Explaining collective intelligence to non-specialists

Collective intelligence is not a new idea and concept. It is the oldest human social organization where individual decide to mutualize their knowledge, know-how and experience in order to generate a higher individual and collective benefit than if they remained alone. Collective intelligence is the foundation of positive-sum economies where the whole is more than the sum of its parties.

Collective intelligence, at a natural stage, has two limitations:

- in size: only a limited number of people can interact before it reaches a too high level of complexity that generates more "noise" than effective results ;
- in distance: people need to be together within in a short range so that everyone can participate and get a perception of the whole

The bigger human organizations became (cities, companies), the more they had to find other ways of organizing themselves. The main structure that prevailed until today is based on the work division sustained by a vertical command&control hierarchy. The command&control structure and the proprietarization/rarity of money are two phenomenon that reinforce themselves and help the world maintain its own social hierarchical structure in a relatively stable manner.

Why collective intelligence is becoming interesting now?

What is new is that the two initial limitative factors of CI are becoming obsolete because of the arising of the Cyberspace. New distributed people-to-people tools (from email to social software...) enable interrelation at a virtually unlimited scale and distance.

The old social form of collective intelligence is now spaying very fast, everywhere at all stages of human organizations. New social structures, new forms of governance, new relationship between the individual and the group, new economies, new political powers are in formation in the cyber layer, competing with the current social organization.

The aim of the Canadian Chair of Collective Intelligence is to study it and develop a theoretical and practical knowledge, in other words, to build a new science that will help understand this emerging planetary phenomenon.