Reflexivity

Ben surveys a mile of huge stones carried by a flood

WAS*IS*WILLBE
Boulder, CO

Connecting the Dots

Will WAS*IS live?

Touched by the Weather

The continental United States experiences more sudden, severe weather than anyplace else on the globe. This astonishing fact occurs because of geography and patterns of wind. Less surprising but still fascinating is that most of the participants attending WAS*IS (including the social scientists) experienced a major weather event when they were young. Whether or not you believe humans have anything to do with global warming – or even in global warming itself, chances are increasing that you’ve been exposed to or affected by a recent severe weather event. At least, this is an assumption that social scientists can help assess.

• What are the costs of bad weather?
• Do we measure this in purely economic terms, or do we need to also understand the sociocultural implications as people adapt, grow, or fail to learn lessons from surviving a natural hazard?

The water is rising

Kevin and Bob: Doing Something Technical

The point of the Societal Impacts Program is to bring the social into team science:

SIP serves as a focal point for developing and supporting a closer relationship between weather researchers, operational forecasters, relevant end users,
and social scientists.

According to the veterans, some amazing things have happened during this 10th “summer workshop” exploring “what WAS to what IS the future” of integrated social and physical science. The representation of stakeholders at the 2011 WAS*IS is impressive: roughly half of the participants are professors, students and/or professional researchers from social science disciplines, with the other half including four television weathermen, two employees of for-profit business companies, and several National Weather Service employees, ranging from extensively-trained meteorologists and technicians in Weather Forecast Offices to national policy advisors and top-level agency directors.

We are, however, missing representation from the largest set of end-users, the diversity of publics who care about weather news. Social science is needed to identify

Caitlin and Jay, listening carefully.

• the very different reasons and diversity of needs of interested consumers of weather news;
• failures of education and training in making weather knowledge common – widely shared and collectively understood;
• social interactions of time and the timing of warnings with both short-fuse and long-fuse weather hazards (such as flash floods or hurricanes, respectively).

Did you know that the National Weather Service warning for Hurricane Katrina was the most precise and accurate warning in history? Not only did the official warning provide a very long lead time, it also predicted in acute detail the devastation about to occur.

A new line in the sand

Brittany's Emergency Management Support Statement

Including so many social scientists in the WAS*IS 2011 Summer Workshop raises the bar for organizers and participants too. The diversity of disciplinary backgrounds means the training model has to embrace new interaction capacities and grow. Just like people in other components of the weather enterprise, we are all responsible for keeping the relationships discovered here alive, active, and productive. Collectively, some stances need to be forged on a wider scale to support the emergence of this movement from its exclusive and cozy origins to an institutional force with considerable lateral reach. WAS*IS  is not only about the weather: its revolutionary model is an exemplar for harnessing collective intelligence in the face of our generation’s severe and complicated societal-level challenges.

Just as some of us will experience various emotions as this experience comes to a close, grief is part and parcel of the process of organizational maturity. It is like a phase shift from youth to early adulthood. The success of creating and delivering these great summer workshops leads to responsibility for nurturing the network’s potential to reach beyond scattered pairings and isolated studies. It is time for WAS*IS to become more than random motion in a chaotic system and self-organize into a system with power to lead institutional level change.

We have the technology!

(inspired by  Matt the Bionic Weatherman)

Spinney: Showing Us The Way

Popularity: 3% [?]

Bill Hooke flips the frame from defeat to opportunity

WAS*IS*WILLBE
Boulder, CO

“I’ll have some unleaded”

Alexis Networks argued that everyone should work a service job at some time in their life . . . she was trying to tolerate our waiter the human whirlwind – after all, we just wanted barbecue!  Her strategy was to jump scale: finding the direct interpersonal interaction challenging, she shifted her perspective to larger socioeconomic dynamics. This defused the possibility of unwelcome tension spoiling our meal.

Decisions: Economics and Value (I wonder: What is the price of ethics?)

We were recovering from a day of touring three flash flood scenes. The overall mood of the 2011 WAS*IS seems good – there is much laughter and comraderie despite the emotional undercurrents raised by facing the evidence of unnecessary human death. I am not sure how many of us were deeply contemplating the various roles we play in ‘the weather enterprise,’ but I think it had to be present. Queen Eve kept asking, How do we get people out of their cars and climbing to safety?

My (social science) answer is that we need to cultivate people’s ability to recognize what situation they’re in; more specifically, which timescale is most salient?

Caught in a storm

On Saturday, in turn with all the other social scientists here at WAS*IS, I gave a brief presentation on the methodologies from the discipline of Communication that I use in my work, ending with Bruce Tuckman’s model of the stages of group development:

If prevention is impossible, how do we recalibrate for continual recovery?

• forming
• storming
• norming
• performing

Ben The Curious asked what I’d observed of our group so far. My answer in the moment was positive and optimistic – I still believe! – but the critical discourse analyst in me started wondering: is this group going to engage ‘the storm‘ or skirt right through it? Will we ‘norm’ in ways that avoid the tensions among us or will we recognize the various timescales present and make decisions accordingly – and will we implement these decisions collectively or individually?

Weather and the challenges of forecasting are perfect metaphors for the development of the WAS*IS movement, especially if you take into account all of its participants and nested timescales.

Better Wet Than Dead

A locus for action?

Just like a severe weather event, group dynamics play out on multiple timescales. It is the convergence of trends and factors that generate a storm.  The group development stage of storming plays out, simultaneously, in the course of:

• a single day in the WAS*IS schedule
• the course of the 8-day workshop
• the life cycle of the WAS*IS movement

It seems to me that all of us ‘innocents’ in this year’s WAS*IS are witness and participant to a storm occurring at the higher level of the movement’s life cycle.  Whether we’re willing to get wet (or prefer to stay in our cars) is a collective decision that will have bearing on the future of these summer workshops.

Popularity: 3% [?]

WAS*IS*WILLBE
Boulder, CO

Oh yea. I’m home. Not just back in Colorado, but in the company of ‘my people.’

Dan and Todd at the Weather Forecast Office, David Skaggs Research Center (NOAA), Boulder CO

At least at first glance, most of us appear to share an ethos that gathering in groups to work together for social change can lead to large-scale effects.

Work, by the way, is used here in the physics sense – “the amount of energy transferred by a force acting through a distance in the direction of the force.”  From my disciplinary perspective, the force at our disposal is language; the energy comes from each (and all) of our separate, specialized knowledges. Energy, in the physics sense, is an indirectly observed physical quantity.  In other words, even though energy does not have a form directly observable to human perception or technological detection, parameters can be established that allow the effect of energy to be measured.

Meteorologists are constantly grappling with the indeterminate appearance of energy in weather systems. Based on two and a half days of participant observation, the language of weather forecasting seems to mirror the chaos and uncertainties of severe storm emergence.

Mark Trail and The Weather Enterprise

What's missing?

Kinetic Kenny explained the marketing strategy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) to use the Mark Trail cartoon character (invented, 1946) to promote the use of weather alert radios (1997).  The ‘work’ that Kinetic Kenny and Julie the Jewel did in the opening WAS*IS presentation was to bring the social scientists in the room up to speed with the meteorologists regarding the mission of the National Weather Service. In other words, their energy was intended to transmit their intelligence through space in order to draw us all in to the weather enterprise.
<

Merger: physical science and social science

Problematics of definition and control quickly became apparent in the formative stages of the 2011 WAS*IS group’s discourse. Weather Forecasters and Broadcast Meteorologists want people to understand risks to their safety and take proper precautions. These professionals hold themselves to high standards and agonize over fatalities – especially those that are preventable. Why don’t people heed weather warnings?

“This is water and you will drown!”
(attribution credit requested)

Decision Support is a Communication Activity

Bill Hooke should give a TED Talk

When, how, and why people choose risk over safety is social behavior that has more to do with time than space. This is my hypothesis, anyway, and I’ll be grateful to anyone and everyone who shares research and resources on this matter!  Control is a discrete, technological phenomena usually achieved under (please correct me if I’m wrong!) strict constraints of immediacy: as soon as temporality extends beyond the limits of the Here-and-Now, prediction typically begins to weaken – especially if human beings are involved.

Even in the most tightly-circumscribed human process there are “too many factors,” as attested by Gaby Who Reads Minds. These factors are psychological and social: they multiply downstream during the inevitable unfolding of severe weather events. One must begin, therefore, with generalities – the patterns evident from aggregating the entire range of actual behaviors and correlating these directly observable phenomena with indirectly observable sources of influence.

Here’s what I see:

The primary pattern of meteorological communication with the public is confusion.

Lack of intradisciplinary agreement on meaning

The human element: Talk about uncertainty!

Which is worse: a watch, a warning, or an advisory?  The definitions combine spatial and temporal criteria in ways that make your head spin. As social media and other technologies allow the evolution of codes, the infighting over ownership of words and terms is intense (so I’m told). How is the public to be engaged in the co-communicative process of understanding the significance of weather measurements? Comprehension is mutually created – whether this is between individuals, among people with different demographic characteristics, or within hierarchical structures of policy construction, implementation, and enforcement.

Opening Reception: Rainbow over Boulder

Culture Change Underway!

The critique I’m offering of weather service related jargon is not actually a criticism. It is possible only because of the clarity with which the WAS*IS community is engaging the known dilemmas of protecting the public with the scientific tools of weather prediction. More than any other physical science, meteorologists are embracing the work of social scientists in a way that foreshadows the best potentials of team science. The newly-coined science of team science has been established on the precedents of medical/public health and safety research but has been slower to embrace social science because of a fascination with the information-processing capabilities of social networking. It seems to me both are needed in order to address wicked problems.

WAS*IS*WILLBE heralds new intellectual terrain. Let’s keep exciting each other!

Arrival at the National Center on Atmospheric Research

Popularity: 8% [?]