New comments in the last few days

Two of the recent entries, Co-evolving Self and Network and Steal this bookmark!? received substantive comments from readers who offered interesting thoughts about them.Struggling with tons of comments spam, I was late to put them online. Now they are on. Apologies for the late approval, - george

Steal this bookmark!?

Thierry Nabeth of INSEAD has just alerted me of a new social networking phenomenon called "tagging". In his message there was a reference to a Salon.com article in which Howard Rheingold said about tagging:

"It's like Friendster for knowledge as far as I'm concerned. I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they've tagged ... And isn't that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful -- and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you."

I think using tags for growing collective intelligence requires more than a clever technology. Unless we think of CI in the statistical sense (as in The Wisdom of Crowds), it requires the art of integrating the triple network of People, Knowledge, and Technology. Tags (bookmarks referring to the same subjects) collected from millions of bloggers are not more useful than a Google search that turns up over a million pages in response to my query. When somebody comes up with a way to integrate tagging with my trusted circle of friends and colleagues, then CI got a potent new tool, indeed. Technically, it shouldn't be difficult and I'd be surprised if an innovative social network host would not be already working on it.

Co-evolving Self and Network

Since I last wrote an entry in this blog, I've been busy with faciltating projects and communities exploring and using some of its themes. I'm still too busy with living CI in action, rather than blog about it but here's a piece of news that I thought you'd like to know about. Three of my favorite people, Lisa Kimball, Howard Rheingold and Joichi "Joi" Ito, will be keynoters at an extraordinary web event that will open tomorrow and will no doubt contribute to the collective intelligence of online social networks.

In 1987 I was a columnist for Computer Currents, a California-based computer magazine, when Howard introduced me to Doug Engelbart. The interview with Doug has literally changed my life, by giving a much sharper focus to a key question of my work and learning: I became obsessed with how emergent technologies of collaboration can contribute to the dramatic upshift that humankind's complex and entangled crises require, from its current level of intelligence. Thank you, Doug, again.

Doug has just passed 80. If you don't know who he is, check out aTributetoDoug.org.

My friendship with Lisa goes back even further, to our meeting in the early 80's on the "text-only" online social networks of those years and co-founding the Electronic Networking Association and its award-winning online newsletter, the Netweaver. That's where I met, back then, with Joi too. I ran into him more recently, virtually, in a multi-channel conference call on emergent democracy, using a chatroom, a conference call and a wiki, concurrently. I'm looking forward to catch up with them at OSN2005.

Starting on Feb 14, at the same place, I will host a workshop on
Boosting the Collective Intelligence of Your Network

This collaborative inquiry is for online facilitators, leaders of virtual teams and communities of practice, change agents, or just about anyone who curious of how to co-evolve Self and Network. We experience the rapid emergence of a new generation of more capable web browsers, co-authoring and publishing tools, free VoIP telephony, photo-blogging, video-chat, etc. What do they tell us about the potential for our co-creativity to rise on the spine of the double helix of autonomy and community?

This will be not a traditional “e-learning” event but a time-bound peer learning community of authentic dialogue, where participants can share their learning edges and negotiate their learning agenda related to their experience and aspirations in social networks. Reading materials will be provided based on the participants’ interests.

I would love to connect at OSN 2005 with all the readers of this blog interested in online social networks and their potential for collective intelligence. If you're one of them, please click on the button above.