The size of one’s life

Posted on October 24, 2009 by George Pór


“Life Shrinks or Expands in proportion to one’s courage. ” – Anais Nin

The story of this unusual portray Called “Anais Nin: Come As Your Madness” Is here.

Posted in Literature | Tagged | Leave a comment

C’est par amour que nous changeons l’histoire…

Posted on October 23, 2009 by George Pór

In her response to my blog entry on “Why we need an English edition of this site” Michelle Holliday, wrote:

> how can we nurture enough cross-pollination between language groups to support the collective intelligence of this group?

I’m grateful to her question for a very personal reason. It brought back the memories of my very first, sweet connection with Quebec.

C’était des années 70 et à l’époque je vivais à Paris avec une amie féministe, et nous étions enchantés par des idées et pratiques de libération sexuelle et politique, et par ce chanson d’une une chanteuse, compositrice et actrice québécoise:

“C’est par amour que nous changeons d’histoire
C’est par amour que nous changeons I’histoire.”

What does the lyrics of Pauline Julien have to do with cross-pollination between language groups to support the collective intelligence of this group? Everything.

When we operate in a social networking space, outside the hierarchical model of delegating translation tasks, or the market model of buying translations, our best bet to get a post that touches us deeply re-awakened in another language, is to offer the author and the community our gift of love and attention by translating it.

I have already a short list of favorite ones; now, i just have to find the time to start translating… Maybe on the plane in my way to Montreal, to honor the memory of Pauline, and the heart and wisdom that appear on the pages of this website…

Posted in Multi-community membership, Songs | Leave a comment

Wrapping the conference in a blanket of collective intelligence (CI)

Posted on October 17, 2009 by George Pór

Since I published The Quest for Collective Intelligence in the anthology on “Community Building: Renewing Spirit and learning in Business” (1995), I knew that a moment will come within my lifetime, when all what we know about CI will need to be brought into conversation and action. That will be called by a viable future that urgently needs “loosely tied far-flung strangers learning to collaborate” (Sébastien Paquet), at increasing scale. In my epiphany, it was also a time when a loose network of communities of CI practitioners and research centers formed, and it started developing and sharing advanced CI tools, methods, frameworks, and practices.

CI blanket, smallI feel that time is now and our CI workshop at UQAM can provide an impetus for advancing both practice and research if we co-created it so. On the practice side, we’ll be successful if we closely align CI-boosting in and around our workshop with the common context of the conference and its participants, which is community development. Thanks to Isabelle Mahy‘s’s wise orchestration, we can use my keynote, the opening and closing world cafés, the roundtable and the workshop, for wrapping the conference in a blanket of “collective intelligence” practices and tools.

Those practices may include on-site interviewing of participants in different sessions and workshops of the conference, then bringing the insights, questions, and inspirations emerging from those interviews both into the room onto the net. The more people capable to conduct dialogue interviews (à la Scharmer) will contribute to the process, the more aware the conference as system can become of its richness and potential. If you’re new to dialogue interviewing, you can learn about it by going to the“U-Tools” diagram and bringing your mouse over “Dialogue Interviews.

I did something like that with some friends, on a very a small scale, at Reboot 9.0 that was geek unconference (an Open Space-like gathering) in Copenhagen, a couple of years ago. Observing what happened there, I articulated some unpublished ideas about “wrapping a conference in a blanket of CI.” If some people would step forward to drive/coordinate the process of dialogue interviewing and synthesizing on-site, I’d be happy to be a resource person to them.

Posted in Collaborative Sense-Making, Events | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Learning expedition into global-scale CI

Posted on October 17, 2009 by George Pór

One of my first inspirations that lead to the ideas about wrapping a conference in a blanket of collective intelligencewas “Learning Expedition into Higher Order Global Learning” (1990) a funding proposal that came two decades too early and never got funded. It seems that the proposal’s problem definition is even more timely today:

“A growing number of women and men, communities and organizations from many cultures, are dedicating themselves to seeking sustainable solutions. Some of these efforts are large-scale and well known, but most are small and unpublicized. They frequently are lonely, disjointed journeys against tremendous odds. Lacking a unifying vision and a systemic framework, using inadequate tools and models for operational and meta-level communications, we duplicate our efforts rather than achieve what we are capable of.”

What I suggested was a Learning Expedition to seed and grow a network of local nodes that research and design tools, methods, and educational opportunities to empower collaborative learning in transformational communities. We were targeting the creation of multi-dimensional cognitive maps and mental models; advanced visual thinking; personal and group knowledge ecologies, integrating scientific and intuitive knowing. (Later, I expanded on the ideas of 1990, in a paper on “Designing for the Emergence of a Global-scale Collective Intelligenc,” presented at the Global Brain Workshop in 2001.)

I am grateful to UQAM and the organizers of the 4 International Conference on Community Development for giving me the opportunity to re-visit those “old” ideas, whose times are slowly coming…

Posted in Local to Global to Local | Leave a comment

Search for Earthlings’ Collective Intelligence (SECI)

Posted on September 23, 2009 by George Pór

EarthRising.jpgSETI@home is a scientific experiment that
uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence (SETI). Currently, it is the largest distributed computing effort with over 3 million users.

What would it take to launch a social experiment run by
Internet-connected people in the Search for Earthlings’
Collective Intelligence (SECI)?

Extraterrestrial intelligence is the big unknown, the big Other of humankind. I’m wondering whether we can meet it before we discover and become friends with the other big unknown, right here, on this planet:

our collective intelligence capable to let us intentionally evolve as a species and choose the future in which the full development of the parts is the goal of the whole and vice versa.

Regarding the SECI experiment, I am thinking of, as a first step, co-convening a new,  ContemplaTweet event. Let me know if you want to be part of it and its design team.

Posted in Collective Intellect Augments Individual | 2 Comments

Facilitating the local/global dynamics of CI calls for a collective sensing organ

Posted on September 21, 2009 by George Pór

Robin Temple commented on the Chaordic

Dialogue Practice blogpost. Instead replying to it in that thread of comments, I’ve
chosen to put the thoughts that it triggered in a new entry, as to give
more visibility to it and our dialogue. Quotes are from Robin’s original
comment.

“On Chaordic Dialogue – two things I perhaps
could contribute:
– your proposal of ‘dis-locating’ dialogue in both dimensions of time and space
opens up the possibility for the reality that is not bound by time and space to
freely emerge in any such dialogue.
This ‘non-located’ reality is the one that holds the intelligence and wisdom we
so much seem to lose when we get too much caught up in our space-time ‘points
of view’. Interestingly, this intelligent reality still ‘needs’ us, as participants
in the conversation…”

It sure does. It’s only through our active engagement can it become aware of
itself. I am thrilled by that we can’t even start fathoming the acceleration of
local evolution when the intelligent reality of the global meta-being awakens
to self-awareness. There’s a beginning conversation about the self-awareness of
the meta-being here, which may be of interest to students of the life of our Emerging Planetary Reality.

Escher's Implosion of spiral toroid.jpgI believe there’s an increasing return on the double spiral of the local
enriching the global, and the global making the local wiser. I started sharing
my observations about the local/global dynamics here and further explored some aspect of the “collective intelligences
playing at different scale” theme under that heading in a research note.
As we apply both systemic observation and collaborative intuition to the
inquiry into, and sense-making from, that dynamics, we can become better agents
of it.

“… in order to be
able to contribute to the our dialogues (as ‘insights’ and ‘inspirations’) and
to insert these contributions back into time and space ‘locatedness’, where we can,
if we choose, take ownership of them and respond to them if we feel moved.”


The local/global dynamics is one of the key dimensions of designing a 4-fold learning
architecture that Etienne Wenger conceptualized in the context of communities
of practice. His learning architecture design is reflected in the diagram below and summarized/popularized here.  Robin Temple’s comment is inspiring to  expand and explore the 4-fold learning architecture’s meaning in the context of
humankind’s learning journey.

4D Learning Architecture.png

Wenger’s model that is central to his “social learning” theory, particularly, the four dynamics (space, time,power and meaning) of the design, can reveal questions useful to ask about the evolution of large-scale collective intelligence, as well. However, that should be the subject of a new conversation ideally, in the context of negotiating the learning agenda of a
nascent community focused on the practice of hosting and facilitating the local/global
CI dynamics.

Contributing our insights, inspirations, and initiatives to the global flows in
the social body of evolutionary emergence, and facilitating the local take-up
of what supports local emergence are two sides of the same coin. Deepening the
learning about one calls for the deeper exploration of the other.

Right now, the relevant insights, inspirations, and initiatives that could
enhance each other and lead to breakthroughs in social innovation and
creativity of great local and planetary portent, are still largely disjoint and
fragmented. They are groping their way towards each other and the actual cases
of cross-fertilization and synergy painfully lag behind the potential. We can’t
expect a significant improvement of that situation before a community is
coalescing around the purpose of developing a collective sensing and
meaning-making organ dedicated as a service to the evolutionary movement.
Currently, there are some early conversations about forming such a community
under the (temporary) name “Evolutionary Learning & Action Network” or
ELAN, for short.

“The more practiced we become at contemplative
silence, as you suggest, the clearer our channels of communication will become
for this ‘reality-intelligence’ that is waiting to emerge through us into our
everyday awareness.”

Yes, and the implication of that statement is that for those engaged in the
support of intentional evolution, the honing of one’s contemplative skills is
not only a personal matter but an issue of evolutionary response-ability.

“Just to say I don’t take any personal credit
for these ideas above – ‘my’ contribution to this chaordic dialogue … they
just ‘appeared’ quite spontaneously as the reading your article came somehow
together with my (daily) ‘practice’ of trying to understand and include
‘reality-beyond-time-and-space’ in my conversations.”

Our brainchildren, just like our biological ones “come through us but don’t
belong to us” (Khalil Gibran). However, credit is due for the daily practice
of contemplative silence and meditation. Without that we couldn’t become
the hollow bamboo for the future playing its songs through us, as it is
emerging from the generative dialogues and actions of millions around the
planet…

“One interesting practical support for
chaordic dialogue that I can see appearing on the horizon is Google’s latest
contribution to communication technology: Google Wave – that is due to be
launched to the public soon. The possibilities of being able to add
audio/video/photo/text contributions seamlessly to on-going chaordic dialogues,
that can be recorded and ‘played back’ and entered into at any point… (again,
freeing dialogues from being ‘fixed’ in time and space) all suggest great possibilities
for our collective learning, sharing and ‘harvesting’ in this area…”

Google Wave is not yet released and, for good
reasons, already making waves in the minds of a couple of observers. Robin’s
comments around it resonate with the excellent blogpost of Dave Pollard
and my own essay
on “Why will Google Wave succeed, in spite itself.”

It seems that the Wave will just arrive just in time to shake up how we work and learn together, as one of the most disruptive innovations in the history of social computing. Technologically curious CI practitioners can help speeding its market acceptance, by developing CI-focused application prototypes, which may well also be a way to fast-track the local and global augmentation of CI itself.    

Posted in Collaborative Sense-Making, Community of CI Practitioners, Contemplative Practice, Evolutionary Movement, Local to Global to Local, Technologies That Support CI | Tagged | Leave a comment

From hardware-based sensors of the physical to software-based sensors of the social

Posted on September 20, 2009 by George Pór

John Seely Brown.jpgQuotes in this blogpost are
from “Ecological
Computing,”

by John Seely Brown and Feng Zhao.

Confluences and their combined confluence

Looking back at the first decades of the third millennium, humans will see them as the era of the Great Transition, an unexpected result brought to us by a confluence of many confluences.

Writing about an omni-present, planet-scale sensor network that will dwarf the Internet by many orders of magnitude, and its implications for biological and computing
ecologies, John Seely Brown mentioned:

“The transformational force underlying this change is the confluence of recent rapid technological advances such as micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) sensors and actuators, wireless and mobile networking, and low-power embedded microprocessors… When the sensor grid becomes ubiquitous it becomes like an enormous digital retina
stretched over the surface of the planet.”

The idea of a planet-scale sensor network evokes an orbital view of not only the confluence of technological developments that make it possible but also, the other confluences that such network contributes to and mingles with. For example, the confluence of shifts from authority to authenticity as driver of social organization, from
scarcity to wide availability of knowledge, and from groupware to massively
distributed social media that link up mega-millions of minds.

“Let’s add intelligent browsers to this vast sensing system that lets scientists, government regulators, or environmental advocates use the internet to ask questions never before imaginable.”

When we’ll use such browsers for navigating on the ocean of data obtained from networked indicators of social well-being, collective moods, diseases in the global social body, and challenges to collective intelligence and wisdom, then we’ll have made a
decisive step towards the bulk of humankind joining in a self-aware meta-being.

Against methodological reductionism

“To build a system of this size, computer scientists and engineers will have to borrow ideas from biology and ecology, and figure out how large-scale complex systems adapt, repair and self organize. An open, two-way interaction between environmental scientists
and computer scientists is likely to have far-reaching implications for both
the computational and biological worlds for many decades to come.”

Besides technology, what can also be affected by learning from living systems is the world of social institutions and systems. I would not call “learning” the efforts to
mechanistically copy the principles of how the frequently referenced social
animals (beehive, ant colony, flock of birds, termites, school of fish, etc.)
behave. The mistake of the authors who propagate that reductionist view is in
the intent to draw guidance for or explain the higher-order complexity of human
society with the lower-order complexity of animal group behavior. The crucial
factor that they disregard is the values, worldviews, conscious choices, and
developmental stages in the individuation of people, which make instinct-based
collective behavior in human society impractical.

Where does the increasing popularity of the analogies with the social animals come from? It would be hard to not see the connection with escaping from the real but testing complexity of the social world, and at the same time, a large number of people moving from Orange to Green value system, in Spiral Dynamics terms, which can’t perceive
developmental stages above itself.

If we are to learn from the natural world, we need to go deeper than the behavioral level and look for inspiration in the basic evolutionary processes at play in biological
ecosystems and explore how they may be relevant in social and knowledge ecosystems.
That’s one of the intentions of my current research on “Designing bio-inspired
knowledge and technical ecosystems to augment collective intelligence.”

Control in ecosystems

“[H]ow such a distributed system can be controlled and by
whom are not simply answered by listing technical capabilities especially given
the self organizing nature of this kind of system.”

When we’ll have a technology focused on enabling harmonization across vast networks of communities, organization, and social systems, then its control needs to be massively distributed. If not, then Big Brother and the Borg would have too much fun
together.

The only way to make control in ecosystems, biological or social, sustainable is by giving up control as “power over” and, as a consequence, gaining control in the cybernetic
sense: the requisite variety needed by the self-regulation of a system can be
kept operational only by setting feedback loops on all of its vital functions.

Nature is good at that kind of control but as I mentioned earlier, human societies have some extra challenges in that domain. Over the millennia, we practiced control from above and it served as well until this point, when knowledge and trust-based
relationship became the key productive forces. Neither of them can be
effectively controlled from above. Observing how emergent forms of cybernetic
control works is the main task of co-sensing the future as it emerges through
zillions of independent and interdependent initiatives.

Posted in Collaborative Sense-Making, Connecting Our Conversations, Democracy and CI, Politics and CI, Technologies That Support CI, Visualizing Our Ecosystem | Leave a comment

Fast-forward to personal singularity via collective intelligence

Posted on August 15, 2009 by George Pór

It used to be that every now and then, but not more frequently than once in a couple of years, I met a person on the edge of learning who caused me to re-focus and shift my direction of authoring myself.

What triggered that shift in the focus of my attention was, typically, the recognition that they do a better job in delivering value from the same niche that I occupy in the ecosystem of knowledge and knowledge-based services.

When more people started talking about the cutting-edge memes that I pioneered or was early adapter of, with more clarity, coherence, and accessibility than I did, then I realized, my service just got commoditized; it?s time to move on.
In an invitational 3-day research workshop on Global Brain, where I gave a presentation on ?Designing for the Emergence of a Global-scale Collective Intelligence?, I was scheduled to speak the last day. Listening to the presentations of the previous speakers I decided twice to shift the focus of my own as to not repeat what they were saying, and provide unique information value to the attendees.

The frequency by which the commoditization/differentiation wave hits me has shifted from ?by years? to ?by days,? and now, by the minutes thanks to social media. Here?s how.

A friend sent me an email with a quote that said: ?Intelligence has a strong social component; for example, we already provide crude cooperative information-filtering for each other. In time, our interactions through the use of such intimate technologies could dovetail with our use of collaborative knowledge systems (such as Wikipedia), to help us not just to build better data sets, but to filter them with greater precision. As our capacity to provide that filter gets faster and richer, it increasingly becomes something akin to collaborative intuition?in which everyone is effectively augmenting everyone else.?

Picture 37.png Image: Anastasia Vasilakis

I didn?t know who wrote it but the resonance was so strong with my own long-held epiphany that I felt compelled to google its source, and found it in an article of Atlantic Monthly, ?Get Smarter? by Jamais Cascio. It starts with these lead-in lines:

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Report on the first contemplative co-tweeting, Part 2: The emergent story

Posted on July 27, 2009 by George Pór

flower gate.jpg There’s a story emerging from the tweets of our experiment, or to be more precise, as many stories as people care for re-reading them (in the files posted here), and connecting them into a bouquet of meaning.
Those flowers of the experiment, in which I am rejoicing the most, are not cut and tied neatly into a bouquet, they are still growing. They are the flowers of:
Beauty (Self and Consciousness)
Truth (Culture and Worldviews)
Goodness (Organism and Systems)
Since I don’t have the talents of a painter, all I can do is to use the above photo of a garden that inspires me, and try to paint those flowers with words:

Continue reading →

Posted in Collective Wisdom | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Report on the first contemplative co-tweeting, Part 1: What happened

Posted on July 26, 2009 by George Pór

Twitter is an intensely personal experience, yet a communal one, at the same time. However, those two dimensions never meet. Our individual tweets create the value of the whole, yet we only benefit individually from the information we receive or dispense, the relationships we build. The opportunities for co-creative play in the tweetstream, benefiting the collective, have been hardly realized.
Picture 24.png That made me curious of what could become possible if we tweeted together, right after contemplating a question that mattered to us. I crafted a question expressing my passion, which worked as an attractor and inspired participation in spite the very short, 1-day notice. 8 Twitter users gathered in the “no place” of cyberspace on July 23, 2009, to embark on a co-tweeting experiment introduced with some minimalist instructions here.
The question that we put in the focus of our contemplation was this:

What is needed for openness and dialogue through tweets to scale
and affect positive change in consciousness and society?


This blogpost is the first installment of a report in 4 parts dealing with: A. what happened, B. what is the emergent story, C. what we learned from the experiment, and D. how we would improve the design of the next one.
So what has really happened in our contemplative twitterspace, on July 23?

Continue reading →

Posted in Collaborative Sense-Making, Technologies That Support CI | Tagged , | 1 Comment