for other people.
So this helps bring stability to those environments and can optimize them and isolate them from interference and noise from others.
So really I wanted to talk through these opportunities. I want to go back to this is, this is how it works, but where can we use opportunities?
Well, clearly we have some opportunities for semantic interoperability. We talk about large language modules. We talked about JU and I, about Babel fish that would on the fly solve those interconnected problems. So if you are talking to somebody at the other end of the line and you can't speak their language, what do you do? You still have to get the message across. How do you build certainty in an uncertain world where we need to be able to express that. So we can look at, okay, well what, how good is that information?
How can we represent the uncertainty so that the people who have to be uncomfortable decisions can make better decisions? So we have need to build common situational awareness.
We can combine and share data feeds. Then we can make, start to build common consensus because we can start to use the same language across the people who we're seeing a common view of the world. That allows us to build consensus and helps build common insight and understanding. And that allows us to move forward with some agreed actions.
But if you don't have that building of information and shared consent, if you don't do it with on for the people involved both at a global level and down to a local level, then we have a real problem. And with, and these misunderstandings between the various different parties leads to, can lead to misunderstanding and escalation of consent of, of the conflict. So you can imagine any particular conflict that you are aware of around the world and see how easy people it can get outta hand.
So trust is a challenging thing.
We can do it cryptographically, but we know in the analog work world it doesn't look, it doesn't behave in that way. So, so we can start to say, okay, well we can build better trust in our infrastructure, digital infrastructure and use that to have some stability and anchor for the trust in the analog world. And we can also build more resilience in our ecosystems amongst our communities. 'cause they could stay connected and reach around the world and relieve the burden as they provide these very important services.
But I welcome anybody else's views and contributions because I don't know really much about this stuff, but you guys do. So I need you to stand up and help me out a bit. So questions, please, suggestions. Welcome. Thank you.
