Community straddling

What a delight! after writing about multi-membership here and there, I've just discovered Sébastien Paquet's concept of "community straddling" in a brief but germinal essay on Online Communities and the Future of Culture. A "community straddler is someone who participates in several communities, be it simultaneously or sequentially, and who understands the culture of each to a certain extent." Seb also says:

These people do not feel irrevocably bound to a particular community. They see themselves as multidimensional: as opposed to saying "I'm a doctor, don't expect me to teach you anything" or "I'm just a programmer, don't bug me with politics", they'll say "Well, right now I'm into this and that and that, and if you have something new to show me I just might take a plunge!"

As humankind's collective intellect--reflected to some extent on the web--became the most powerful force of production of our times, multi-community membership and the corresponding multi-dimensional evolution of human faculties, became harbingers of cultural and economic transformation much more profound and broader than we've ever had a chance to experience.

Technologies of CI

Technologies of Collective Intelligence, two-day seminar (in French) at Collège de Polytechnique, in Paris.

next sessions:
03.07.01-02
03.12.18-19

website is here

http://www.collegepolytechnique.com/cdx/site/fiche_seminaire.cfm?seminaire_id=140

"Collective intelligence" is defined

"Collective intelligence" is defined as the capacity of human communities to co-operate intellectually in creation, innovation and invention.

from the news announcing the research program on "Collective intelligence" at the University of Ottawa

Canada Research Chair on Collective Intelligence

Pierre Lévy, author of Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace, is heading the Canada Research Chair on Collective Intelligence at the University of Ottawa. He has graciously accepted my invotation to co-author this blog. I hope he is going to join us here soon. If you can't wait to meet him here, look up his Manifest. Or go to The Collective Intelligence Lab to read about its: General orientation and context; Missions; Approach and methods; Fields of activity.

Pierre visited Paris a week ago, and in a long and inspiring conversation, I accepted with the delight the "job" of designing and facilitating a process for the emergence of a global Collective Intelligence Network.

What is Collective Intelligence

- “Intelligence” refers to the main cognitive powers: perception, action planning and coordination, memory, imagination and hypothesis generation, inquisitiveness and learning abilities.

- The expression “collective intelligence” designates the cognitive powers of a group. These cognitive powers are closely related to the group’s culture.

excerpt from the
Frequently Asked Questions about Collective Intelligence

Content distribution network

In an email someone wrote about blogging, "Think of it as an alternative underground content distribution network."

I sent the following reply, then thought to post it here to, for the record and the sake those of those who seek to understand, as I do, the "bigger picture" potential of the bloggers movement.

Blogrolling may spread faster and faster as the number of bloggers keep growing. I heard about the current pace that there are 40 new blogs coming online in every second. So blogrolling will be less and less underground but let's hope it will remain alternative to the big-money media.

Blogrolling is only the very first stage towards a medium that can support massively global networks of conversations among bloggers. The next stages are already here: blog syndication via RSS and XML, community blogs (c-blogs), trackbacking, and topic maps.

Culturally strategic AND operational

Joe “Synchronicity” Jaworski is not only an eloquent speaker and guru of “collaborative leadership,” he is also a deeply genuine person. Since I saw him at a gathering of organizational learning professionals in Bretton Woods, in the early90's, I kept hearing about his goodwork from many friends. Finally, I met him again on a Paris - Zürich flight, last October; no, he was not sitting next to me, I’ve only met with his thoughts, as I read his guest column “ Tapping into the collective intelligence ” in International Herald Tribune, with which the stewardess blessed me on an otherwise boring trip.

It was a short article full of depth, love of humanity, and germinal ideas. Here are some snippets, followed by the thoughts/questions that they inspired in me. By the way, I still haven’t talked with Joe, so this blog entry is also an invitation to a conversation. Not only to him but anybody reading it and caring about its subjects.

> [E]verything produced within the industrial system must become either a “technical nutrient,” which is recycled to make new products, or a “natural nutrient,” which can move harmoniously into the biosphere. For this to happen by 2010, a shift to radical innovation is needed now. Do we know how to bring about such large-scale changes — changes that are culturally strategic and at the same time operational? …

The radical and large-scale innovation that industrial ecologists and Joe are calling for is unprecedented in scope and portent. Yet, nothing else will work if we want to transform the gazillion of wasteful social and marketplace practices into sustainable ones. Do we know how to bring about such large-scale changes? No, I don’t think so, but we CAN learn it by observing, understanding, and supporting what can enable them. One of those factors, a vital and fast-evolving business and social innovation--that matches Joe’s criteria of culturally strategic and at the same time operational--is “communities of practice," to which I dedicate another blog

Taxonomies help meaning emerge from conversations

Knowledge and meaning can emerge from the blog conversations more easily than discussion forums becaue we can conveniently add one or more categories to our entries and couple their chronological flow with a flexible taxonomy.

CPs don’t only start defining themselves by defining their domain of practice, they also continually redefining that domain through their daily practice. CPs continually ARE constituting themselves by the practice of shared meaning making.

Collaborative taxonomy building tools are essential to pursue that, in any complex domain. We need to use taxonomy tools for linking the conversation flows with the community’s dynamic knowledge repositories. That has been the Grail of my quest for collective intelligence since 1987, the first Hypertext conference. Now we have it, or almost...

In search of tools for collaborative taxonomy building

Luis, a member of our team, wrote in the team blog, “I like to use the blog to capture passing bits and blurbs of information that I know could be handy to all of us, but for which it is hard to find a right category.”

He is certainly not alone to want to use a blog in that way. Even if the right category is hard to find, associating one with every burst of insight would make them easier to retrieve them when they will be needed in another conversation.

So what’s the “right” category, anyway? Why is it hard to find? Maybe it's because: “One thing that I have found (and this is universally applicable) is that my method of organizing topics is different than everybody else's. We all structure the world differently,” says John “K-Log” Robb in an interview published in We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs.

What is so exciting about blogging?

Reading Using Blogs in Business is a similarly powerful experience as it was to read Murray Turoff's Network Nation 20 years ago!

One of the differences though is that Turoff had to wait 15 years for his vision of a connected world to materialize with the Web, whereas the tools of the blogging revolution, that can enable the self-organization of individual intelligences into higher-level collective intelligence, they are right HERE and NOW.

What are we doing with them? What are the most exciting and promising experiments for really learning what it will take to learn to escape into higher-order complexity?