Blog of Collective Intelligence

It seems that Facebook can help members in "real-life" communities and networks to be more visible to themselves and increase their opportunity to think, feel, learn, and act together. That brings up two questions:

What combination of current Fb apps could support a circle of friends in cultivating their collective intelligence and wisdom?

What new, innovative app can you imagine that could become a big CI booster? (Hint: some of the categories, into which I classified this entry, serve me as reminders of the context for this question.)

Posted by at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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"" »

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Talking about “presence,” Andrew Campbell wrote in email, “what it means is not what it is -- and does.” It reminded me of Aurobindo’s saying, “Man’s greatness is not in what he is but in what he makes possible.”

What our times demand us to make possible is nothing less than what the unknown author of the following graffiti on the wall of the occupied Sorbonne asked in 1968: Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible! It is to bootstrap ourselves onto higher stages of individual and collective consciousness by simultaneously letting go of the illusion of a separate self-sense, yet embracing our full respons-ability for our choices in every moment.

Continue reading "All presencing is co-presencing" »

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In the months that gone by since I last wrote in the blog, I've been on a fast-pace learning journey into emergent CI, not as a concept but as the living experience of people gathering in circles, in various countries, and diving into such questions as:

• What is our individual and collective learning edge?

• How can we grow competence in attending to and sensing from the whole?

• What is the role of collective intelligence in moving the edge of evolution?

If you want to read what other questions people in the evolutionary movement ask from themselves, here you will find a good sample of them.

Below are some links to places where I've been in active conversations with others interested in those and similar questions:

Continue reading "Diving into the CI of what is emerging" »

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This is a message as a comment on my earlier post of today on the 4-fold ecosystem of the CI field from David Beatty who has just asked me by email to post it for him because our spam-protecction software prevented him from doing it himself. (I guess, we will junk our "junkstopper," now that the new version of Movable Type, our blog software can provide stronger protection.) Here comes David:

George,

I appreciated the 'hey, look-at-this' note a few minutes ago. Long time since we have had a conversation.
A 4 element structure is a very rich structure. I will limit myself to pointing out the relationships that a 4-fold enables.

1) You have the 'purity' of each of the four elements A B C D (which can also be subdivided, of course.)

2. You have the combos of the 4 elements AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD If you wish, you can also consider these as simultaneous, separate operating pairs, AB/CD, AC/BD, AD/BC,

3. You have the dynamism of the 3's ABC, ABD,ACD,BCD,. Since a characteristic of 3 is the dynamic nature, you can read each trio as one of three forms. e.g. ABC ACB BAC BCA, CAB, CBA. reflecting the difference that comes when you consider first position as impulse, second position as reception, and third position as interactive product. (see J.G. Bennett, The Dramatic Universe, Vol.2, Ch.27,28 for more) If this dynamism is useful, (often is) that gives you 4 triads, each of which has 6 dynamic states.

4. And you have the 'whole' of all four creating a state of affairs.

Thus, while the four form does look simple, the importance of the choice of the most potent 4 terms is clear. (or maybe, it also indicates that our language of terms is a short-form code for much more complexity. (4/38ths!)

No wonder intelligence must be collective, continuously-changing, and self-reflective!!

regards

David B

Posted by at 4:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are two questions that frequently keep me awake in the night or wake me up in the morning. This morning, they did it again. They are:

• Shall we have the collective will and capacity to absorb the complexity of the impending crisis of crises, also known as the "perfect storm," or shall we not, and be defeated by it?
• If the winning scenario is to prevail, what it will take to make it so?

This morning, the pieces of the puzzle started coming together and asked for this blog entry.

It seems that our best hope for developing an adequate response to the perfect storm is in the collective intelligence of an ecosystem comprised of four fields:

1. Rigorous, scientific research on large-scale CI that provides coherent frameworks and methodologies for building successful prototypes of complex CI systems

2. Such social innovations as enlightened communications and deliberative democracy, peer-to-peer, and open source, coupled and supported by the best theories and practices of whole system change and large-group interventions

3. A post-metaphysical, evolutionary spirituality embedded in the great story, an inspiring context, the wisdom of which can support practitioners on all four fields

4. Advanced and emerging technologies for collaborative knowledge development and coordination, which can power of up the thought and action of CI researchers, social activists, and initiators of applying them to every area of social life

Continue reading "The 4-fold ecosystem of CI - an inquiry into our survival" »

Posted by at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I received this message via an email distribution list:

> you may have seen this already, but this is a beautiful example of visualizing networks (and their intersection). kind of a brain-like tool for community. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jheer/infovis/final/

and responded:

Thank you for the pointer to the site. I looked it up and am happy for having done so. That’s because I think:

Increasing the capacity of people and communities to visualize their (online) social networks is essential to the evolution of Collective Intelligence (CI). I believe it is one of the key conditions to move from fleeting moments of collective consciousness of what we’re becoming to new, stabilized stages of CI.

It is also essential to “the advancement of the Collective Comprehensional Bandwidth. If mutual respect depends on understanding, and understanding hinges on information sharing, then anything that can be done to increase productive information sharing is also helping our world towards increased mutual respect.” (Jason Wilson)

Posted by at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Scott Leslie wrote in his EdTechPost blog:

"Don't you just love when, in the process of thinking about an issue, you come to a question that you know others are looking at and that is more than you could handle yourself, and then the next minute you turn around and - lo and behold - you find exactly what you were looking for. I expect there's a name for this phenomenon, and I also expect someone will soon develop an explanation of why this phenomenon seems so applified within the blogosphere."

Well, a couple of years ago, I developed an explanation that I believe touches Scott's expectations. Here it is:

Continue reading "Collective intellect augments individual" »

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