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.

Here's an intriguing "pattern language" graph, generated by his software:

"Marx suggested that at a certain point in the development of capital... the crucial factor in production will become the ‘development of the general powers of the human head’; ‘general social knowledge’; social intellect; or, in a striking metaphor, the 'general productive forces of the social brain’." (Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism, by Nick Dyer-Witheford, 1999)

A more attentive reading of Marx' Grundrisse, his notes for Das Kapital that were published after his death, reveals that there is more than the social intellect, more than the gifts of the social brain that flow into our general intellect.

"General Intellect consists in a number of competences that are inscribed in the social environment organized by capitalist machinery, and hence available freely to its participants, by virtue of their existence as ‘social individuals’. These competences can be cognitive, as in technical or scientific knowledge, but they are also social and affective..." (Ethics and General Intellect, in Ethical Economy, by Adam Arvidsson, 2006)

Diving into the far-reaching implications of Arvidsson's statement is food for future thought. For now, we share a few quotes from Empire, which may illuminate the portent of this issue. "The danger of discourse of general intellect is that it risks remaining entirely on the same plan of thought, as if the new powers of labor were only intellectual and not also corporeal… As we saw earlier, new forces and new positions of affective labor characterize labor power as much as intellectual labor does.” (Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 2001)

Avoiding the danger of conceiving "general intellect" as something only intellectual is what Lazzarato accomplished (in "General Intellect: towards an inquiry into immaterial labour", Common Sense #22, 1996), by strengthening his analysis with a few relevant passages of the Grundrisse. A key component of Lazzarato's concept of "immaterial labour" is what he, Negri and other authors of the Italian-French "autonomist" school of thought described in Multitudes magazine. They refer to it as "affective labour." That distinction opened a whole new domain of inquiry where political economy and social psychology overlap.

What happens when we apply the "general intellect" lens to realize a fuller meaning of "collective intelligence?" It gives us access to CI in the long view, the broad sweeps of social evolution, past and future included.

Visualizing that long view as the vertical plane, we can add "collective intelligence" as the horizontal axis. In that sense, CI is the ensemble of capabilities, knowledge, and tools available to a collective entity, in the given stage of its evolution, for creating its desired future.

The spiral that is expanding from the point where the vertical and horizontal planes intersect, is driven by the co-evolutionary dynamics that plays in the macro/micro and global/local scales of CI.

(Excerpt from my Working Paper on Collective Intelligece and Collective Leadership)

The emphasis on CI's cognitive dimension is strong in the work of Pierre Lévy but he also acknowledges: "[E]mphasis on cognition does not intend to diminish the essential roles of emotions, bodies, medias, sign systems, social relations, technologies, biological environment or physical support in collective intelligence processes. The study of collective intelligence (abbreviated as CI) constitutes an inter-discipline aspiring as much to a dialogue between human and social sciences as with the technical, artistic and spiritual traditions. Its goal is to understand and improve collective learning and the creative process." (Strategy to build a CI network, manuscript by Pierre Lévy, 2003.)

As a consequence of that resolution, I'm looking for a part-time Research Assistant with interest to support a Research Fellow at Universiteit van Amsterdam, engaged in the design of cutting-edge action research in the fields of Personal Knowledge Management and Collective Intelligence.

Depending on the resonance with the applicant's own professional interests, tasks may include: managing the Blog of CI, interviewing me on emergent issues in our action research, wiki-fying documents, preparing presentation materials, etc.

It is a great situation for someone who is looking to make a positive difference in the world, by supporting an action research committed to that. The ideal candidate has both research and administrative skills, and is internet savvy.

The office is in Brussels, so living there or willing to travel there once a week, is required. Compensation will be based on mutual agreement about the depth and breadth of the support that the aspirant offers to be accountable for.

If you are interested, send CV and letter of intention to me at George(at)Community-Intelligence(dot)com. I will review all letters and CVs by the end of the year, and notify the applicants by January 7, 2008.

If you know someone who may be interested in the position, please pass on the URL of this entry: http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/2007/11/research_assistant_in_personal.html .

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.)

> 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…

"A new social art form I call Social Presencing Theater that stages media events and productions to connect different communities and their transformational stories by blending action research, theater, contemplative practices, intentional silence, generative dialogue and open space."

Social Presencing Theater is striking an enthusiastic chord in many people who read or hear about it. When Otto told me about the idea in our first conversation two years ago, my soul caught fire as I imagined what could happen when Social Presencing Theater links up communities across a country or across the globe in co-creative, future-responsive dialogues, fun, and wise action.

In this --longish!-- blog entry, I explore the relationship between Social Presencing Theater (SPT) and collective intelligence (CI).

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.

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.

Kent Bye wrote:

Tapping into collective intelligence is achieved by aggregating context and meaning on video segment sound bites through the mechanism of "user-contributed metadata" (i.e. credibility ratings, quality ratings, free tagging categorization and organizing video segments into playlist sequences). The end result a rich body of links and associations between the facts and subjective judgments that is used to aggregate contextual knowledge from the participants. There are many practical examples from technology firms that aggregate individual judgments into collective decisions -- Amazon.com book recommendations, eBay trust and reputation systems, the link citation analysis built into Google's PageRank algorithm, and the front-page voting system of Digg.com. The Echo Chamber Project will be combining some of these technological mechanisms within a journalistic context by using the collection of interview video segments.

What would it look like if we didn't pit intelligence against emotions but go for their synergy, for Civilization 2.0? If the forms of CI 1.0 (and social organization) led to the global crises we are in, CI 2.0 will need to be governed by what has heart and meaning for us.

I will co-facilitate there an experiment in Boosting Our Collective Intelligence. The subtitle is: Presencing the future we care for, by liberating the potential of communities of practice and life-work communities.

Let me know whether you'd want to learn more about it, as it unfolds.