Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems

Palfrey and Gasser’s book looks at the benefits and risks of interconnectivity in order to lay out a way to both understand what’s involved and how to achieve the best level of healthy interconnectivity without inadvertently introducing too many risks. One of the reasons interconnectivity is difficult is that it’s not only a technical issue. It has at least four layers: the technology involved, the content or data being shared, the humans using the data, and an institutional layer of people deciding through laws, standards, cultural values, or business decisions how they want to interact and who's going to pay for it.returnreturnPalfrey and Gasser provide interesting examples of why interop is beneficial – including the ways that people who didn’t know one another were able to use open source software to connect with each other and with people on the ground when Haiti was struck by a massive earthquake in 2010. In this case, it involved a non-profit technology company that had designed a suite of interactive software designed to work in crisis situations, a program at Tufts University, the United Nations, and an intriguing organization I’d never heard of, the International Network of Crisis Mappers. Online and on the ground, information was gathered, shared, and used by people who had never met, but had to act, right now. This is interop in the public interest, and it was fast, effective, and democratic. On the other hand, there are issues around privacy and security in which interop can spread problems quickly.returnreturnPalfrey and Gasser have written a clear and well-organized book about a topic many librarians will instinctively recognize (and, indeed, a chapter is devoted to sharing and preserving knowledge). But once you read it, you will see interop issues everywhere. In a world where we tend to specialize, they have done a good job of drawing from a wide range of disciplines, including communication studies, law, sociology, economics, and information science, to map out how culture and technology and our efforts to weave our systems into a coherent whole are complicated on many levels. The book includes a case study on how integrating our healthcare information systems could bring benefits – yet is so very hard to do for many reasons. There are more case studies available online through the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.returnreturnAs the authors point out, so many of the choices we make today are part of a tangle of intersecting concerns. We can’t pull on one string to untangle them all, we can't patch them together with a little extra code. We need to understand the whole tangled mess. The authors argue that understanding interop processes might help us make better decisions about our interconnected world. “It should push us, as individuals and as societies, to acknowledge and address the costs and benefits of deep interconnection among technologies, data, humans, and institutions." As the authors point out, it's only if we understand complex systems and what is at stake if they fail, that we will be able "to fashion the kind of world in which we want to live.”returnreturnThis review is condensed from a column I wrote at Inside">www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/interop-untangling-complex-systems#ixzz204YrXo3D">Inside Higher Ed,