Here are some more comments from Jay Cross about Shift Happens!
> When I look back at your definition of Collective Intelligence: “the capacity of communities to evolve towards higher order integration and performance through collaboration and innovation,” I have a tough time figuring out when the tipping point has tipped, e.g. when the ice turns to water or when the performance is of such a higher order that an observer would say, “Boy, that’s really different.”
Are you asking, what is the evolutionary threshold for a system-in-focus to reach metasystem transition? Discussing the Big Shift, or the threshold for entering the next phase of global society, a friend of mine, Larry Victor responded in an email, 10 years ago:

A high level of threshold would be evidenced when such planetary indicators of balance and vitality can be observed as the increasing rate at which hunger, poverty, and violence are decreasing.
Then he agreed with the following response I sent him:
What I see the next important step is not as much defining it, but designing a co-creative, generative, multi-stakeholder conversation in which indicators and criteria for each level can be jointly developed and brought into the public discourse.
Today, looking around in blogosphere, I have certainly more trust in the possibility of the kind of co-creative, generative, multi-stakeholder conversations about the tipping point criteria than I had when the web has just started and we have not yet had blogs.