Blog of Collective Intelligence

Today most intranets and information systems rely on administrator-oriented tools: you must fill in pre-defined forms, upload reports, update databases, provide complete profile information, etc. Such predesigned tools and interfaces are built upon "mass market" rules, i.e. one same item for everyone. Another concomitent aspect of current corporate I.S. is that they rely on the sum of each individual duties. In other words they don't work.

Assumption 1: I.S. should rely on natural and free energies that flow in human environments. The best natural energy, free and inexhaustible, is the permanent need to be in relation with one another. This need generates ongoing streams of actions, reactions and conversations that blow up the whole activity in the information systems and provide exploitable data.

Assumption 2: "Mapping the world" will become a leitmotiv, an obsession for hoisting CI as a science. Modelizing CI theories will to be built upon the analysis of IS layers (there are more than one - see a few thoughts about them here). The IS layer can be considered as a map of part of the human interactions, and we know that maps should not be confused with the ground (they just provide a certain representation of it). Thus Information Systems are destined to serve as observation tools, as harvesters of information drawn from the elusive reality. So it is in any science: it's theoretical corpus gets built from the string of reality collectors.

This leads to an important question: a big part of CI takes place in close geographical spaces where people can directly interact. Of course current tools help them to lever their CI by providing powerful asynchronous conversation extensions. How will the theory be able to collect and count such IC nests? Will these nests be artificialy estimated from their indirect expression, just like the theory allow to "rebuild" astral objects only by watching their attraction on other masses in the neighborhood?