This past Wednesday, Craig and I delivered the SENDS Pilot Project Out-Brief to our government sponsors in the US Air Force Institute of Technology Center for Cyberspace Research and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. It was a challenge to capture a year’s worth of effort within a two-and-a-half hour presentation and demonstration, but it was also a stimulating experience. We had a great story to tell!

You can follow along with the slides from the briefing here if you are interested in knowing how things played out and what we think we accomplished in the Pilot. These slides are a subset of what we briefed and what you see are many of the actual ones we used. I removed some that talk to programmatics, but in the interest of SENDS transparency, we want you to see what we told our sponsors about SENDS and doing science in cyberspace.

We kicked things off with a general overview of SENDS and the rationale for why we think a science of cyberspace is so important. Calling on previous writings about wicked problems and organizational leadership challenges, we emphasized both the challenges and the potential solutions we have at our disposal to tackle the tough issues we as a nation face in evolving cyberspace so that it is more about prosperity than about security. While security of cyberspace is a “clear and present” challenge, it’s only a subset of the challenges we face.

The rationale for doing SENDS and a science of cyberspace is rooted in the critical need to integrate, synergize and fuse insights and discoveries into an environment that makes it more likely we can operationalize science on behalf of those who routinely reside in cyberspace…“digital immigrants” and “digital natives” alike. The goal of these multiple objectives is to emphasize emergence and the requirement to understand it and embrace it.

In fact, we boldly claimed that “leadership, command and control in cyberspace are only possible through an understanding of emergence.” Even though our models and writings about cyberspace as an ecospace have morphed in the months of the SENDS Pilot, emergence, powered by the exchange processes we’ve defined, are at the core of any true understanding of cyberspace. That’s still true as we approach the conclusion of the Pilot, and I’ll further “boldly” claim it will be true throughout the endeavor of cyberspace science research. I suspect we’ll even discover exchange and emergence as interactive core components of one or more of Craig’s laws of the science of cyberspace!

Next, Craig reviewed the work we’ve done in developing and articulating the attributes of a Center for Science of Cyberspace (SCSC). The overall goal of the SCSC is to enhance the exploration and exploitation of cyberspace through massively distributed scientific study, hosted in a broadly interactive virtual facility. Throughout the Pilot, we’ve written a great deal about this keystone task, but it is one of the objectives that set SENDS apart from other efforts, and in fact defines what it means to do collaboration within the SENDS environment.

A successful implementation of the SCSC will allow us to study, share and understand cyberspace through many disciplines and perspectives. We have specified the basic conditions for this virtual environment that would allow us to conduct research; test evidence, assumptions and hypotheses; and then apply our findings through experimentation and prototypes, including virtual models such as the SENDSim M&S laboratory environment.

Next, SENDS partner Eric Bonabeau presented the Pilot Project research on SENDSim. The goal of the SENDS modeling and simulation task is to study wicked problems like cyberspace security, and provide emergent, evidence-based solution sets that could enhance the likelihood of resolving such challenges. In SENDSim, we are seeking to transform M&S into a deeper, more immersive and distributed interactive capability, while providing the framework for a laboratory for cyberspace science.

From its initial demonstrations at the Out-Brief, SENDSim is well on its way to meeting all of these objectives. You’ll see a lot more about SENDSim in coming weeks, here on SENDSonline.org.

Craig then returned to the podium to talk about the SENDS Academic Curricula task. The main goal of this task is to promote and advance the study of the Science of Cyberspace and its complement, the Science of Cyberspace Security. We want to accomplish this while simultaneously supporting the nurturing of “digital natives,” the generation that has grown up with the manifestation of cyberspace all around us.

In this task, we sought to outline a concept that supports the establishment of a modern cyberspace educational approach for government and non-government education and training spanning basic entry to Post Graduate level through continuing, evolving curricula. The findings from the task are too numerous to mention in this review, but we’ll provide deeper insights soon. The accompanying presentation slides do highlight the findings and recommendations, however.

In the final task review, the SENDS Consortium, I highlighted the growth in participation over the Pilot Project year, and discussed individual contributions of some of the major partners. Many of those consortium partners are highlighted on this website (here and here). Their efforts helped to make the SENDS Pilot Project distinctive and provided us access to expertise that articulated the essence of cyberspace as we have come to know it through SENDS.

We’ll be providing more of our insights on what we learned in the Pilot Project throughout the month of June, but lessons learned and insights gained provided the close-out for the presentation. These thoughts are too numerous for the current piece but the biggest lesson of all is that cyberspace can’t be understood or measured through technological means alone. It exists as much in our minds and processes as in any physical space…but, it changes the way we think about both.

Those changes, the basis for predictions about the future of people in cyberspace, form the core of the SENDS Project. These changes will also be at the heart of SENDS research and application of future insights on behalf of increased prosperity and security through cyberspace. Stay Tuned!

by Carl Hunt, sendsonline.org, May 31, 2011