Blog of Collective Intelligence

a measure and a condition for the metabeing to truly become intelligent

2011-04-17T11:53:41Z

> all semantically linked, so for example, it could be built so that it showed all organizations, and then listed specific projects they are working on or in support of or things they are associated with.

> providing a snapshot overview of the entire ecosystem, and making it very easy for projects and people to become aware of one another and share data instead of duplicating it over and over.

In a similar vein, I wrote about some steps towards crowdsourcing the mapping of the movements & tribes that model the social practices of a positive future here.

The particular possibility that has been attracting my attention the most is to increase the self-awareness of all fields of transformation and to create/cultivate an emergent platform that can act as a rocket booster for our collective intelligence and wisdom.

> The thing i'm envisioning would be a lot of work to set up, but then it would be intelligent… if these values were defined, they could then be entered into this database, and it would show you the 9 projects that were related/similar/identical.

The thing that Venessa is envisioning is the thing that any self-organizing global-scale collective intelligence need if it is to be holoptical.

> If there was more granular information about all of this, and it was openly available and easy to navigate, we'd have a much more effective method of allocating resources to efforts that will go furthest.

Envisioning and prototyping “more effective method of allocating resources to efforts that will go furthest” is both a measure and a condition for the metabeing to truly become intelligent. Nothing less will keep us from becoming an aborted evolutionary experience.

If so, then need to shift, sooner or later our scaffolding environment from The Next Net Google Group to, at least, a Drupal-like content management system/framework. The sooner would be better because the conversation is already richer than what this tool can do justice to.

Howard Rheingold interviews Pierre Lévy on collective intelligence

2011-03-07T02:18:13Z

Mapping the Complexity of Climate Change and Sustainability

2011-01-31T20:21:30Z

"Mapping the Complexity of Climate Change and Sustainability" is the title of a conversation in the Sustainability group at the Presencing Community site, which Toni Stafford, a wise, whole-brain woman opened on March 5. By "whole brain" I mean someone who is at home with matters of Spirit, beauty, deep intuition, AND doesn't shy away from the scientific dimensions of what evolutionary agents need to master, such as chaos and complexity theory in action, systems dynamics, holarchy, etc.

Toni developed a systems dynamics model that reflects her understanding the multiple perspectives on climate change and how to balance the needs of environment, economy, and society. She added:

"Creation of these diagrams MUST be collaborative and iterative. No one person can comprehend and map all the complexity herself. That means I'm aware that it is incomplete and even deeply flawed."

Toni posted her model both in the format of the Vensim systems dynamics software, for those of us who want to interact with the model and in PowerPoint for those who want only to see it. I attach here ToniStafford's sysdynamics view of climate change, March 5, 2010 .ppt , hoping that some of the world-citizens will decide to dive into the model sooner or later, on our collaborative learning journey. To change it to readable size, after downloading it, select 200%.

Toni says: If you are unaccustomed to reading these models, look for the big bold blue words "I am exposed to climate change data" in the center of the cluster of loops on the left. This is where you will begin to read the story. Follow the arrows around and read the words in order that you encounter them. When the words have multiple arrows leading away from them, think of that as a "choose your own adventure story". Pick a thread and follow it around and then go back and follow any of the thread you've missed.

If you want to go deeper in studying and improving her model, I recommend to download its Vensim version from her post, for which you'd also have to download the Vensim's model reader and Personal Learning Edition.

If after all this, you feel inspired to work with Toni on the collaborative development of the systems dynamics model of the complexity of climate change and sustainability, please join her in the conversation in the Presencing community.

Building the Arks

2011-01-31T20:12:27Z

I feel this is a "building the Arks" time on Earth, vehicles built by our collective intelligence, competence, and wisdom, which should not leak while sailing to the other shore on the stormy waters of complexity and singularity waves.

Where will their strength come from? From the strength of our caring for the Whole; the life-affirming principles of our working together; and the joy we experience in doing so.

and the Noah story, on a lighthearted tone: ...

Meaning flows more smoothly if we compact before we ship

2010-07-26T15:17:08Z

There was a skype call between @ffunch, @sebpaquet and @technoshaman on July 9, 2010.

Below is a small pattern offered as a self-running demonstration of its content, inspired by our rich conversation.

Can you think of any additional heading for the meta-data that would make this pattern more useful to you?

If yes, pls reply.

Key thought:

New experiences & meaning from inspired conversations flow more smoothly in and across nodes of innovation, if we pay attention to how we can help it.

Relevant excerpts:

@ffunch: I accept your suggestion that we reflect and polish and send something out; it's not just a matter of summarizing it, but there are also some other dimensions. We need to make a pretty compact form; a 1.5h recording is not compact. We need to distil the core of it and pass that on.
@technoshaman: Groups of conscious people have a responsibility of bringing out as much coherence as possible outside of their group.

@ffunch: What I heard you saying is that we have a responsibility to package insights. It's not a great service necessarily to share a long conversation or a long set of notes.

Reviewer note:

Listening to the record of the conversation, @cyber_shaman commented:

Distillation of information, creation of new languages, passing on coherent meta-messages

To adequately convey something to the future it needs to be in a compact form.

Attention to consciousness of common process ie converging/diverging

Rendering effective processes into pattern language

Observing responsibility to bring coherent information, distilled and synthesised, to the whole in accessible and appropriate ways

CI, AI, UI or just I?

2010-07-08T13:23:44Z

The term "Collective Intelligence" is sufficiently vague and positive that it is quite easy to agree that of course we want it. We want to be smarter together.

But we might imply quite different subtexts when we talk with each other about it, and we might make different assumptions. It is probably a good idea to be aware of those differences.

Some would group CI with AI. That would imply that it is constructed, or that mechanisms are constructed that will evolve into the AI, like neural nets or cellular automata. And at some point the AI will become self-aware and we can talk with it. And further down the line it becomes smarter than us, and it might decide to no longer bother to talk with us.

I personally am skeptical of Artificial Intelligence. I'm even more skeptical of the idea of brains as the seat of consciousness. I think it is a little naive to expect that if one constructs a network with a sufficient number of inter-connected nodes, modeled superficially on the cells we see in brains, then, suddenly - a miracle happens - and it becomes self-aware. Oh, there's probably plenty of still undiscovered magic in inter-connected networks of nodes and cellular automata, etc., and we don't really know yet what will be most significant, so we should explore all if it. I'm just saying that it isn't a good idea to bet everything on that one sketchy theory.

Another possibility is what we're harnessing something that already is there. The universe is very intelligently constructed, in ways we can't approximate by many orders of magnitude, even if we can do some clever things of our own. Just think of evolution. Here's a process that has continued without fail for billions of years, continuously developing better and better life forms. A fantastic variety of life forms, all representing clever solutions to many, many problems. Some life forms, like us, even can think abstractly and creatively, and seem to have to opportunity to continue and expand evolution consciously, at a higher order. All set in motion by autonomous processes started many billions of years ago. Mind-blowing. It is entirely possible that the whole thing, the universe, or multiverse, already is one giant immortal quantum entangled 11 dimensional Universal Intelligence. In which case we'd maybe want to tap into that, instead of trying to re-invent the wheel.

A more down-to-earth way of looking at it is that CI is simply us. How well we work together, and how coherent the result is. If we work together in ways that maximize synergy, where things fit well together, and we accomplish more together than apart, then CI is high.

I believe that by its very nature, an increase of CI can only be a good thing. Because it is collective. It is us operating at a higher level. As contrasted with the AI scenario, where something alien wakes up and it might or might not be friendly, might or might not like us. A positive level of CI is by its nature friendly to us. A negative level of CI is destructive and maybe suicidal. But, as it is at all times us, it is never really against us. It couldn't ever decide to continue without us.

It might well be a red herring to pursue a personification for CIs or AIs. You know, the Turing test, where we'd expect a new kind of intelligence to be able to have a conversation indistinguishable from one with a human. It is a bit like the logical mistake often made by religious prophets. Like how Christians cast their God in their own image. Some old man with a grey beard. It might be just as ridiculous to expect a higher order intelligence to be a person, with whom you have idle smalltalk. We don't need another person, we already have plenty of those, we need higher order intelligence.

The kind of higher order intelligence we most need isn't particularly the self-aware kind. Rather, we need a coherent noosphere to operate in. Simply an environment where the information we need is likely to be easily available to us. Like how you've all noticed that Google makes you seem much smarter. You can find information much faster. You seem more intelligent. But we need something several orders of magnitude more flexible and organized. Where it is very easy to know what you need or want to know, very easy to find the people you need or want to work with, and where the decreased resistance and increased efficiency makes bigger things appear to come together effortlessly and "by themselves". That doesn't so much require an AI God who stays up all night figuring things out for us, as it requires an instant friction-less access to huge amounts of reliable information.

We need systems that make us more intelligent. I.e. that increase our collective ability to solve problems, to plan, to learn, to understand complexity. That might have more to do with understanding intelligence than with constructing an intelligence, or waiting for one to appear.

on hypertrails between vistas, which we create by walking on them

2010-06-30T13:08:06Z

Good tools always have unintended uses stumbled upon by its individual and collective users. Hopefully, that will be the case of élan map, too. I can hardly wait for its alpha version to manifest so that we can start playing with it and discover its potential beyond what it was originally conceived.

A possibility that I am particularly interested in and want to explore further as the components of our mapping tool gain higher resolution is this:

What if we convened an expert panel of thinkers and doers in selected disciplines, and let them loose in a treasure hunting exercise using our interactive map of social and thought movements on the edge?

The question that we would ask could include something like this: Looking back from the middle of the 21st century, which of the movements mapped by élan would be considered as having had a significant impact on the transition to our new planetary reality?

Then we could compare the data coming from a modified Delphi survey of our panel with the data from the hypertrails connecting the vistas in the landscape of transformational memes and movements.

Hypertrails are those affinity passages between the vistas, the salient points (or strange attractors) in the landscape, which will emerge from our very walking those trails. Just as students cut new paths on campus lawn by going for shorter connection between buildings they visit more frequently…

What if we had a chance to distort the timeline by using information from the Delphi's "visit from the future"? :-)

on junto, élan, Kosmic synchronicity, and movement cartography

2010-06-30T11:31:18Z

"We are at a critical point in human history, where as a globally interdependent society, we must learn how to lower these barriers, share information, collaborate, and cocreate value in new ways." @VenessaMiemis

Learning how to learn that, and sharing what I learn, is what I've been dedicating my life to since the mid-80's. Reading the overview of junto's concept, philosophy, and components, I felt my heart full of joy and gratitude to the collective wisdom and expertise of the junto group, and to Venessa for her buildership and eloquent articulation of what is needed to accelerate collaborative learning, locally and globally.

In the junto concept, I found the most practical and feasible expression of a web-enabled, emergent system for boosting our collective intelligence that became a matter of our survival and thriving as a species.
I see the élan project (that went through many iterations since I conceived it in 2005) as a sister, contributor and user of junto. Naming and appreciating the differences, we may discover the true potential for synergy between the two projects. They have two strongly complementary questions:

Venessa is asking, "How do we go from theory to practice, and amplify the power of networks?" The emphasis seems to be on connecting the unconnected in terms of people, ideas, and conversations.

élan is asking, how do we go from practice to theory to, and amplify the power of connected social movements for transition to a new civilization. Social innovation of significance is happening on the edge and in the white space between those movements. Intelligent maps linked with a pattern language of their practices worth replicating are needed to let the whole ecosystem become holoptical, i.e.: to let the parts see each other and the whole, and vice versa, which is a condition of the ecosystem's self-awareness. Moving from theorizing the living praxis of individual movements to discover the larger frameworks that connect hem, our world in transformation will start making more sense.

The yet-to-discover combinations of junto and élan should help with that sense making. I intend to stay in full engagement with the junto community, while continuing, with the élan group, the building of momentum for increasing connectivity across the practitioners of the various arts of transformation facilitation and the social and thought movements on the edge.

Those movements include (but definitely not limited to) movements for protecting and strengthening global and local commons, transition networks, sustainability movement, bright greens, evolutionaries, conscious computing, integral aficionados, Women on the Edge of Evolution, Spiral Wizards and meshworkers, collaborative consumption movement, ethical economy, Complementary currencies, etc. Compassionate Action Network, Evolver, etc.
Do you start seeing what good maps of this ecosystem could enable? If yes, please share it in the comments below.

As Ken Wilber reminds us “we live in extraordinary times, in which the leading edge of culture is arising at the exact moment issues of a global scale are impacting our planet." He refers to this as Kosmic synchronicity—a problem presents itself and a solution arises to deal with it. Listen to what he ahs to say about it, here.

We know a lot about the problems. It's time to amplify the power of the movements that work on the solutions, by increasing their collective consciousness and intelligence that good maps can help with. If you have a passion and knack for becoming a movement cartographer, let us know.

Conversation transcript-> mindmap-> semantic web-> sane sentient AI

2010-06-26T22:42:40Z

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.

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.

One suggestion is to convert text based transcripts of conversations into mind maps, which can then be adapted into semantically integrated ontologies. @cyber_shaman

Mindmaps are only one of kind of knowledge visualization practices and we need to explore a whole range of them to discover which ones serve as really good translators between the layers of recorded human experience and insights, on one hand, and semantically integrated ontologies, on the other hand.

Mindmaps are handy scaffolding tools because they are here for us to play with them and find out what specific features of each provide the right mix of affordances that would let their users to go boldly into co-presencing their favorite future. I hope our playing with such mindmapping tools as Compendium, VUE, and The Brain http://www.thebrain.com/ will inspire someone to do a comparative table of their affordances. If the categories of that table will be informed by the needs and aspirations of the conversation mapping community and its stakeholders, then that table could yield multiple results. More about that later, when we'll have more shared practice with the various tools.

Effective and scalable, collab mindmapping is the Holy Grail of boosting collective intelligence, and not only because the software is not quit there yet. The bigger challenge is in slowing down the rush to prototype the tool enough to hear out each other's mental models and letting them learn from each other. It's about hanging in long enough with the uncertainty re the shape that our tool system will take, until the pattern will emerge from the ongoing, mindful conversations with those that we care to follow. Needless to say, I felt a strong resonance when I read I the following comment to Practices and Processes for boosting CI:

Because we don't have (enough) collective intelligence, most of what we say is really scattered and disconnected and incoherent. Having it carefully catalogued doesn't make it a whole lot better. Which brings out my point that CI has more to do with perception and connection than with data per se. It is an analog whole, rather than a really big pile of digital stuff. So, if we could have conversations and propose ideas WHILE clearly perceiving everybody else and their ideas, then we might really be getting somewhere… @ffunch

The "everybody else" needs to be limited to those with whom we choose to be in shared memestreams. That's because the size limitations of an organic, co-originating group of people to whom we can pay attention with enough depth to get not only their ideas but also, the dreams that they come from. Mutual learning, the mother CI, is happening at its best, in mutually caring, supportive relationships, where the highest potential of everyone is at the heart of the whole and vice versa. Ultimately, we can say is that the relationship is the map.

Just think of how the neurons get to fire together. Not only the neurons that fire together, wire together; Twitterers do, too. I follow only 200-something people and re-tweet the messages coming from some of them more frequently than others. The same goes the other way too; there are groups of my followers that tend to re-tweet my messages more frequently than others.

Imagine that we as a group are conversing via text chat. At the same time there is a natural language analyser picking out key concepts (or we can do this manually).

Note: all previous conversations have already been harvested and from this an ontology has been distilled. Thus when the analyser picks out a concept there is a window showing the network of ideas surrounding that concept - where it fits within the élan universe of discourse and what relations it has with other concepts. Woven into this semantic scaffold are comments, observations, links and all manner of data that may be associated with each concept.

This is an example of real-time mapping of the memesphere of a conversation space. The map can be interacted with, edited, and augmented with meta-data as part of the conversation. It provides an interface into the collective knowledge space. @anandavala

It's a hugely attractive possibility to imagine and its juiciest part that is totally feasible. It is also beautiful manifestation of the Becoming energy in our network of conversations. To realize what it can open doors to, it needs to be coupled with the Being energy that reminds us:

Our challenge, I think, is to become conversant with the intelligence in the wholeness, to harness it, without spoiling it in the process, by slicing it into too small pieces that we can put labels on. @ffunch

Talking about converting text based transcripts of conversations into mind maps, which can then be adapted into semantically integrated ontologies, @cyber_shaman also wrote:

This does represent a lot of work, the details of which we have yet to establish, however the results could very well pave the way to sane sentient AI, so the potential benefits are enormous. @cyber_shaman

Sane sentient AI is another way of talking about the emergent metabeing, in which the global brain and nervous system (our connected conversations) are coupled with the intelligence of the global heart. Evolution is moving towards increasing complexity through us, all of us Earthlings, not only those who read this. Whether it will be ruled by the collective ego of private interests or the compassionate global commons, will define whether the sentient AI will be deeply neurotic or sane, friendly to the humankind's best interests.

Whatever is our work in the junto community, the details of which are yet to discover, our contribution to paving the way to sane sentient AI is only a relatively small part of the story. The other part is in how the social movements on the edge evolution are taking up the new tools and make themselves available to their benefits.

One of the élan project's interests in partnering with #junto is in bridging the gap between the techno ecosystem of collab tools and models and the vast social movements of emergence that need to increase their CI if they are to be the effective in face of our intertwining global challenges. New social organization of daily life, work, and the new social systems will grow out from those movements. Mapping their inter-relatedness, functional alignment, practices worth replicating, buildership patterns, and other descriptors, is what the élan project is aimed at pursuing.

Key: the quotes followed by @xyz, where xyz is the Twitter name of their author, are taken from Practices and Processes for boosting CI blogpost and the comments on that blogpost.

Practices and Processes for boosting CI

2010-06-24T09:29:44Z

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.

Given that our topic is boosting CI, it seems that we could develop a set of process protocols to apply to this stream of valuable resource information. I guess as it stands, we each have our 'pet' methodology, which would result in variable results, and not all parties to any given conversation have the time to devote to comparative analysis of the harvest.

Also, 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.

So, we need to develop methods of information harvesting and storage that are able to co-evolve with the contributions and constantly improving insights of the collaborators. 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).

Given this, the information we co-create needs to be rendered into language that the web can use. A process that enables this 'translation' is what we can develop as the next logical step on our journey of collective intelligence.

One suggestion is to convert text based transcripts of conversations into mind maps, which can then be adapted into semantacally integrated ontologies. This does represent a lot of work,the details of which we have yet to establish, however the results could very well pave the way to sane sentient AI, so the potential benefits are enormous.

This suggestion from a friend:

Imagine that we as a group are conversing via text chat. At the same time there is a natural language analyser picking out key concepts (or we can do this manually).

Note: all previous conversations have already been harvested and from this an ontology has been distilled. Thus when the analyser picks out a concept there is a window showing the network of ideas surrounding that concept - where it fits within the élan universe of discourse and what relations it has with other concepts. Woven into this semantic scaffold are comments, observations, links and all manner of data that may be associated with each concept.

This is an example of real-time mapping of the memesphere of a conversation space. The map can be interacted with, edited, and augmented with meta-data as part of the conversation. It provides an interface into the collective knowledge space.

Elements of collective intelligence in organizational context

2010-06-17T12:36:24Z

collective intelligence —

"The capacity of a social organism, such as a corporation, to:

sense its needs and that of its environment (stakeholders)
generate choices that will satisfy those collective needs
anticipate the consequences of those choices
to make choices that best serve the well-being of those affected by those choices
learn from the consequences of those choices"

Source: The Infinite Games Distinctionary, by Bill Veltrop

The social tetrahedron: a step towards prototyping Indra's Net

2010-06-16T12:29:12Z

"The user profile can also show people and initiatives that one values as part of an "extended", empathic self. This can be done by dragging and dropping other profiles into one's tetrahedron, much as Twitter allows one to follow admired people. To add a person or cause to one's empathic self, the profile creator could rotate the tetrahedron to populate a personal frame of reference (filling it with family and friends), a civic frame of reference (e.g. with admired individuals and organizations working for the commons), and a professional or business frame (with valued coworkers). Individuals and initiatives included in one's "extended self" also could be made visible to others, when access rights are set, by double-clicking on a given face of one's user profile." Mark Frazier, @openworld

Mark, the most beautiful thing about your wise model is that it's doable!

In your tetrahedron, I see a seed crystal for growing disruptive social practices. For example, practices for large-scale, bottom up self-organization of a new social body, may it be a personal learning network, a trustnet-based virtual nation or a federation of co-creative initiatives.

When a social body is grown on networks of desire, networks of what the extended, empathic self of everyone values, then, then the harmony in the system will let it absorb much higher doses of complexity.

Mark, in your tetrahedron, I also see Indra's net materializing, taking the shape of millions of tetrahedrons interacting, free from the gravity of legacy institutions! It's like a massively co-written, continually unfolding science fiction that we shape just by playing with our co-intelligence and co-creativity toys.

Heartfelt thank you Mark for the huge contribution you've already made by developing and sharing your thoughts on the tetrahedron. I am eager to discover more of the world, from which it came.

p.s. I re-posted this note from a junto talk because in version 0.5, it cannot yet be tagged, categorized and have a URL.

from CI to collective wisdom in Silicon valley

2010-06-14T17:02:43Z

Just picked up on Twitter this link to a 6-min vid on YouTube about:

Then I found the conference's website and, thanks to Albert Klamt, its Facebook page.

I feel meme deserve our support to move beyond Silicon Valley; let's help it find new places and connections in Europe and elsewhere...

What can dynamic views (in mapping emergent systems) enable?

2010-06-14T09:37:21Z

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.

I see multiple large screens stacked on the wall of a team lounge or community center. We sit there with cams turned on ourselves, watching the vid streams coming from our preferred channels, and at the same time, engaged in accessing and using novel ways to discover patterns of possibilities, connect dots, and share what we see. (One of my fave mixes would be the mix of 24x7 tele-BarCamp channels dedicated to invent/improve Augmented Reality tools and processes for more co-intelligent evolution.)

The key to that possibility is a web-enabled strategy for attenuating (incoming) complexity and amplifying (outgoing) complexity through our presence in the social networks, and a tool-set supporting it.

> Any snaphot view will be outdated immediately and superseded continuously. So we need a tool which is capable of illustrating the dynamic of the evolving neuronal network as it emerges into our field of awareness.

Using TweetDeck, I can display 3 columns showing 3 streams of tweets idexed with the hashtags #junto, #commons, and #collectiveintelligence. What I cannot do, for example, is to recombine the interesting ones, on the fly, and discover elements of solutions to challenges that we've put in the focus of our shared-attention.

> I'm sure the technology exists to provide an interactive, visually oriented platform for co-operative, co-evolution and collective observation of the emergence of a collective mind-space, it is a matter of discovering the components and integrating them with the input information we wish to observe and interact with

Yes and yes! If those components and our configuration of them add up to boosting the collective intelligence in and across the commons, integral, and evolutionary movements, then I feel mission accomplished.

In defense of complexity

2010-06-10T08:28:40Z

Somebody wrote in a group on "Transforming Capitalism" in the Presencing community :

> all complex civilisations have collapsed at one point or another. Only 'simple' societies have managed to survive.

In the spirit of helping each other unearthing our assumptions, let me point out that the feudal society that invented the first forms of science was more complex than the slave-based mode of production that, in turn, was more complex than the hunter-gatherer mode of production. The same is true for capitalism that is more complex than the feudal society, and emerging, post-capitalist reality that is moving towards global-scale self-organization and collective intelligence, which will be more (not less) complex than the capitalist world. More complex means capable to differentiate, absorb and integrate more variety.

Just think of nature. Hasn't life been moving towards increasing complexity from the single-cellular to the multi-cellular organism, from worms to mammalians and humans? (To let that really sink in, use the Cellular Complexity painting above, by David Sweatt, as a meditation object. Click on the image to enlarge.) You can find another example of increasing complexity in your own life. Isn't it a story of increasing the variety of phenomena that you were capable to differentiate, absorb and integrate, from kindergarten, to school and adulthood?

The move towards more complexity doesn't stop in adulthood. The development of such subsequent value systems depicted by Spiral Dynamics as TruthForce, StriveDrive, HumanBond, FlexFlow, GlobalView, is also an evolution towards more complexity. (I wrote more about it in Communitas Sapiens that you can find in the files of the London Integral Circle, and in my paper on Collective Intelligence, Collective Leadership .) In fact, 2nd tier stages of development, starting with FlexFlow and GlobalView are the first ones that cease to think of complexity as an enemy to defeat and start appreciating it.

Facing the overwhelming complexity of today's world, the "natural" response is to look back and long for a lost "natural rhythm and pace." That's the best that our individual ego can find when one's world is growing more complex than one can fully comprehend. It is the best that it can do, simply, because it cannot see what is above its head: the next level, at which the assumption that I, me, mine, is the most important in the world is recognized as an increasingly useless assumption.

What if what we sense as overwhelming complexity was only evolution's trick to seduce us into the collective identities and shared minds needed to make sense and higher meaning out of our world? What if someday we woke up realizing that we left the fixation with the narrower perspectives behind just as we did with toys that we've outgrown in the kindergarten? What if that day was today?

I know, it's easier said than done. Spreading good practices worth replicating does help. Here is a beautiful example. The good news is there's a growing number of us who recognize that awakening communities are not the death of our individuality, only the death of our ego. In fact, autonomy gains never before experienced depth and richness in the unfolding dynamics and interplay between autonomy and communion. So, what are we waiting for? :-)