Blog of Collective Intelligence

The stellar line up of workshops at the upcoming ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work reflects the edge of CSCW research, with profound implications for the global-scale cooperative work needed to mach global challenges.

Technically, it has become possible to connect constellations of CI pools of any size. That possibility, when coupled with the passion of social innovators and the wizards of social process technologies, is a key enabler of the current and much needed shift in the evolution of how we organize ourselves as societies and as the crew of Spaceship Earth...

Back to the ACM Conference on CSCW, I’ve just learned that there will be a workshop  on software tools to support Collective Intelligence in organizations. I’m wondering whether the designers/organizers of the conference envisioned to wrap it into a blanket of advanced CI tools and methods, as to augment the CI of the field of CI tool makers, itself?

The program doesn’t say anything about it, probably because the focus is CI in organizations, as it should be, not what it can do for solving world problems. Nevertheless, I believe that there will be a good number of people among the delegates, speakers, panelists, and interactive poster presenters, who feel inspired to address the broader implications of frontier research in CSCW for the world.

What could crystallize that interest so that during the conference a “Big Picture” caucus can form (under any other name) and explore research questions of common or adjacent interest? This blog entry is a message in a bottle, thrown into the digital ocean for someone interested in that question...

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Robin Temple commented on the Chaordic Dialogue Practice blogpost. Instead replying to it in that thread of comments, I've chosen to put the thoughts that it triggered in a new entry, as to give more visibility to it and our dialogue. Quotes are from Robin's original comment.

“On Chaordic Dialogue - two things I perhaps could contribute:
- your proposal of 'dis-locating' dialogue in both dimensions of time and space opens up the possibility for the reality that is not bound by time and space to freely emerge in any such dialogue.
This 'non-located' reality is the one that holds the intelligence and wisdom we so much seem to lose when we get too much caught up in our space-time 'points of view'. Interestingly, this intelligent reality still 'needs' us, as participants in the conversation...”

It sure does. It's only through our active engagement can it become aware of itself. I am thrilled by that we can't even start fathoming the acceleration of local evolution when the intelligent reality of the global meta-being awakens to self-awareness. There’s a beginning conversation about the self-awareness of the meta-being here, which may be of interest to students of the life of our Emerging Planetary Reality.

I believe there's an increasing return on the double spiral of the local enriching the global, and the global making the local wiser. I started sharing my observations about the local/global dynamics here and further explored some aspect of the “collective intelligences playing at different scale” theme under that heading in a research note.  As we apply both systemic observation and collaborative intuition to the inquiry into, and sense-making from, that dynamics, we can become better agents of it.

Continue reading "Facilitating the local/global dynamics of CI calls for a collective sensing organ" »

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Quotes in this blogpost are from “Ecological Computing,”

by John Seely Brown and Feng Zhao.

Confluences and their combined confluence

Looking back at the first decades of the third millennium, humans will see them as the era of the Great Transition, an unexpected result brought to us by a confluence of many confluences.

Writing about an omni-present, planet-scale sensor network that will dwarf the Internet by many orders of magnitude, and its implications for biological and computing ecologies, John Seely Brown mentioned:

“The transformational force underlying this change is the confluence of recent rapid technological advances such as micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) sensors and actuators, wireless and mobile networking, and low-power embedded microprocessors… When the sensor grid becomes ubiquitous it becomes like an enormous digital retina stretched over the surface of the planet.”

The idea of a planet-scale sensor network evokes an orbital view of not only the confluence of technological developments that make it possible but also, the other confluences that such network contributes to and mingles with. For example, the confluence of shifts from authority to authenticity as driver of social organization, from scarcity to wide availability of knowledge, and from groupware to massively distributed social media that link up mega-millions of minds.

“Let's add intelligent browsers to this vast sensing system that lets scientists, government regulators, or environmental advocates use the internet to ask questions never before imaginable.”

When we’ll use such browsers for navigating on the ocean of data obtained from networked indicators of social well-being, collective moods, diseases in the global social body, and challenges to collective intelligence and wisdom, then we’ll have made a decisive step towards the bulk of humankind joining in a self-aware meta-being.

Continue reading "From hardware-based sensors of the physical to software-based sensors of the social" »

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Twitter is an intensely personal experience, yet a communal one, at the same time. However, those two dimensions never meet. Our individual tweets create the value of the whole, yet we only benefit individually from the information we receive or dispense, the relationships we build. The opportunities for co-creative play in the tweetstream, benefiting the collective, have been hardly realized.

That made me curious of what could become possible if we tweeted together, right after contemplating a question that mattered to us. I crafted a question expressing my passion, which worked as an attractor and inspired participation in spite the very short, 1-day notice. 8 Twitter users gathered in the “no place” of cyberspace on July 23, 2009, to embark on a co-tweeting experiment introduced with some minimalist instructions here.

The question that we put in the focus of our contemplation was this:

This blogpost is the first installment of a report in 4 parts dealing with: A. what happened, B. what is the emergent story, C. what we learned from the experiment, and D. how we would improve the design of the next one.

So what has really happened in our contemplative twitterspace, on July 23?

Continue reading "Report on the first contemplative co-tweeting, Part 1: What happened " »

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Large-scale, collaborative meaning making is a vital condition for dealing with crises and turning breakdowns into breakthroughs, locally and globally.

To be effective, the social technologies for facilitating that transformation need to be supported by the best what emergent electronic technologies can offer. For example:

Imagine to couple Personal Brain with a robust taxonomy-builder and a semantic engine,
all rolled up into a rapid-deployment learning environment that can be easily customized
for any knowledge domain or project, by community tech stewards, including non-programmers.

What do you see? What could such system enable?
What new community, organisational, and global capacities could be afforded by it?
Here’s my take on what it should help us with:

Continue reading "Combining social and electronic technologies for large-scale, collaborative meaning making" »

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Our steady attention to what is moving us in the luminous moments of co-inspiration
transforms the fleeting experience into continuous celebration of the awakening of the collective learner
to its potential for higher intelligence and wisdom, capable to hold more compassion and complexity.

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I rarely choose to fall even further behind on my GTD Next Action list, by adding a comment to blogposts, which may never will be read, but your intriguing question caught me because I've been asking myself, for quite a while, the same:

Bev Trayner asked, "what the hell are all these connections and social media for?"

We'll see in 2-3 years from now but that's not an answer to my wanting to sense the lay lines of our emerging planetary reality, as they emerge, so that they can inform wiser actions: mine, my clients' and communities'...

Holding that question for a couple of years led me to the first sketches that you may want to take a look at here and here and here.

What kind of social learning system would be appropriate to address the challenges inherent in those posts?

Regarding our shared "falling behind" syndrome, what if it was only evolution's trick to help us recognize that resistance to distributed cognition and collective intelligence/wisdom is futile, the relevant cognitive unit is not me but we?

(By "relevant" I mean capable to develop the functionally fit differentiation of one's contribution to the whole, based on relatively accurate maps of our social and technical ecosystems.)

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I woke up this morning 4 o’clock and not only because the jetlag. Yesterday was the first day of the first World Café Research Conference. Due to the delay of the flight from New York, I arrived late and when I entered the room, I stepped into a conversation about the reflexive nature of knowing and research. It was strangely familiar and excitingly new, at the same time.

It was familiar because a central theme of my thesis, 30-something years ago, was a critique of the objectivist sociology and its claim that its interview methods are neutral. (I suggested that interviewer and interviewee interact and their relationship constructs the meaning of their exchange as much as the words uttered by the second.)

It was also new because the context, the implied assessment that the quality of new knowledge developed in a typical World Café setting is a reflection of the quality of relationship between participants, as well as, the attention they give to the inner space, from which they are listening and speaking. (Bow to Otto Scharmer’s concept of the “blindspot.”)

At the dinner table, I happened to sit next to Fred Steier of the Fielding Graduate Institute and editor of a series of books on reflexivity in research. Fred is a gentle man with deep caring to squeeze out every once of learning from a conversation, with the power of second order self-reflection. In my exchange with him and the others around the table, I discovered this:

If people in conversation are observing and reflecting on both the source and the direction of their attention (the inner and the inter-subjective space), and sharing those reflections, a spontaneous combustion of consciousness can occur. If so, collective self-reflexivity can lead to deeper, more fine-tuned sensing of reality, thus to wiser action.

How well can collective self-reflexivity scale? What does it depend on whether it will grow into a system of influence or wither away, unfulfilled its potential? I feel those questions deserve a focused and rigorous research. My first thought about it is this:

For conversations that matter to grow into communities of practice and social systems at increasing scale, they have to be able to absorb the increased complexity involved with those systems. What does it depend on whether a community or a network of communities is capable to do that? One of the factors seems to be the trust and appreciation that flow among the participants in the conversation, besides their capacity for double loop learning in real-time, on the spot…

That’s what I got out from the bed with. Now, I go to get a breakfast, and continue the conversation, in the 2nd day of the conference.

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Evolution's Edge from Best Futures says:

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that all the necessary elements of a sustainable system will develop quickly enough to prevent irreversible environmental and social damage. Major evolutionary transformations only occur after a critical number of useful paradigm-changing developments (functional mutations) have taken place within a biological or social system. If these new system components are compatible, their interactions can begin to change the form and function of the entire system.

How can the new components learn whether they are compatible with one another, when they exist still only in germ form inside the old system? By engaging in collaborative inquiry in what is the next, larger subsystem of which they are part, how would it function, and what is the unique contribution of each of them to it. That inquiry will facilitate the differentiation and integration of the parts. It will also support and be supported by the CI of the whole.

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Talking about the phases of collaborative film making, Kent Bye wrote in Building a Theory of Collaborative Sensemaking | Echo Chamber Project:

The ideal collaborative sensemaking system would allow people to add their own context through each of these phases in a way that is both easy to participate and easy to productively make sense of the user input in a cumulative fashion.

I imagine that there will be a web-based multimedia experience of the film that is able to can get smarter as time goes on and more people are interact with the material by adding their context and meaning to it -- as well as produce remixes and contribute new source material back to the ecosystem.

So while the finished 90-minute documentary becomes a static product that is released and watched by a mass audience, there will also be a multimedia experience of the source material that will grow and evolve over time as users continue to interact and contribute their meaning to the material.

Two Questions Come Up at this Point:

* How am I planning on making sense of this process as it evolves?
* How am I going to coordinate these various phases and harness the chaos of the participation and collective wisdom?

I will certainly be learning a lot as real people start using the system, and I intend on doing some top-down leadership by expressing specific questions to look into, themes of sequences to cut together and trying to process as much of the incoming participation as possible.

It will be a very uncertain and chaotic process, but Wikipedia has shown that the anarchy can be productively harnessed if there is an agreed upon set of collaborative principles, a group of people with common intentions, and through enough open communication.

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