Building a research-based, dynamic knowledge repository of social media strategies

Writing about what she was up to four years ago, Joanne Jacobs  noted:  “the impact of social media was so poorly understood that the opportunity to develop a sophisticated (and academically rigorous) methodology for assessing social media strategies was too difficult. We are now, however, at a stage where such a document could be collaboratively produced.”

Yes, we are, or at least, it is my working hypothesis #1 worth verifying. “Social media strategies” can also serve as an important context for a much needed action enquiry into how to let practices worth replicating (PWR) spread faster and farther.

Assessing the fitness of rapidly evolving strategies on any domain can be a high-value contribution to the collective intelligence of that domain, particularly, if it was supported by a “sophisticated (and academically rigorous) methodology,” as Joanne noted. That’s what inspired me to pick up her statement and see into the interesting possibilities that it opens. One of them is the enquiry into the question: how to spread innovative practices faster and farther, in the domain of growing social media strategies in organisations?

Given that focusing question and the right methodology (still to develop), that enquiry could activate and boost the collective intelligence (CI) of the whole ecosystem of social media strategies.  Of course, people in strategic management and other professionals whose work will benefit from the enquiry would have to be involved if it is to succeed.

Continue reading "Advancing social media strategies in organisations, using collective intelligence" »

Category: CI & Communities of Practice ; Pattern Language
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The stellar line up of workshops at the upcoming ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work reflects the edge of CSCW research, with profound implications for the global-scale cooperative work needed to mach global challenges.

Technically, it has become possible to connect constellations of CI pools of any size. That possibility, when coupled with the passion of social innovators and the wizards of social process technologies, is a key enabler of the current and much needed shift in the evolution of how we organize ourselves as societies and as the crew of Spaceship Earth...

Back to the ACM Conference on CSCW, I’ve just learned that there will be a workshop  on software tools to support Collective Intelligence in organizations. I’m wondering whether the designers/organizers of the conference envisioned to wrap it into a blanket of advanced CI tools and methods, as to augment the CI of the field of CI tool makers, itself?

The program doesn’t say anything about it, probably because the focus is CI in organizations, as it should be, not what it can do for solving world problems. Nevertheless, I believe that there will be a good number of people among the delegates, speakers, panelists, and interactive poster presenters, who feel inspired to address the broader implications of frontier research in CSCW for the world.

What could crystallize that interest so that during the conference a “Big Picture” caucus can form (under any other name) and explore research questions of common or adjacent interest? This blog entry is a message in a bottle, thrown into the digital ocean for someone interested in that question...

Category: Academic Research in CI ; Collaborative Sense-Making ; Community of CI Practitioners ; Questions Worth Asking ; Technologies That Support CI
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Category: Collective Intellect Augments Individual
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Robin Temple commented on the Chaordic Dialogue Practice blogpost. Instead replying to it in that thread of comments, I've chosen to put the thoughts that it triggered in a new entry, as to give more visibility to it and our dialogue. Quotes are from Robin's original comment.

“On Chaordic Dialogue - two things I perhaps could contribute:
- your proposal of 'dis-locating' dialogue in both dimensions of time and space opens up the possibility for the reality that is not bound by time and space to freely emerge in any such dialogue.
This 'non-located' reality is the one that holds the intelligence and wisdom we so much seem to lose when we get too much caught up in our space-time 'points of view'. Interestingly, this intelligent reality still 'needs' us, as participants in the conversation...”

It sure does. It's only through our active engagement can it become aware of itself. I am thrilled by that we can't even start fathoming the acceleration of local evolution when the intelligent reality of the global meta-being awakens to self-awareness. There’s a beginning conversation about the self-awareness of the meta-being here, which may be of interest to students of the life of our Emerging Planetary Reality.

I believe there's an increasing return on the double spiral of the local enriching the global, and the global making the local wiser. I started sharing my observations about the local/global dynamics here and further explored some aspect of the “collective intelligences playing at different scale” theme under that heading in a research note.  As we apply both systemic observation and collaborative intuition to the inquiry into, and sense-making from, that dynamics, we can become better agents of it.

Continue reading "Facilitating the local/global dynamics of CI calls for a collective sensing organ" »

Category: Collaborative Sense-Making ; Community of CI Practitioners ; Contemplative Practice ; Evolutionary Movement ; Local to Global to Local ; Technologies That Support CI
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Quotes in this blogpost are from “Ecological Computing,”

by John Seely Brown and Feng Zhao.

Confluences and their combined confluence

Looking back at the first decades of the third millennium, humans will see them as the era of the Great Transition, an unexpected result brought to us by a confluence of many confluences.

Writing about an omni-present, planet-scale sensor network that will dwarf the Internet by many orders of magnitude, and its implications for biological and computing ecologies, John Seely Brown mentioned:

“The transformational force underlying this change is the confluence of recent rapid technological advances such as micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) sensors and actuators, wireless and mobile networking, and low-power embedded microprocessors… When the sensor grid becomes ubiquitous it becomes like an enormous digital retina stretched over the surface of the planet.”

The idea of a planet-scale sensor network evokes an orbital view of not only the confluence of technological developments that make it possible but also, the other confluences that such network contributes to and mingles with. For example, the confluence of shifts from authority to authenticity as driver of social organization, from scarcity to wide availability of knowledge, and from groupware to massively distributed social media that link up mega-millions of minds.

“Let's add intelligent browsers to this vast sensing system that lets scientists, government regulators, or environmental advocates use the internet to ask questions never before imaginable.”

When we’ll use such browsers for navigating on the ocean of data obtained from networked indicators of social well-being, collective moods, diseases in the global social body, and challenges to collective intelligence and wisdom, then we’ll have made a decisive step towards the bulk of humankind joining in a self-aware meta-being.

Continue reading "From hardware-based sensors of the physical to software-based sensors of the social" »

Category: Collaborative Sense-Making ; Connecting Our Conversations ; Democracy and CI ; Politics and CI ; Technologies That Support CI ; Visualizing Our Ecosystem
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It used to be that every now and then, but not more frequently than once in a couple of years, I met a person on the edge of learning who caused me to re-focus and shift my direction of authoring myself.

What triggered that shift in the focus of my attention was, typically, the recognition that they do a better job in delivering value from the same niche that I occupy in the ecosystem of knowledge and knowledge-based services.

When more people started talking about the cutting-edge memes that I pioneered or was early adapter of, with more clarity, coherence, and accessibility than I did, then I realized, my service just got commoditized; it?s time to move on.
In an invitational 3-day research workshop on Global Brain, where I gave a presentation on ?Designing for the Emergence of a Global-scale Collective Intelligence?, I was scheduled to speak the last day. Listening to the presentations of the previous speakers I decided twice to shift the focus of my own as to not repeat what they were saying, and provide unique information value to the attendees.

The frequency by which the commoditization/differentiation wave hits me has shifted from ?by years? to ?by days,? and now, by the minutes thanks to social media. Here?s how.

A friend sent me an email with a quote that said: ?Intelligence has a strong social component; for example, we already provide crude cooperative information-filtering for each other. In time, our interactions through the use of such intimate technologies could dovetail with our use of collaborative knowledge systems (such as Wikipedia), to help us not just to build better data sets, but to filter them with greater precision. As our capacity to provide that filter gets faster and richer, it increasingly becomes something akin to collaborative intuition?in which everyone is effectively augmenting everyone else.?

I didn?t know who wrote it but the resonance was so strong with my own long-held epiphany that I felt compelled to google its source, and found it in an article of Atlantic Monthly, ?Get Smarter? by Jamais Cascio. It starts with these lead-in lines:

Continue reading "Fast-forward to personal singularity via collective intelligence" »

Category:
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There’s a story emerging from the tweets of our experiment, or to be more precise, as many stories as people care for re-reading them (in the files posted here), and connecting them into a bouquet of meaning.

Those flowers of the experiment, in which I am rejoicing the most, are not cut and tied neatly into a bouquet, they are still growing. They are the flowers of:

Beauty (Self and Consciousness)
Truth (Culture and Worldviews)
Goodness (Organism and Systems)

Since I don’t have the talents of a painter, all I can do is to use the above photo of a garden that inspires me, and try to paint those flowers with words:

Continue reading "Report on the first contemplative co-tweeting, Part 2: The emergent story" »

Category: Collective Wisdom
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Twitter is an intensely personal experience, yet a communal one, at the same time. However, those two dimensions never meet. Our individual tweets create the value of the whole, yet we only benefit individually from the information we receive or dispense, the relationships we build. The opportunities for co-creative play in the tweetstream, benefiting the collective, have been hardly realized.

That made me curious of what could become possible if we tweeted together, right after contemplating a question that mattered to us. I crafted a question expressing my passion, which worked as an attractor and inspired participation in spite the very short, 1-day notice. 8 Twitter users gathered in the “no place” of cyberspace on July 23, 2009, to embark on a co-tweeting experiment introduced with some minimalist instructions here.

The question that we put in the focus of our contemplation was this:

This blogpost is the first installment of a report in 4 parts dealing with: A. what happened, B. what is the emergent story, C. what we learned from the experiment, and D. how we would improve the design of the next one.

So what has really happened in our contemplative twitterspace, on July 23?

Continue reading "Report on the first contemplative co-tweeting, Part 1: What happened " »

Category: Collaborative Sense-Making ; Technologies That Support CI
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This blogpost builds on and extends the ideas introduced in the Chaordic Dialogue Practice.

Both there and here, I am passionately curious of what would become possible, what we could gain access to individually and together, if we decided to work with such communication tools as SMS, chatrooms, or chat in Skype, and consensually suspended the habit of giving, receiving, and expecting immediate a response. What if we could give ourselves more time to listen and respond from a more mindful space, respecting more silence pregnant with possibilities?

Inspired by the early experiences with the Chaordic Dialogue Practice, here I add a Twitter dimension to renew and expand it. If you don?t have yet a Twitter account but want to participate, sign up here.

For detailed instructions, read on:

Continue reading "Experiment in contemplative co-tweeting " »

Category:
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A good interview opens new conversations by triggering more questions than it answers. I"m grateful to Christiana Wyly for interviewing James Quilligan and for the new questions that their conversation made possible to ask.

"[T]he real epistemic break is happening where individuals with deeper understanding are organizing to preserve and manage a particular commons which they depend on for their own livelihood or well-being (be it natural, social, cultural or intellectual), and allowing the energy of shared governance to flow in and through that space." -- Quiliigan

What are the signs of such epistemic breaks?
How can we recognize them when they happen?
What are their necessary antecedents?

What difference could it make for the movement of transition to a better world if the collaborative inquiries into those questions would unearth some initial, useful replies?

Continue reading "Autonomous commons groups as drivers of the transition, their CI, and the CI they are part of" »

Category: Questions Worth Asking
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This practice starts by breaking the habit of giving and receiving immediate response in real-time conversations, texting, on skype or on the phone. It gives access to a fuller intelligence of the parties in communication. When we take any insight, a striking inspiration, or a special resonance between possibilities, into the focus of our non-judgmental observing and contemplating them, then we can access a deeper intuition. Giving room to such contemplation, before moving to expression, is a gift to the conversation’s highest potential. That is a hypothesis worth testing in the prototyping process.

Continue reading "Chaordic Dialogue Practice" »

Category:
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