Blog of Collective Intelligence

 

Imaginal cells in the protoplasm, from which the new civilization is emerging, discover the current state of their fluid identity, by being engaged in generative conversations with one another.

 

When we collaborate using the currently available tools, we are able to share meaning and develop themes, resulting in a record of the interactions which then requires processing in order to extract the valuable data which emerged from the conversation. @cyber_shaman

As long as we stay on the edge of not knowing and wanting to know what is that which wants to come into being through our conversations, the narrative evolving from them is a of high value. It is a narrative that gradually becomes more coherent as we continually co-sense what is and co-initiate what it can be and throw ourselves in the dance of the being and becoming parts of ourselves.

That narrative deserves our sustained shared-attention. @Cyber_shaman's recent post   on "Practices and Processes for boosting CI" is truly generative. Staying connected with that inquiry, and standing in it with intense curiosity and humility, we can move the edge of discovery and co-creative action.

The harvested information is a valuable resource as part of an evolving collective 'meme-stream' (to coin a phrase) so we want to be able to access and include it in the evolving discourse in a way that becomes 'standard' with a view to automation of the process for optimal benefit to the overall process. @cyber_shaman

Yes! and there are various candidates in the works, as we speak; standard-candidates that may synch with one another to let the next-gen collab software parse more dimensions of  our knowledge/action ecosystem. One of the most promising candidates is #NarrativeFractals , another is the social tetrahedron.

Ultimately we need to be able to provide this information to the semantic web so it can process and refine it as a collaborative partner to us (which is what it is set to become). @cyber_shaman

That's the best naming of the semantic web's evolutionary significance that I've heard! It's a partner that we can shape and it will shape us. It is a good time to ask daring questions about the nature of that partnering. Sorting out the best conversation mapping methods that need to be supported by our new collaborative mapping tools, we are also preparing ourselves to ask those deeper questions.

Continue reading "Conversation transcript-> mindmap-> semantic web-> sane sentient AI" »

Posted by George Pór at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

In a comment to A tool for mapping the future as it's emerging, Glisten wrote:

> The visual mapping of an evolving system is not a trivial affair. If we create a map of our "current state" we only provide a snapshot view of what is more closely aligned analogously with a continual stream of images such as video...

Yet, for humankind's emergent metabeing to become fully conscious of itself (as whole and parts), it must grow simultaneous capacity and tools for the awareness of both the structural and dynamic aspects of its life.

Why not prototype that feature into the élan mapping tool? I have some ideas of how we and the groups we want to support could greatly enhance our sensing of, and making meaning from, the next level of emergence (at any scale that our imagination can hold). However, what is more important than my ideas is our co-sensing what is really needed with members of those groups.

Before inviting them to this blog exchange, let's imagine what a globally linked creative community could do with new tools and ways to sense breakthrough practices in any domain, as son as they appear in our global nervous system: in our connected conversations.

Continue reading "What can dynamic views (in mapping emergent systems) enable?" »

Posted by George Pór at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Venessa wrote a fascinating blog entry  on

"A Pay It Forward Business Model [in transition to a new global society]."

It prompted the following open message to her.


Dear Venessa,

Your "pay it forward" model is hugely inspiring in all of the various scope of its meaning! 

I start responding from the one that is the juiciest for me, the scope of our Emerging Planetary Reality.  We're in the midst of a world transition that still has to generate highly-scalable practices of value creation and exchange beyond the logic of the incumbent mode of production. I see your quest in the context of that larger one.

As Scott Lewis  wrote: "In regards to the gift economy, I don’t think we’ve ever been without it." True, it persisted throughout human history but largely as an under current of economic activity. Now it is stepping into history's limelight a second time.

This time, it comes with a mission: to help freeing the energies of our individual and social creativity, intuition, caring, and imagination, trapped in work systems that don't honor our highest aspirations. Only liberating those energies, will Emergence gain enough momentum to lift us into the next civilization.  (Here, "next" means: capable to operate at a higher level of complexity and harmony.) The value of your offer to the world, at that level, is in its contribution to that liberation. It's like "a small step for Venessa, one giant leap for mankind." :-)

Continue reading "Message to Venessa Miemis about her "Pay It Forward Business Model"" »

Posted by George Pór at 11:59 PM | Permalink

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" »

Posted by George Pór at 11:22 AM | Permalink

Philippe Dancause, a Canadian practitioner of various social technologies of collective intelligence shared some insights of great clarity in his blog that I roughly translated as follows.

“In most organisations, there are very few real forums that allow the emergence of new visions, perceptions, possibilities, solutions, and realities. Few places to make a point, evoke a combination of opinions, play out a diversity of experiences, and really understand the vision of the other person (no, the 2-day annual strategic retreat by senior management is not enough!).”

As long as the meaning-making conversations of the organization has access limited to the top decision makers, that diagnosis is unlikely to loose relevance.

“Should we say that the members of the organization serve only to play their role in the current activities, to perpetuate what is already established? I may exaggerate a bit here, but maybe not… We can say, at leas, that the collective intelligence of the organization is obviously (and sadly) underused.”

If you work in a company or any other hierarchy-dominated organization, your experience probably tells you that Philippe is not exaggerating. It is that very CI deficit of the dominant mode of organizing work, which makes it historically obsolete, unfit to perform under the conditions of increasing complexity multiplied urgency.

The good news is:

Continue reading "The CI deficit of the dominant way of organizing work" »

Posted by George Pór at 8:07 PM | Permalink

Sofia Bustamante wrote:

> If our world is a living system of systems (holistically embedded), then the base concept of ecology must have biological connotations...

I love both the depth of her insight and what it inspired me to see:

YES! Our world is a living system of systems. It is alive, expanding and contracting, dancing on the edge off chaords, between "nothingness and eternity."

Sofia continued:

> And aspects like finance, social, environmental factors need be considered within this context.

YES, again! And when more of us understand, feel, and relate to them as living systems, we may even inspire the awakening of their sentience, who knows. Just imagine…

Continue reading "" If our world is a living system of systems"" »

Posted by George Pór at 1:10 AM | Permalink

Tom Atlee wrote in an email message:

> A capacity usually involves both being and doing. It manifests
> through doing, but usually requires some form of being.
>
> Intelligence manifests largely through solving problems. If you
> can't solve problems of some type, most people wouldn't say you were
> very intelligent.
>
> Intelligence is bigger than 'problem solving', but that's sort of a
> core standard.
>
> Solving problems involves being able to see clearly, decide what's
> relevant, reflect on it, not be prejudiced in ways that block your
> ability to do these things, etc. These things are as much about
> being as doing.
>
> Does one "apply" one's intelligence, or just "use" it?
>
> Here's how I think about CI:

Continue reading "Collective intelligence as integral capacity" »

Posted by George Pór at 7:46 AM | Permalink

I've just finished reading an amazing book by Joel Garreau, a reporter and editor at of the Washington Post, titled "Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human."

Garreau presents three scenarios of the future: the "Heaven" of technological optimists, like Ray Kurzweill, the "Hell" of technological pessimists, like Bill Joy; and the "Prevail" scenario of people like Jaron Lanier who doesn't believe in technological determinism and thinks that:

"Even if technology is advancing along an exponential curve, that doesn’t mean humans cannot creatively shape the impact on human nature and society in largely unpredictable ways."

The quotes below are from "Radical Evolution".

Continue reading "Connectivity ramp, CI, and Jaron Lanier" »

Posted by George Pór at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I rarely came across a stranger, who could as accurately describe my feelings and aspirations, by expressing his own, as Michael Dubois did in his blog entry on "Co-Intelligence. The part and the whole".

"What if some of us did know or at least had the requisite pieces of the whole of understanding for what to do and how to do it? How would we recognize a workable way among all the competing philosophies and strategies and schemes? And if we did recognize a workable way out of our mess, how would we communicate it?"

"This is what is haunting me every day now. I seem to be understanding more and more of what is happening, and what we will need to do now and in the very near future. And the interesting thing for me is that the main feature of this understanding is that it is a partially complete piece of a much larger whole, and that whole is all of us. In other words, I don’t have the answer, and I never will, but I am an intrinsic part of the answer. I am a node of the collective intelligence that literally MUST awaken from its dormancy. I feel now like a piece of the Big Hologram. I have the whole vision inside me, but it must be united with the whole visions that are inside everyone else or it’s worthless and doomed. And I’m beginning to wake up to how this will work or die trying."

Fortunately, not only we are still alive but there are more and more of us "beginning to wake up to how this will work."

Yet, the movement of "collective intelligence" is still largely invisible to itself, in spite the half million webpages using that term. "The 'movement' isn't lots of people carrying signs in the street. It is the motion of the living social body, in this case, as it is waking up." -- Tom Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute.

It is awakening as we connect our conversations, seeking the answers, the new capabilities that only together we can be. I don’t know why but that reminds me of a cartoon showing a little girl hugging every little comrades of her in the kindergarten, and in the last picture, she says, “because God has only my arms to hug them all.”

The creative impulse of the universe that is trying to come through in our 1-on-1 conversations really needs us, each of us, to connect the fragments of meaning perceived individually and in pairs, into a bigger picture of coherent landscape and action. It is both humbling and inspiring to realize that there are important messages coming from the noetic field, which have more enfolded complexity than any individual mind/consciousness could fully contain and absorb.

It is humbling because our personally-focused self-sense can’t grasp the higher, impersonal sense of self, in which it is extended to the collective that became, from an evolutionary perspective, the basic unit of cognition and intelligence.

It is also inspiring, if we hear it as a knock on our door by evolution (towards higher complexity and integration), which says, hey come out, join the bigger you and play.

Knock... knock... do you hear it?

Posted by George Pór at 10:10 PM | Permalink