Towards Building Trusted Multinational Civil-Military Relationships Using Social Networks

摘要

Trust in relationships is essential for deep sharing of information/intelligence and meaningful collaboration. Building the required level of trust is often a lengthy face-to-face process. Lack of trust seriously hampers effectiveness in situations such as emergency response to international crisis or the coming together of a coalition. Specifically, it leads to redundant analysis and information overload. Trust-based networks are a very promising avenue. Trust can be mapped to the digital world, at least partially, through attributes associated with Social Networking technologies. When combined with recommendation systems, trust-based results are better than traditional collaborative filtering techniques. These systems have proven effective in finding good films to watch or for feeling confident about online purchasing, but can they be adapted to more high-stake endeavours such as intelligence information gathering. Since 2005, we have witnesses an unprecedented technological adaption rate in the form of social networking applications and the use of such recommender systems. However use by military and Other Government Departments (OGDs) has been very conservative. Can the formation of a military, OGD and Non-Government Organizations (NGO) social network allow for meaningful information sharing and trust between multinational civil-military actors. Would such a network increase access to pertinent operational information while decreasing the information overload of intelligence analysts. This paper takes a first look at the concepts of, trust, social networking, recommender systems and how they could be combined to decrease information overload.