As adaptive systems, communities can be both innovative and trustworthy to the extent that they are guided by information about critical constrains of the ecosystem in which they are embedded. To ensure the availability and salience of such information, we need an ontology that describes the most important causal relationships within an ecosystem at various levels of analysis and from a variety of perspectives. Ontology logically precedes and guides epistemology. 

The Federal Enterprise Architecture is a good starting point for designing trustworthy self-organization and innovation because it has evolved to help complex enterprises organize and operate through the loose coupling provided by information systems.

Formal risk management vastly increases the level of risk that can be tolerated at the outset of a program and thus enables the development of capabilities for more ambiguous or uncertain situations. One way to reduce risk is to utilize commercial items as prototypes in early assessment of concepts for new capabilities and in assessment of new ways to employ those capabilities. Even rudimentary prototypes can reveal possibilities for integrating new capabilities with extant systems and processes. This can accelerate the identification and thus management of risk. Risk management can be formalized in ways that doesn’t suffocate innovation. It can become agile, experimental, and even scientific.

Science in the wild and selective open innovation as a departure from the concept of a closed Skunkworks. Work conducted by the Wolfpack Enterprise at Ft. Benning to develop novel operational concepts and associated system of systems for infantry squads..

Access control can become arbitrary or onerous to the extent there is ambiguity or intractable cross-cultural complexity in a community of practice. Taxonomies for science and engineering communities can help alleviate the potential problem. This figure depicts such a framework developed for the Wolfpack Enterprise

An aspect of our work is especially noteworthy even though it is not unique. This is the ability to exploit synergies between different projects. The ad hoc community in the work for NSRDEC, for example, was able to exploit synergies with independent work for ARI and TRADOC as well as with independent connections to the relevant acquisitions community (PEO Soldier) outside of these funded projects.The force multiplication in this context was not required for compliance with the statements of work. It was irresistible knowledge aggregation in the context of an ideal collaboration among three elements in a fundamental triad of organizations (i.e., Science & Technology, Acquisitions, Training & Doctrine). This is what informal communities can do when grounded in a variety of funded programs of research and when utilizing extra-procedural activity with a balance of initiative and accountability.

Early concepts wearable computing, communications, and electronics to enhance functionality and overmatch with the potential to lighten the load of individual Soldiers.

In the Wolfpack Enterprise, we explicitly articulated the interdependencies among concurrent and sequential processes without comprehensively prescribing who should be coordinating with whom. This figure depicts this web of relationships among very different kinds of activities in the systematic development of an integrated capability for infantry squads. These relationships and activities provide a basis for determination of situation-specific need to know that can be helpful in managing access to information in a somewhat open collaboration. They lead to definition of attributes that can constrain access within and across roles to ensure that the right people get the right information at the right time. Identifying the right people is a nontrivial process with potentially transformational consequences in collaborative innovation that is open to an unusually diverse group of participants.

We explicitly articulated the interdependencies among concurrent and sequential processes without comprehensively prescribing who should be coordinating with whom. This figure depicts a web of relationships among very different kinds of activities in the systematic development of an integrated capability for infantry squads. These relationships and activities provide a basis for determination of situation-specific need to know that can be helpful in managing access to information in a somewhat open collaboration. They lead to definition of attributes that can constrain access within and across roles to ensure that the right people get the right information at the right time.

In addition to collaborative reflection and extemporaneous discussion, Quick Looks include walk-throughs of events that normally occur very quickly (e.g., breach, clearing a room) in addition to conducting the event at normal speed. Moving vantage points of various members of a team can be captured using video cameras. Video and still photographs can be are taken from third-person perspectives.

The proven power of the Quick Look methodology can be taken to a much higher level by extending it to participants who are not physically present. This methodology has been realized with the use of recorded video after a Quick Look with a different or broader team. The video is effective in providing boundary objects for collaboration who tend to use different language in describing their experience and who have very different past experiences. The next innovation would be to allow some team members to participate live while remote from the site of the Quick Look

We utilized an agile form of systems engineering to preserve insights and sustain progress across discrete events. In the work on the JLTV, we conceptualized R&D as an extended series of collaborative events that, while distributed geographically and across different groups of participants over time, was a unified process. A formal process of coordination between groups and across activities was necessary to maintain coherence of the program and to ensure systematic progress. This was as much a manifestation of the culture created in our expeditionary community as it was about systems engineering contrivances. Our systems engineering was a manifestation of our community culture and, as such, agile implementation of the processes was straightforward.

Using M&S and facilitate collaborative innovation in a diverse team of technical, operational, and programmatic experts that cross boundaries between programs and associated Soldier systems for closer correspondence with operational needs.

The methodological innovations that helped us bridge the gaps among these organizations involved aggregation of field-based walk-throughs by a multi-faceted team with field-based measurement techniques and associate modeling and simulation from the commercial sector (e.g., accident reconstruction). The models based on the field exercises facilitated dialogue and collaborative problem solving among people with different kinds of experience, expertise, and associated terminology. The models enabled the team to collaborate on combinations of vehicle design attributes and Soldier kit that were far more varied than what the team could experience in the field exercise with available prototypes and mockups.

In addition to ensuring systematic progress, agile documentation helped harness the changing constellation of participants (using the right people at the right time for the right problem) by grounding all the relevant subgroups of the expeditionary community in concrete action items or design considerations. Concept maps helped us keep track of the evolving and decentralized evolution of the documentation. They provided the holistic view, as needed, to particular subgroups convened at particular points in time for particular purposes.

Essentially it is a
digest of situated collaborative problem solving that is logged on the web. The term diaβlogue is a combination of the familiar weblog with the concept of continuous beta in improvement of a product or service. It is a collaborative journal about the pursuit of a common objective. The new term emphasizes the departure from blogs that, for the most part, are merely a widely distributed web-based log of one's own private thoughts and opinions.

If scientific community is a model for selective open innovation, then graduate education in science can be a model for development of talent through collaborative research to create new knowledge and capabilities. Strategic communications then reflects an empirical grounding in the real world for theories of relevance, impact, and value.

The AWG leadership took notice of the initial concept demonstrations for the measurement of intangible attributes such as confidence, initiative, and accountability in tactical marksmanship training. They realized the power this combination of science with novel approaches to training the trainer, specifically in promulgating lessons learned from the Special Operations community throughout the broader community of ground forces. COL Robert Shaw, the AWG Commander at the time, had the foresight to commission a monograph from this new “science team” that would provide technical gravitas to their work and thus facilitate communication and coordination with TRADOC.