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. 

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.
@cyber_shaman

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 élanproject 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.