“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.”
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: …
There was a skype call between @ffunch, @sebpaquet and @technoshaman on July 9, 2010.
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/divergingRendering effective processes into pattern languageObserving responsibility to bring coherent information, distilled and synthesised, to the whole in accessible and appropriate ways
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”? 🙂
“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.
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.
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.
collective intelligence —
“The capacity of a
social organism, such as a corporation, to:
Source: The Infinite Games Distinctionary, by Bill Veltrop
Blog of Collective Intelligence (since 2003) 
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