Enablingknowledgefordisasterriskreductionin integrationtoclimatechangeadaptationSalzburg, Austria –27-28 May2014

1. 1
Collective Intelligence: Advancing and
Challenging the Crisis Response Paradigm
Ouejdane Mejri
Politecnico di Milano,
Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria

2. 2
XXIst century dictatorship
 The dictatorial regime of Ben Ali has
deployed for 23 years a «Disciplinary
Machinery»
“The eye of the dictatorship is watching you,
controls you wherever you go, whatever you do,
transforms you, and tries to drag you in his own
perversion”
(Hagi, Mejri 2013)
Control, terror and punishment
 The modality of control implies
uninterrupted, constant surveillance,
 Terror was the method to make people
«adhere» to the disciplinary machinery
 While we were aware that the surveillance
was continuous and total, one could not
guess when the punishment would come

3. 3
How they see you and how you perceive
yourself: individuation
 Massive use of
police, with its
techniques of
“proximity”
 Spying increasingly
widespread due to
capillary action of
the cells of the party
«Divide et impera»
 The presence of civil «informers» through
civil encouraged delation
 Systematic "dividing and individualizing"
approach
 Leads to fragmentation and atomization of
the society : rupture of the social link

4. 4
Social graphs during Ben Ali’s regime
Groups of the regime
Population structure
Censorship : second after Cuba (2010)

5. 5
Use of Web technologies (Dictatorship)
«Virtual» social networks in Tunisia
during Ben Ali’s regime
Groups of the regime

6. 6
Thinking in communion
 What Jürgen Habermas calls "public sphere" in
Tunisia could not exist. A "rational” public opinion
could not even emerge => the result of the
exchange of believes, free conversations and
communion of ideas.
 The freedom to think, as Kant wrote, go hand in hand
with the freedom to communicate, to interact.
“We usually say: the supreme power can take away the
freedom to speak and write but not the freedom to think.
But to what extent and with what accuracy, we would
know how to think if we don’t think in communion with
others which we communicate our thoughts and that
communicate their to us? "
«Traditional» use of facebook

7. 7
1.800.000 tunisians on facebook (December
2010)
1.950.000 (first 2 weeks January 2011)
New configuration : “Revolutionary
actions”

8. 8
Integration of technologies:
“Revolutionary actions”
“We have gone from virtual to material
and non from material to virtual”
“The web re-materializes the things that
were virtual: you can follow now,
affiliations, exchanges of ideas, you can
draw things that were not traceable, and
then you could repeat the question about
what it means to have a political position
and take a stand”
Bruno Latour (November 20, 2009)

9. 9
New structural configuration in the
network

10. 10
New behavioral configuration in the
network
Society of networks
 The revolutionary action happens in what we
call a “crisis moment” or catastrophe
 During this moment the "society of networks"
as defined by Gauchet, is no longer
conditioned by the technology that defines and
dictates the social relations, but the latter
structure and enforce new terms to
technological devices.

11. 11
Political crisis and Collective
intelligence
 The ICT platform becomes an «other space»
that amplifies the information sharing (what),
enhancing the velocity of information
spreading (when) crossing the geographical
boundaries (where) and catalyzing the
contamination (how)
New challenges for crisis
management
 Transformation of communication
paradigms
 Information management through an a self
adaptive model (unexpected ?)
 New engagement frameworks among
stakeholders