E1. background & significance

In particular, most approaches in the physical, biological, and social sciences focus on one level of organization at a time. As a result, something important is often not just given short shrift (this may be inevitable) but is totally left off the table. A multi-layer approach also highlights the importance of individual-fallibility (as “inability to cover all bases”) not as only weakness, but as an asset if we recognize it as a driver of emphasis-diversity in our communities, as well as something that must be taken into account. To be more specific, a focus in on fundamental symmetry-breaks (in the evolution of planetary systems as well as in the development of life on our planet’s surface) has suggested that individual metazoans are in general concerned (to various extents) with the buffering of subsystem-correlations that look inward and outward from the boundaries of their skin, their family, and their culture. These are six elements of physical structure in our communities that, therefore, we might benefit from trying to care for all at once.

This model associates six positive numbers (resource fractions directed toward the buffering of correlations in/out relative to skin, family and culture) with each metazoan. These numbers characterize a community's correlation-network only in terms of the individual time and/or energy resources allocated to each layer. One objective is to explore ways to gather high-quality experimental data on the layer multiplicity of niche structures in a given metazoan community (via e.g. observation of behaviors, communication traffic, and for human communities development of survey instruments). Primary long-term goals are to examine the robustness of task layer-multiplicity as a measure of community well-being, and to examine the utility of multi-layer awareness as conceptual tool for tracking the healing effect of communications on communities. Possible application to displaced communities of metazoans will also be considered, with the simple objective there of going one step beyond body count in quantitatively assessing the impact of disasters and policy changes.

One of the problems for modelers (and those interested in information about the impact of disasters and policies on these broader aspects of community structure) in this context has been the absence of empirical data on more than one layer at a time. For human communities, new possibilities for obtaining such data are opening up in the areas of (i) survey self-reporting, (ii) real-time experience-sampling [12], and (iii) communication-traffic “behavioral” analysis. In brief, survey data is now coming available e.g. through the Gallup-Healthways 5 initiative [13]. The door to work on real-time attention-slice experience-sampling is increasingly opening up with the wide availableity of smartphones across the planet. Finally, public data-streams (like that made available through Twitter) show promise, perhaps with help from mechanical turk participants, to provide behavioral information on the attention-focus in communities as well.

We are still organizing our specific objectives (and collaborations) in this initiative, but are hoping to examine all three of these opportunities to obtain empirical data on task-layer multiplicity for multiple communities in real time. We will also try to see how the various measures correlate with one another, and with other measures of community well-being.