Emerging and converging fields involving collective intelligence.

The following fields of study and practice have an emergent, leading edge quality to them and, at the same time, seem to be overlapping more and more, and even converging into an increasingly coherent understanding of the intelligence of whole systems, and of Life as a whole. Increasingly, these fields are using methodologies, language, metaphors and narratives from each other to support and describe what seem to be manifestations of the same patterns in different realms and at different levels.

We can further the evolution of our culture(s) towards becoming a global wisdom society by supporting these diverse fields to discover each other, talk together and collaborate.

I suspect this list is not complete. I hope others will add new fields or emergent factors that they see as part of this convergence toward greater collective intelligence. But these are the ones that come to my mind at this point:

Seminar on CI at the U. of Ottawa

Fourth international seminar on Collective Intelligence at the University of Ottawa

8, 9, 10th of August, 2004

THEME:
Collective intelligence is a very broad field, with many research programs. The Ottawa seminar is concerned with the research program developed at the CI Lab of the University of Ottawa. The participants of the seminar will discuss the projection of digital information into a 3D virtual world mirroring CI processes thanks to the Digitong semantic coordinate system.

See DRAFT PROGRAM below.

What is social about "social tools"?

Marc Eisenstadt, a fellow speaker at London Symposium on Social Tools for the Enterprise, wrote in the Symposium's blog:

Personal ownership of content creation is critical: in our work with school children, parents, members of the local community, University students, corporate sponsors, and research colleagues, we find over and over again that empowering users to create their own content is the key to fostering engagement, creativity, and problem solving skills. (emphasis added)

Building on that, I'd add the technological innovation of weblogs will discover its full power in the enterprise when associated with the social innovation of communities of practice. Why? When we free the creative potential of flexible constellations of communities of interest and practice, it will boost their members’ identity, mutual care and professional pride. The emerging generation of social tools can be optimized for powering up that process. When that happens, blogs graduate from personal publishing tool and become a potent enabler of collective intelligence.

Right now, in many companies blogging is looked at with the same suspicion as personal webpages were in the early days of intranets. "Yet, another tool that people can use to express themselves but doesn't it risk to get out of control?" Well, who is in control, anyway?

Thoughts on Wisdom and Collective Intelligence

One of the most intriguing aspects of collective intelligence is its relative independence from individual intelligence. It is clear to most students of the field that a group of intelligent people will not necessarily manifest group intelligence. Nor will a coalition of intelligent groups necessarily add up to an intelligent coalition. Nor will making all organizations intelligent, by itself, produce a collectively intelligent society. The intelligence of the parts/individuals varies independently with the intelligence of the whole/collective.

Usually the difference is described in terms of cooperation. If the individuals cooperate, they can generate collective intelligence. Often the importance of collective resources or structures, like various forms of group memory (databases), are noted. These, and other analyses, are quite valid.

I sense something underlying them all, though. That is the presence of "the whole" in the life and functioning of "the parts." For example:

* If workers in an organization share a common vision and/or an understanding of the functioning of the entire organization, they tend to self-organize in more collectively intelligent ways.
* People who collaborate are doing so either because they believe in their shared work (the larger whole that embraces them all) or because there is a collaborative group ethic which lives in or among them strongly enough to structure their interactions.
* In decision-making bodies, having diverse information from all stakeholders which paints a more complex big-picture reality than any member came in with, and/or having a process that can help them deal with their diverse perspectives creatively so that they "encounter more of the whole" creatively, facilitates the emergence of collective intelligence.
* People who are collectively attuned to more inclusive, less fragemented realities -- including Quakers and certain practitioners of ego-transcendence -- tend to be able to more readily find high-quality common ground and shared energy, often in ways that feel more like the Whole is working THROUGH them or AS them.

For many years, I've felt that the essence of wisdom is wholeness. Wisdom, in all its forms, helps us deal creatively with more of the whole of life, of situations, of the people who sit across from us -- engaging more of their complexity, nuance, aliveness and fullness. It recently occurred to me that wisdom may be a concept within which to collect all the different factors that enable individual intelligence to manifest as collective intelligence. If wisdom is present at the individual level, or in the environment where the individuals are relating to each other, then it tends to expand their individuality into the "higher" (collective) levels where all those individualities can then manifest collectively as positive, intelligently coherent functioning.

This may be too abstract to be useful to others, but I expect to be exploring it further for my own purposes in the future. For what it's worth, here are some notes that summarize this thesis....

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Polarization, and CI

I read in an email that I’ve just received from Tom Atlee:
(The quotes are authorized to publish.)

There is a lot of conversation about polarization, and a flurry of Op Ed pieces about it, from both the Left and the Right... that has been triggered by Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11. Polarization is one of the major obstacles to people coming together co-intelligently... But attacking an individual or group for polarizing the conversation can, by marginalizing them, undermine informed dialogue and collective intelligence. The kind of anti-polarization work that is needed, in contrast, is persistent, open exploration of the polarizing forces in and around all of us, and the polarizing activities of all sides.

If we want to enhance collective intelligence in our political process, the important thing is not to silence the polarizing partisans. The most important thing is to establish adequate forums where citizens can hear articulate advocates of opposing views; productively deliberate about their ideas, information and proposals; and creatively use those different perspectives to arrive at understandings and policies that serve them and their collective welfare.

To read the whole text of Tom’s astute observation and analysis of what is going on around Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, click here.

The political sphere is deeply divided by partisan interests everywhere but probably nowhere more so than in the United States. Yet, not thinking of politics as a domain from which collective intelligence can emerge just as much as from business, scientific or blogging communities, is an oversight. The work of Tom and his Co-Intelligence Institute is challenging it. We’re working on starting and nurturing a multi-disciplinary dialogue involving him and representatives of all the other streams of the CI field. Stay tuned.