Creating a Meshwork of Communities of Practice for Unleashing the Emancipatory Potential of AI-Enhanced Collective Intelligence

Posted on September 16, 2018 by George Pór

Screen Shot 2018-09-10 at 15.03.34

paper to be presented at

the 9th International Conference on Innovation and Knowledge Management in Asia Pacific (IKMAP2018), in Hangzhou, China, Nov 1, 2018

/work-in-progress, 15-Sept-2018/

George Pór, Meridian University

 

Abstract

How can the astounding powers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) be put in service of galvanizing the even more awesome powers of the Collective Intelligence (CI) of our communities, organizations, and the human species, for the sake of the greater good? That’s the question I begin to address with this paper and with the present stage of my life as a CI researcher (since the mid-80s).

Many of the current explorations about the dangers of an unfriendly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or the promises of a human-friendly version of it is largely speculative because AGI requires achieving human-level intelligence and sentience which is as questionable as faster-than-light travel. In the media and the public discourse about AI, there’s frequently a blurring of the difference between general AI and narrow AI . General AI is supposed to be able to perform any intellectual task that a human being can, from which we are decades away. Narrow AI can solve specific problems on a well-defined narrow domain. In this paper, “AI” refers to “narrow AI.”

This paper will outline ways to actualize the possibility of:

  • Augmenting the self-reflective, collective intelligence of humans and their communities with AI.
  • Creating a conceptual framework for Generative Action Research to address the challenges of individual and collective intelligence augmentation (IA) with AI for the common good.
  • Facilitating collaboration among civic-minded AI practitioners and academics in Asia and the West, who are attracted to the first two challenges.
  • Convening an international meshworking conference (of leading AI researchers, entrepreneurs, NGOs, policy-makers, technology executives, and philanthropists) to identify priorities for both near-term and long-term development and jointly articulate recommendations for national/international policy-making bodies.
  • Using the meshworking conference for forming human-facilitated and AI-enabled communities of practice to realize the emancipatory potential of AI for prosperity for all

Collective intelligence is defined in this paper, as an emergent quality of social groups (of any size), which enables them to evolve towards higher-order harmony and complexity,  through networks of interacting individual capacities and such innovation mechanisms as differentiation and integration. Of course, that is only one of the many definitions of CI . It is seen through the ‘evolutionary’ lens and differs from the ‘wisdom of crowd’-type CI… The emphasis on the emergent quality distinguishes it from ‘additive CI’ that merely states, ‘two minds are better than one’.” (Pór, 2014)

Communities of practice are self-organizing and self-governing groups of people who share a passion for the common domain of what they do and strive to become better practitioners. They create value for their members and stakeholders through developing and spreading new knowledge, productive capabilities, and fostering innovation.

Meshworks are multi-stakeholder social spaces for structured collaboration across various sectors, communities of practice, and other actors, to achieve a common purpose.

 

“The coming AI revolution will bring about either the best of times or the worst of times.”

— Kai-Fu Lee

From the kingdom of necessity… to the kingdom of freedom

Are you intrigued by the density of these abstracts and the many terms waiting to be unpacked? Let’s unpack them together, starting with the “emancipatory potential of AI.”

Did you know that global GDP would be 14% higher in 2030 as a result of AI – the equivalent of an additional $15.7 trillion? Labour productivity improvements are expected to account for over half of all economic gains from AI… Increased consumer demand resulting from AI-enabled product enhancements will account for the rest. The greatest economic gains from AI will be in China (26% boost to GDP in 2030) and North America (14.5% boost), equivalent to a total of $10.7 trillion and accounting for almost 70% of the global economic impact, according to a recent research by PwC.

Those numbers are huge, yet they are tiny when compared with the true potential resulting, in the next few decades, from the cross-fertilization of AI with the impact of nanotechnology, biotechnology, open data, and other tech trends growing exponentially.

If realized, that potential could lead humanity out of the kingdom of necessity (wage slavery)… into the kingdom of freedom (abundance for all). From an era where most humans have to toil in meaningless jobs to sustain their life… to an era, where work is becoming the joyous expression of the associated free agents’ creativity and aspirations.

“If realized…” but that’s a very big IF. For some, it’s impossible even to imagine it, which is normal given the hundreds of years of work ethics that defined people’s self-worth by how hard they work. The emancipatory potential of AI is opening a door to the best of the times that Kai-Fu Lee and other AI visionaries are dreaming about and working for. Are we going to walk through that door or the one, opening to the worst of the times, in which the world would be run by a handful of mega-corporations, a sliver of managerial and techno-elite prosper beyond measure and the disposable multitudes subsist on basic income?

Choosing wisely

One of the things we can do for choosing wisely between the paths leading to that dystopian future and the best of the times is influencing the directions in which AI is developing. They are too important for the future of humanity to leave them to be decided by the technologists and the market forces alone. “Our AI future will be created by us, and it will reflect the choices we make and the actions we take. In that process, I hope we will look deep within ourselves and to each other for the values and wisdom that can guide us.” — Kai-Fu Lee

The multi-dimensional issues involved with the choices about our AI future are far too complex for anyone to fully comprehend, let alone influence on their own. Together, with the right design and preparation for a meshworking process, we do have a chance. What do you know about meshworks beyond them being “multi-stakeholder social spaces for structured collaboration across various sectors, communities of practice, and other actors, to achieve a common purpose”?

Meshworks are social activity systems, where the participating actors, organizations, and sectors, co-create their influence on complex societal decisions that matter to them. They do that by creating greater connectivity and coherence in the social field, without centralizing solutions. The higher the diversity of concerned stakeholders participating in the mesh, the better are the chances for a higher-level CI and impact. (It’s worth noting that meshworks also represent a new type of foundation for philanthropy.)

For a case study of large-scale meshworking, read “Developing a roadmap and meshwork for Millennium Development Goal 5.”

What does our better AI future need meshworking for? For example, in no particular order:

  • Developing the societal “capability of big-picture thinking coupled with a quick-response intelligence” — Don Beck
  • Accomplishing more with less and faster thanks to the synergy emerging from discovering “memories of the future” through collaborative scenario writing
  • Piloting Intelligence Augmentation (IA) with AI
  • Generating both critical mass and critical connectivity for a systemic impact

How can an initially small group of concerned citizens’ impact scale to the level needed to make a difference and ensure that AI, the science and technology building on humankind’s general intellect, will help usher in “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible”? — Charles Eisenstein

Scaling up and across

For scaling up a collaborative and growing it into a system of influence, I developed the Generative Action Research (GAR) methodology that I introduced in my keynote at the 2013 annual conference of the International Society for Systems Sciences and outlined in my Issue paper for the workshop on Collective Intelligence for the Common Good. I further elaborated on such qualities of GAR as self-sustaining, self-improving, self-evolving, and self-propagating, in my recent essay.

 

Beyond its self-propagating aspect, what contributes to scale up its impact are the following characteristics of the GAR methodology. It’s based on a process that is:

  • Cyclic — Action and understanding go through cycles of deliberate and spiralling intervention and reflection. Cycle 1 starts with discovering the questions that are the most compelling to the main stakeholders of the research.
  • Emergent — The design is not detailed in advance to allow its cycles to respond to relevant knowledge emerging from the previous one. Thus, when specific outcomes cannot be predicted, the process remains flexible and is allowed to develop on its own.
  • Participative — Key stakeholders of the project are actively involved in advising the process, reviewing and commenting on its purpose and design.

Scaling for the systemic impact doesn’t just happen by scaling up through self-propagation in expanding cycles of involvement. Another—and potentially more productive—strategy is scaling across: connecting and developing collaboration horizontally with organizations, groups, and initiatives that have similar or complementary intent, then share our discoveries, challenges, and inspirations. Below are the ones that I see, presently, on the horizon of an action research for identifying and realizing the emancipatory potential of (narrow) AI.

 

Who should be in the room? — 10 candidate research areas with challenge questions

Where should the first cycle of our Generative Action Research start? Who should be in the room, co-initiating it? To answer that question, we need to first address another issue. We need to define the specific challenges that we ask it to meet. Below is a list of 10 sample areas in which I have a personal and professional interest. I couple the naming of each area worth researching with a challenge question that suggests a practical orientation of the research.

If you want to be invited into the co-initiation process of GAR, let me know which of those issues/questions is of interest to you, too. If you don’t see yours in the list but you believe it should be there, please post a comment about why it should be included and what you’re already doing or plan to do in that area.

  1. The ABCD of civic technologies — connecting them with Artificial intelligence & Big data in City Democracies

How to prototype use cases that combine the power of Linked Open Data and AI with collaborative civic technologies for strengthening real democracy in the political ecosystem of the current shift from a planet of nations to a planet of cities?

  1. Serious gaming to grow collective capacity for climate resilience

Screen Shot 2018-09-15 at 09.34.35Research shows that showing people research doesn’t work, but their direct experience may. If so, and if the experience of participating in well-designed serious games can spark “climate change” consciousness and remedying action, then could the combination of game mechanics and reinforcement learning support “climate resilience” policies and social movements?

 

  1. Living with climate change and turning it into a bitter but healing medicine

How could an opportunity seeking AI embodied in deep learning use challenge propagation for helping to increase the fitness of organisations and larger systems in their sociocultural evolution, by learning to adapt to and thrive in the changing climate conditions?

What combination of collective human intelligence and a global sensor network would be useful to a reinforcement learning agent to assign threads to discover dependency relationships between a large number of climate observations and their forcing factors?

  1. Appreciating the return on collective intelligence

How do the open source movement, next-stage organisations, commons-based peer production, and other new forms of social interaction and coordination spin the distributed (collective) intelligence around the virtuous circle of increasing returns to society?

Can the evaluation of climate policy options by the collective intelligence of expert teams provide useful information to policy-makers about the highest probable social return on the investment in those options, applying a trained Logistic Regression Classifier (as it is already used in the private sector)?

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Image source: Designing_for_the_Emergence_of_a_Global-scale_Collective_Intelligence, by George Pór (paper presented at the Global Brain Workshop, Brussels, July 3-5, 2001)
  1. Galvanizing societal innovation with AI-enhanced soft power

What kind of societal innovation projects involving soft power (could) have big enough data sets to benefit from the power of computer simulation or machine learning, thus enabling the synergy of human and artificial intelligences?

  1. Electrifying the collective consciousness of networked social movements

How could appropriate combinations of transformative scenario planning, generative scribing, social data mining, collective sensing organs, movement sense-making and other tools and processes for collective self-reflection, be put in service of the networked movements of the multitudes?

  1. Democratizing AI

Diverse and broad-based participation in AI-enabled CI projects (that call for generating new options) is a condition for their success. What information can be useful for AI to become instrumental in developing tools for facilitating lay people learning to master AI?

How to validate practices worth replicating in AI design for the common good and civic technologies, in direct engagement with the communities of practitioners on the ground?

  1. Evaluating and increasing synergy in meshworks collaboration

What parameters of collaboration among meshworking partners need to be defined for assessing the applicability of a Foraging Search algorithm to create a synergy index as a multiplier of their collaboration power?

  1. Birthing a higher-order collective intelligence

What is the role of “inner technologies” in developing that kind of shared mindfulness, which will let us reach a higher-order collective intelligence necessary to guide the development of the right machine learning tools for humankind to navigate safely the turbulent waters of this century?

  1. Designing conditions for the emergent superorganism’s distributed intelligence

Emergence, by definition, cannot be designed but the conditions favouring emergence can. What can we learn from the functions of intelligence in human beings, which would inform our design for the distributed intelligence of the planetary meta-being?

If some of these challenge questions strike a resonant chord in your heart and mind, let’s explore how we can design a collective intelligence experiment to address them. We could even use the collective intelligence in the global network of the users of OpenIDEO and its design thinking tools to develop, refine, and scale these challenge ideas, and if we’re lucky, even access funding to advance and implement them.

Ultimately, I’d like to co-initiate the convening of an interdisciplinary gathering for augmenting the collective intelligence of the field of collective intelligence itself. In fact, with some colleagues, I tried to organise a Collective Intelligence Convergence already in 1993, then in 2007, still ahead of my time, when neither the field nor my idea was quite ripe for it to happen. (However, the 600-page anthology, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, grew out from those efforts.)

I learned since then that it’s not my job to boost the CI of the field of CI, in fact not of any one person, but of a network of civic-minded CI researchers and users, AI and data scientists, concerned NGOs, policy-makers, and philanthropists. If you’re one of them, let’s talk.

 

 

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Collective Intelligence and the Future of Consciousness

Posted on August 27, 2018 by George Pór

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“To solve our current, complex problems involving a large number of people and organizations in varying environments, a new form of collective intelligence is required. It emerges especially via digital media: the Collective Intelligence called “holomidal.” It would function as in small groups, in constant interaction to allow everyone to act taking into account others, but by doing so in large numbers. I make the assumption that such form of intelligence develops thanks to and with another level of consciousness. It is therefore to exchange with people who explore the future of consciousness.” — Pierre Lévy

According to Professor Lévy, holomidal CI comes into being in the Internet age, following such stages of CI as swarm (insects), original (tribes), and pyramidal (armies, corporations).

Thanks to the electronic media of communication, collaboration, and coordination of action, people in large groups can, indeed, act and interact, informed by the recorded knowledge and experience of everyone else. Participating in and witnessing those actions and interactions, we are participating in and witnessing in a shared cognition that can be distributed locally and/or globally. Exercising our distributed mind, we are both creating and being created by an emergent collective consciousness, at the same time.

Let’s take the simple example of a Google search, where you enter the search statement “enclosure of the commons.” Before you even hit the Return key, the page already displays some other key terms related to yours, which people were looking for, thus giving you some hints about how you may refine your search in any direction appealing to you. As you type, you will see words appearing below the search box:

  • enclosure of the commons definition
  • enclosure of the commons in england
  • enclosure of the commons economics
  • enclosure of the commons under capitalism

You may accept one of the suggestions or feeling inspired by it, modify your own search. If you do the latter, it will show up as an option for the next seeker of information about this subject

But that’s not all. After you, hit Return, on the top of the page you get a snippet that includes a summary of the answer to your question and below it, a list of other questions related to yours, which people around the world are addressing (in zillions of websites, forum conversations, encyclopedias, government documents, academic research papers, etc.). For example:

  • What was the Enclosure Act?
  • Why was the Enclosure Act passed in England?
  • What does enclosure have to do with the industrial revolution?
  •  What was the cause of the enclosure movement?
  •  How do you use “enclosure” in a sentence?

If you click on any of the questions, you will see below it another snippet summarizing and programmatically extracted from the webpage the most pertinent to it according to Google’s algorithms.

One can marvel at the genius of software engineers producing them but I’m even more impressed by humanity’s general intellect, another term for collective intelligence seen through the lens of political economy, where it refers to the productive force of the social mind that has been evolving throughout the millennia. All of humankind’s technical and scientific knowledge is part of it.

As I wrote in Collective Intelligence and Collective Leadership, the distinction “general intellect” lets us realize a fuller meaning of “collective intelligence,” seen in the long view, in the broad sweeps of social evolution, past and future included. It may be unbeknownst to us, but when we do the search described above, we interact with (a product of) humankind’s general intellect.

What does all that have to do with the future of consciousness? Let’s see what the Phoenix Generation has to say about it:

“This new model of communication and connection can be said to be rewiring our thinking and behaviour patterns. We are becoming accustomed to dealing with multiple connections rather than single ones, and to becoming immersed in varied and diverse relations and not just one-on-one dialogues. In turn we are being exposed to, and impacted by, a myriad of viewpoints, beliefs, identities and experiences. Within these models of self-expression each person is being called forth to respond and engage with the outside world not in fear or with anxiety but with healthy, creative and positive energies.”

The shift of learning from the sage-on-the stage to learning from each other, where the “other” is frequently the unknown multitudes, is also stimulating the firing of neurons in the global brain.

When our individual and planetary psyche dance together, they co-inspire, and the “emerging energy patterns are likely to have traits of a feminine consciousness, using energies that work through relationships… ; that seek to nurture co-operation; and that are nourished themselves through compassion and loving connections. ” — Kingsley L. Dennis, in Phoenix Generation

Well, that’s one of the possibilities and certainly the one that is more attractive than the alternative, the domination of our attention and choices, by the mega-corporations for the sake of profit and by “big brother” states serving them. Which one will prevail is up to us!

To allow these “big picture” thoughts to make a real difference in your everyday life, try each or any of these questions (and their embedded practice) on for a week:

How would your quality of life be affected if, at the end of  your search journey,  you could get answer to a question that really matters to you and can be asked with 10 words or less?

How would your desire to give back more grow if, from time to time, you could visualize and empathize with not only the long chain of people who put your food on the table, but also with the long chain of those who put food for thought on your screen?

p.s. This mini-essay is an abbreviated summary of my contemplation over the Pierre Lévy interview that has arrived in my inbox, this morning. In it, I signal rather than cover a number of topics. The more of you indicate an interest in any of them, in the comments, the more likely that I will elaborate on it in subsequent pieces.

 

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Definitions of Collective Intelligence

Posted on October 13, 2022 by George Pór

ONLINE DEFINITIONS OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

There are many definitions of collective intelligence available online. Below are the one’s I found so far. Some of them are edited to make them readable as definitions. Most define what I would consider only one portion of the full range of collective intelligence, being too narrow either in their sense of the “collective” that is intelligent, or in the functions they equate with intelligence, or in their sense of where collective intelligence comes from. But they are all very articulate about what CI is from their perspective. I’ll start with definitions proposed by the prolific Pierre Levy:

The capacity of human communities to co-operate intellectually in creation, innovation and invention. — Pierre Levy http://www.chairs.gc.ca/web/chairholders/viewprofile_e.asp?id=584

The cognitive powers of a group — e.g., perception, action planning and coordination, reasoning, prediction, memory, imagination and hypothesis generation, inquisitiveness, problem solving and, above all, learning capacity. Collective cognitive powers are closely related to the groupís culture. — Pierre Levy http://www.collectiveintelligence.info/cifaq.htm (the cognitive powers list from this source has been expanded with items from Levy’s definitions in http://www.carpediemcommunication.com/pierrelevyUS.html and http://137.122.100.152/mt/mt-weblogs/roadmap/archives/000042.html)

A fully distributed intelligence that is continuously enhanced and synergised in real-time. — Pierre Levy http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/presence.htm

Collective learning and creative process [realized] through exchanges of knowledge and intellectual creativity. — Pierre Levy http://137.122.100.152/mt/mt-weblogs/roadmap/archives/000043.html

A form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills… No one knows everything, everyone knows something. — Pierre Levy http://facultyofcinema.com/0738202614.html

Human communities, organizations and cultures exhibiting “mind-like” properties, such as learning, perceiving, acting, thinking, problem-solving, and so on. [This embraces phenomena variously known as] distributed cognition, distributed knowledge systems, global brain, super-brain, global mind, group mind, ecology of mind, hive mind, learning organization, connected intelligence, networked intelligence, augmented intelligence, hyper-cortex, symbiotic man, etc… Emotions, bodies, medias, sign systems, social relations, technologies, biological environment and physical supports [also play roles in] collective intelligence processes. — Pierre Levy http://137.122.100.152/mt/mt-weblogs/roadmap/archives/000042.html

The capability for a group to organize itself in order to decide upon its own future and control the means to attain it in complex contexts. — Jean-Francois Noubel http://www.noubel.com/mt/weblogs/ci/archives/000102.php

The oldest human social organization where individuals decide to mutualize their knowledge, know-how and experience in order to generate a higher individual and collective benefit than if they remained alone. Collective intelligence is the foundation of positive-sum economies where the whole is more than the sum of its parties. — Jean-Francois Noubel http://www.masternewmedia.org/2003/05/27/what_is_collective_intelligence.htm

The capability of a collective/social system to hold questions and language too complex for any individual intelligence to hold, and to work out strategies, visions, goals, and images of a desired future, etc. — edited from Finn Voldtofte’s notes from a World Cafe http://www.worldcafe.dk/worldcafe/generative.htm

A specific property of a social structure, initialized when individuals organize, acquiring the ability to solve more complex problems than individuals can. This property amplifies if the social structure improves its synergy. — Tadeusz Szuba http://jcwinnie.biz/wordpress/index.php?p=188

An unconscious, random, parallel and distributed computational process run by a social structure [such that the] social structure seems to be working well for a wide spectrum of beings (from bacterial colonies up to human social structures). — Tadeusz (Ted) Szuba http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Collective_intelligence

People of different backgrounds or talents working together so as to help optimize the meshing of those talents in organizations — Doug Engelbart http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/yak/2003-03/msg00029.html

Collective problem-solving ability. — Francis Heylighen http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=238069&PDF=1

The capacity of families, groups, organizations, communities and entire societies to act intelligently as whole, living systems. — Tom Atlee http://www.co-intelligence.org/I-fivedimensions.html

The capacity of communities to evolve towards higher order integration and performance through collaboration and innovation. — George Por http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public

That which overcomes “groupthink” and individual cognitive bias in order to allow a relatively large number of people to cooperate in one process – leading to reliable action. — Anonymous http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Collective_intelligence

Empowerment through the development and pooling of intelligence to attain common goals or resolve common problems. — Phillip Brown and Hugh Lauder http://www.womencentre.org.hk/document/April/2002_6_5.pdf

For more articles on collective intelligence, click here.

This list was compiled by Tom Atlee and posted on the Co-intelligence Institute’ website: https://www.co-intelligence.org/CollectiveIntelligence2.html#definitions

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Collective Intelligence Today

Posted on July 21, 2021 by George Pór

Pierre Lévy, a pioneer of Collective Intelligence, writes:

“Images, sounds, smells and places mark out human memory, as well as that of animals. But it is language that unifies, orders and reinterprets our symbolic memory at will. This is true not only on an individual scale, but also on a collective scale, through the transmission of stories and writing. Through language, humanity has gained access to reflexive intelligence. By analogy, I think that we will only reach reflexive collective intelligence by adopting a language adequate to the organization of the digital memory.”

Source: Collective Intelligence Today

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Greater than the sum of our parts: The evolution of collective intelligence

Posted on June 17, 2021 by George Pór

“The impact of human activity on the environment is the most pressing and stark example of this. The challenge of collaborating and cooperatively adapting at scale creates many difficulties and we may have unwittingly put in place a number of cultural systems and practices, particularly in education, which are undermining our ability to adapt. These self-imposed limitations disrupt our complementary cognitive search capability and may restrict our capacity to find and act upon innovative and creative solutions.”

“Complementary cognition should be seen as a starting point in exploring a rich area of human evolution and as a valuable tool in helping to create an adaptive and sustainable society. Our species may owe our spectacular technological and cultural achievements to neurocognitive specialization and cooperative cognitive search, but our adaptive success so far may belie the importance of attaining an equilibrium of approaches. If this system becomes maladjusted, it can quickly lead to equally spectacular failures to adapt—and to survive, it is critical that this system be explored and understood further.”

Source: Greater than the sum of our parts: The evolution of collective intelligence

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School of Collective Intelligence in Morocco

Posted on April 12, 2021 by George Pór

Republished from: https://sci.um6p.ma/collective-intelligence

What is Collective Intelligence?

Collective Intelligence is a new field of knowledge with ancient roots. At its core is a simple insight about the nature of human beings: we have evolved to collaborate, and are more likely to succeed when we collaborate effectively.

From Thucydides to Ibn Khaldun, John Stuart Mill to Peter Senge, scholars through the ages have observed that groups can, under the right circumstances, build and preserve knowledge better than a single gifted individual. At the school of collective intelligence, we study the details of how these processes happen, and we build state-of-the-art tools to support new forms of knowledge sharing, knowledge aggregation, and collective decision-making.

The study of collective intelligence embraces many domains of inquiry:

  • Cognitive science, to understand the human mind, its biases and strengths
  • Data science, to understand how collective decisions can be better informed;
  • Organizational science, to develop new structures that favor effective collaboration;
  • Political innovation, to build more inclusive and effective institutions;
  • Facilitation, to develop the interpersonal skills needed to lead;
  • History, biology and ethics to tailor our skills to the present moment.

 

Research

As a burgeoning field, the boundaries of collective intelligence are still being defined. At the UM6P School of Collective Intelligence (SCI), we have chosen to focus on cognition and systems as the core building blocks of our research offer.

We explore cognitive science, evolutionary biology, data science/AI, epistemology and ethics. Under the umbrella of systems, we look at computational systems, complex systems, participatory design, culture and behaviour change.

Innovation and Technology Transfer

Strengthening the links between research and real-world applications is at the core of the mission of the School of Collective Intelligence. The School encourages both researchers and students to develop methodologies and digital tools that harness collective intelligence to solve complex problems and promote a sustainable society.

We employ methodologies from the field of behavioral science, crowdsourcing, open innovation and collaborative innovation networks to optimize decision-making processes, creativity, and understanding of today’s challenges.

Working with world-class researchers and innovators to solve real-life problems, we develop solutions alongside industrial and public-sector actors.

Our innovation and technology-transfer strategy balances exploration and exploitation modes of innovation to ensure that research matches the actual needs of the organizations and communities.

Our innovation projects include tools and methods for :

  • Complex deliberation and cognitive diversity
  • Collective recruitment and engagement
  • Organizational network-mapping
  • Collaborative learning
  • Crowdsourced prediction

Impact

The School is committed to having a positive social and economic impact. UM6P School of Collective Intelligence will focus on high-impact projects for both the public and private sectors.

Source: UM6P SCI – Collective Intelligence

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Mobilizing the CI of the Movements for a Thrivable Future

Posted on June 21, 2020 by George Pór
mobilizing-the-ci-of-the-movements-george-pocc81rDownload

This slide and its speaker’s note are from the attached presentation I made on the Radical Collaboration panel of Humanity Rising, on June 13, 2020.


June 13, 2020 was the same day, when Tomas Björkman and Joe Ross published on Emerge their seminal essay, Building Bridges Into The Fog.

I’m wondering what else did the Cosmic Central Committee of Coincidences sent into our cultural field, that day?

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on the effervescent edge of emergent CI

Posted on September 9, 2019 by George Pór

(The Collective Intelligence Lab is a series of three events over three weeks – and requires attendance at all three)

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/rebelwisdom/290534/

In a world of ever-increasing complexity, it’s clearer than ever before that no one mind is sufficient to grasp the whole. Yet at the same time as we urgently need multiple perspectives and connections, polarisation is growing as we increasingly isolate ourselves inside filter bubbles. Many of us are feeling that it’s harder than ever to talk to those we disagree with, let alone learn from one another.

Rebel Wisdom is a media channel that looks at the deep code of culture and society through a lens of philosophy, science, personal growth, and transformation. Since the inception of the channel last year, we have been on a journey of discovery, interviewing and learning from the most profound thinkers* on the planet. Most of them have independently realized that we urgently need to develop new forms of collective intelligence in order to respond to the challenge of the times.

This process cannot just be conceptual. It means going beyond our analytical minds, engaging the whole person and entering into genuine dialogue with others. To this end, it requires technologies such as mindfulness, conscious dialogue (circling/inquiry), breathwork and other techniques so that our disagreements can be generative rather than destructive.

We are running an experimental series of events – the Rebel Wisdom Collective Intelligence Lab – in October this year to trial these techniques and to bring them together with philosophy and cultural change. Our hope is to find a genuinely new way of coming together to meet the challenges we all face – if you’d like to join us, please register your interest.

We will be keeping the ticket price low – just above cost – this is about getting the right group of committed people together. It will involve a commitment to 3 Tuesday evenings in October – October 1, October 8 and October 15.

*including Ken Wilber, Jamie Wheal, Daniel Schmachtenberger, John Vervaeke, Jordan (Green)Hall and others

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Decentralized Collective Intelligence

Posted on July 28, 2019 by George Pór

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The Power Of Attention Diversity At Work

Posted on May 15, 2019 by George Pór

The only way to cultivate focus is to have an alignment of what does and doesn’t deserve attention. Shared attention is both the cause and result of a cohesive community—and the reason why it’s true that “culture eats strategy for lunch.”

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AI for Good Global Summit – 28-31 May 2019, Geneva, Switzerland

Posted on April 30, 2019 by George Pór

Contribute key information about how to leverage AI to help solve humanity’s greatest challenges.

Source: AI for Good Global Summit – 28-31 May 2019, Geneva, Switzerland

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Collective Intelligence 2019

Posted on April 30, 2019 by George Pór

The ACM Collective Intelligence 2019 is the seventh edition of this annual interdisciplinary conference sponsored by SIGCHI dedicated to advancing our understanding of collective intelligence and the workings of teams. The conference will take place at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business on June 13-14, 2019.

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