Organization Networks as Information Integration System: Case study on Environment and Health in Southeast Asia

We present a method for evaluating the capacity of a network of organizations to function as Information Integration System (IIS) as required in the performance of complex common objectives such as the design of inter-sectoral policies in "Health and Environment". Inspired by the information integration theory issued from the modeling of consciousness, the method poses that the information integration is limited by the partition of the set of organizations that presents major difficulties to share information. It proceeds in two steps: a) the establishment of a network where vertices are organizations and links are induced by the average mutual information between organizations, information assessed on the basis of textual corpora associated with each organization; b) the assessment of the ability to function as IIS, defined as the minimum of the average mutual information between components of a partition, minimum found among all partitions of the set of the organizations.