Last November I was invited to speak to the GeoData Forum, one of the organizations that is trying to use chaordic principles in building a nobody-in-charge network. This club of experts on geographic information was meeting in Denver to collaborate in the assembly, analysis, and dissemination of spatial information, and to think harder about how to persuade non-experts to help them do it.

They had asked me to tell them something from personal experience about the wise collation and analysis of complex information on important issues. I decided to exhume from my random access memory an intensely personal story about the origins of the World Weather Watch.

In 1963, I was an Assistant Secretary of State in President John F. Kennedy's State Department, responsible for relations with most of the 53 intergovernmental organizations to which the United States then belonged. One of these was WMO, the World Meteorological Organization. Dr. Robert M. White, then head of the U.S. Weather Service, was our chief representative to that little-noticed agency.

In the summer of 1963, to prepare for an upcoming WMO meeting, I invited Bob White and Herb Holloman, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Science and Technology, to lunch at the State Department.

With no idea what it might lead to, I started early in the meal to tease my expert colleagues: "You scientists and technologists, you never tell us institution-builders what miracles are going to be possible, far enough ahead of time to allow us to wrap them in political and financial and administrative clothing, before they start running around naked!" As an experiment, I challenged them to tell me, before lunch was over and in words I could understand, what miracles in weather forecasting were in store.

They did. By the time we parted, I was wide-eyed-and so, it seemed, were they. I had learned that in the decade of the 1960s, four new technologies would be deployed, which together could revolutionize weather forecasting. One was picture-taking satellites, keeping track of cloud systems from above, giving a synoptic view covering the whole world, supplemented by (but not depending on) observations from land, sea, aircraft, and balloons. Another was measurements from remote-sensing satellites of temperatures and air currents at places around the earth that couldn't be matched by observations from balloons or other probes launched locally from the ground. A third was communication satellites, which would be able to get digitized data from anywhere to anywhere else in a big hurry. And the fourth breakthrough was about to be much faster computers, which could process the complex information coming in from all over the world and get it onto the forecasters' desks in time-that is, before the weather changed.

Over a second cup of coffee we looked together in awe at this prospect. The obvious policy conclusion occurred to us as a kind of simultaneous insight. If these new technologies could be pulled together into a workable world system, the human race would be able, for the first time in history, to think of the weather as a single envelope around the globe-the way God had presumably been thinking of it right along.

But because the weather impertinently ignores the land frontiers and ocean jurisdictions we humans consider so important, such a system would require the cooperation of more than a hundred nations to make global forecasting work.

We decided, then and there, to launch a U.S. initiative at the next global assembly of the WMO, a few months away. I no longer remember who first suggested calling it the "World Weather Watch"; success always has multiple parents. A plan was developed by hardworking staffs in both departments to launch it.

Then we got lucky. President Kennedy was to go to New York that autumn to make an international policy speech to the UN General Assembly, in his capacity as chief of state of the host nation. But he was grumbling about the content of such an address. In effect he said, I don't want to go up there and mouth all those clichés that are usually heard in UN speeches. Isn't there something fresh for me to say?

The opening was too inviting to pass up. "Well, Mr. President, we just happen to have developed a proposal for a World Weather Watch, using satellites our space program is launching. We were going to float it at the WMO, but why not float it at the General Assembly instead?"

After a few minutes' discussion, the President was more than receptive; he was enthusiastic. It seems he had received a heavy dose of editorial flak for announcing, in 1961, that the United States would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. We can't even clean up our urban slums, the editorial writers were writing, and this guy wants to go to the moon! If President Kennedy could, at the UN, hold up a new vision of a space-based system that would move us from chancy three-day weather forecasts to more dependable predictions five days ahead, he could dramatize the prospect that the exciting but expensive U.S. space program would benefit every farmer, every business person, every picnicker, every citizen who needs to guess, with the help of the atmospheric sciences, what the weather is going to do next.

Thus it was that the World Weather Watch became one of the major Kennedy initiatives in the General Assembly in the autumn of 1963 (only a few weeks before the president was assassinated in Dallas). No one in the General Assembly, including the Soviet delegate, could think of any reason why it wasn't a splendid idea; it passed unanimously and was referred for action to the WMO. And there, Bob White and several other U.S. scientist-statesmen managed to arrange the endorsement and participation of nearly every country on earth.

The two biggest data-collection centers, it was agreed, would be near Moscow and in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. And, because the politics of the World Weather Watch had been drained out through its approval by the UN General Assembly, no one at WMO felt the need to hold up the gathering global consensus by talking about Palestine, East Germany, Taiwan, or any of the other political issues then available to distract attention from action items being considered by the UN's technical agencies.

By the late 1960s, the World Weather Watch was up and running-the satellites and ground stations communicating with each other, most of the world's relevant nations contributing to the expenses and adding their local observations to the global data pool, the resulting information being converted into forecasts by thousands of meteorologists around the world. Even the People's Republic of China eventually sent a junior officer to deposit weather data at the Bethesda headquarters.

The lesson from this success story is clear. The way to avoid damaging fallout from science and technology is to invent the political, financial, and administrative framework for managing science/technology breakthroughs while new hardware is still being procured and deployed.

Breakthroughs in social thinking will have to come faster and faster, since the natural sciences keep accelerating the pace of change. The tools we have to help us think about science are also improving with exponential speed. Can we social thinkers demonstrate a comparable increase in productivity? As the British economist Barbara Ward once wrote about a similarly puzzling enigma, human impacts on the global environment: "We do not know. We have the duty to hope."

Afterthought may be too late. The story of the World Weather Watch suggests that it's possible, if we work hard at it, to stay ahead of the game.

Harlan Cleveland, political scientist and public executive, is a Trustee of the Chaordic Commons. He has served as an Assistant Secretary of State, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, twice an academic dean and once a university president. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, Nobody in Charge: Essays on the Future of Leadership (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, May 2002).

Trustee Cleveland Keynotes GeoData Forum

Harlan Cleveland, a Chaordic Commons Trustee, delivered the keynote speech at the 2001 National GeoData Forum convened by the GeoData Alliance in Denver, Colorado, last November. The GeoData Alliance is a nonprofit membership organization created to foster trusted and inclusive processes to enable the creation, beneficial use, and equitable flow of geographic information.
Harlan praised the chaordic organizing principles of the GeoData Alliance and Forum. "A group where nobody is in charge is a group where everybody is partly in charge," he said. He then turned to the topic of the meeting: How information and technology can solve human problems.
"Information is the world's dominant resource, and it will play the role in the future that stone, metal, and energy once played," he said. But unlike oil, coal, or other resources, "information expands as it is used." It is easily transportable, can replace labor and capital, and is shared, not exchanged.
"Both parties have it after it is shared. It can't be owned," Harlan said.
At the same time, science and technology have produced unintended suffering, smog, wasted weaponry, and fail-safe systems that continually crash, he said. The lesson is clear, he said: To prevent unwanted fallout from science and technology, it is necessary to develop a political framework to guide the use of this technology while the hardware is still being developed. The key to a decentralized system is agreement on standards for that system, Harlan said.
He applauded the collaborative goals of those in attendance and offered this advice: The development of public-interest goals-whether for a global meteorological program or geospatial data initiatives-is best entrusted to committed individuals "whose source of interest is not derived from their paycheck."

--Excerpted from a report by Paul Tolme.