Blog of Collective Intelligence

I know it's a short notice but I've received the news only last night. The opportunity it represents for the cross-fertilization of the "collective intelligence" and the "civic intelligence" phenomena is just too important to not try to alert you all about it.

According to Doug Schuler, one of the thought leaders of civic intelligence, "Society often develops intelligent responses to collective problems often through citizen activism. At the same time, our innumerable problems may be outpacing our ability to address them and the ideas, tactics and technologies that we need may not be adequate... Civic intelligence goes beyond the individual and focuses on the collective and distributed nature of intelligence." excerpt from Civic Intelligence pattern

It seems that the civic intelligence initiatives, such as A Pattern Language Project, could benefit from the significant work that has been done on the field of collective intelligence, and vice versa.

Here's an opportunity to engage the dialogue. The Journal of Human Centred Systems will have a special issue on Exploring Civic Intelligence: Descriptions & Prescriptions. Due date for submission of extended abstracts (1000 words) is August 13, 2004. Details of the Call for Papers are here. If some of you reading this blog are also interested in CI applied to civic matters, then this maybe the perfect opportunity to collaborate on a paper that can feed and cross-polinate those fields.

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There’s nothing like the joy, freedom, and deep intimacy of intersubjective space, in which ego-driven programs are effortlessly replaced by the curiosity of who we really are when we are free from the illusions of a separate self. A passionate yet playful curiosity of what our connection is about floats in the room when the tyranny of the ego’s desires and fears that drive our acts, is gone or, at least, suspended for the time of being together with other aficionados of Truth, Beauty, and Good.

Traditionally, the experience of reaching a heightened state of awareness and interacting from within it with others in the same state was the privilege of participants in shamanic dances, Tantric sex ceremonies, other mystic traditions, and the modern-day group experiments with “psychoactive vitamins,” and rave parties. They’ve certainly reached a level of intersubjectivity not accessible in ego-driven states but they all shared a pre-rational logic that made those occurrences of collective consciousness unfit for dealing with challenges that required cognitive skills in managing complexity.

Intersubjectivity in the trans-rational is a whole different ball game! What prompted this blog entry was my experience of it in a circle of “enlightened communications,” last Friday:

Continue reading "From intersubjectivity to collective objectivity: a socioeconomic imperative" »

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