Experiment in contemplative co-tweeting

Posted on July 22, 2009 by George Pór

This blogpost builds on and extends the ideas introduced in the Chaordic Dialogue Practice.
Both there and here, I am passionately curious of what would become possible, what we could gain access to individually and together, if we decided to work with such communication tools as SMS, chatrooms, or chat in Skype, and consensually suspended the habit of giving, receiving, and expecting immediate a response. What if we could give ourselves more time to listen and respond from a more mindful space, respecting more silence pregnant with possibilities?
Picture 24.png Inspired by the early experiences with the Chaordic Dialogue Practice, here I add a Twitter dimension to renew and expand it. If you don?t have yet a Twitter account but want to participate, sign up here.
For detailed instructions, read on:

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Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Autonomous commons groups as drivers of the transition, their CI, and the CI they are part of

Posted on July 4, 2009 by George Pór

A good interview opens new conversations by triggering more questions than it answers. I”m grateful to Christiana Wyly for interviewing James Quilligan and for the new questions that their conversation made possible to ask.
“[T]he real epistemic break is happening where individuals with deeper understanding are organizing to preserve and manage a particular commons which they depend on for their own livelihood or well-being (be it natural, social, cultural or intellectual), and allowing the energy of shared governance to flow in and through that space.” — Quiliigan
What are the signs of such epistemic breaks?
How can we recognize them when they happen?
What are their necessary antecedents?
What difference could it make for the movement of transition to a better world if the collaborative inquiries into those questions would unearth some initial, useful replies?

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Chaordic Chat Practice

Posted on April 16, 2009 by George Pór

This practice starts by breaking the habit of giving and receiving immediate response in real-time conversations, texting, on skype or on the phone. It gives access to a fuller intelligence of the parties in communication. When we take any insight, a striking inspiration, or a special resonance between possibilities, into the focus of our non-judgmental observing and contemplating them, then we can access a deeper intuition. Giving room to such contemplation, before moving to expression, is a gift to the conversation’s highest potential. That is a hypothesis worth testing in the prototyping process.

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Posted in Chaordic Chat, Collaborative Sense-Making, Collective Wisdom, Shared Mindfulness, Uncategorized | 18 Comments

Obama, collective intelligence, and Current TV

Posted on November 10, 2008 by George Pór

Gore is pitching CI at Web 2 Summit.jpgAl Gore made an intriguing comment about the presidential election at the recent Web 2.0 Summit.
“One of the reasons we were all thrilled Tuesday night is it was pretty obvious this was a collectively intelligent decision.”
That made me wonder, what if Gore’s Current TV became a more conscious and competent vehicle for bottom-up “collective intelligence” generation, by engaging the combined power of social and electronic technologies for CI?
Gore’s statement comes 1/2 later than my “With Obama, for a new kind of “surge” – the surge of social creativity and collective intelligence” and “Resources for amplifying our collective intelligence and collective wisdom” blog entries at Obama’s site but what is important that he would have more chance to act on them with a higher leverage than me. Let’s see what he will do with it.

Posted in Democracy and CI, Politics and CI | Leave a comment

Combining social and electronic technologies for large-scale, collaborative meaning making

Posted on October 11, 2008 by George Pór

Large-scale, collaborative meaning making is a vital condition for dealing with crises and turning breakdowns into breakthroughs, locally and globally.
To be effective, the social technologies for facilitating that transformation need to be supported by the best what emergent electronic technologies can offer. For example:
Imagine to couple Personal Brain with a robust taxonomy-builder and a semantic engine,
all rolled up into a rapid-deployment learning environment that can be easily customized
for any knowledge domain or project, by community tech stewards, including non-programmers.
What do you see? What could such system enable?
What new community, organisational, and global capacities could be afforded by it?
Here’s my take on what it should help us with:

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Posted in Collaborative Sense-Making, Collaborative Taxonomy, Democracy and CI, Knowledge Ecology, Technologies That Support CI | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

The CI deficit of the dominant way of organizing work

Posted on September 17, 2008 by George Pór

Philippe Dancause, a Canadian practitioner of various social technologies of collective intelligence shared some insights of great clarity in his blog that I roughly translated as follows.

“In most organisations, there are very few real forums that allow the emergence of new visions, perceptions, possibilities, solutions, and realities. Few places to make a point, evoke a combination of opinions, play out a diversity of experiences, and really understand the vision of the other person (no, the 2-day annual strategic retreat by senior management is not enough!).”

As long as the meaning-making conversations of the organization has access limited to the top decision makers, that diagnosis is unlikely to loose relevance.

“Should we say that the members of the organization serve only to play their role in the current activities, to perpetuate what is already established? I may exaggerate a bit here, but maybe not… We can say, at leas, that the collective intelligence of the organization is obviously (and sadly) underused.”

If you work in a company or any other hierarchy-dominated organization, your experience probably tells you that Philippe is not exaggerating. It is that very CI deficit of the dominant mode of organizing work, which makes it historically obsolete, unfit to perform under the conditions of increasing complexity multiplied urgency.
The good news is:

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Our steady attention…

Posted on August 30, 2008 by George Pór

Our steady attention to what is moving us in the luminous moments of co-inspiration
transforms the fleeting experience into continuous celebration of the awakening of the collective learner
to its potential for higher intelligence and wisdom, capable to hold more compassion and complexity.

Posted in Collaborative Sense-Making, Collective Wisdom, Intersubjectivity, Shared Attention | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“What the hell are all these connections and social media for?”

Posted on July 21, 2008 by George Pór

I rarely choose to fall even further behind on my GTD Next Action list, by adding a comment to blogposts, which may never will be read, but your intriguing question caught me because I’ve been asking myself, for quite a while, the same:
Bev Trayner asked, “what the hell are all these connections and social media for?”
We’ll see in 2-3 years from now but that’s not an answer to my wanting to sense the lay lines of our emerging planetary reality, as they emerge, so that they can inform wiser actions: mine, my clients’ and communities’…
Holding that question for a couple of years led me to the first sketches that you may want to take a look at here and here and here.
What kind of social learning system would be appropriate to address the challenges inherent in those posts?
Regarding our shared “falling behind” syndrome, what if it was only evolution’s trick to help us recognize that resistance to distributed cognition and collective intelligence/wisdom is futile, the relevant cognitive unit is not me but we?
(By “relevant” I mean capable to develop the functionally fit differentiation of one’s contribution to the whole, based on relatively accurate maps of our social and technical ecosystems.)

Posted in Autonomy, Communion, and CI, Collaborative Sense-Making, Questions Worth Asking, Visualizing Our Ecosystem | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

How well can collective self-reflexivity scale?

Posted on April 5, 2008 by George Pór

I woke up this morning 4 o’clock and not only because the jetlag. Yesterday was the first day of the first World Café Research Conference. Due to the delay of the flight from New York, I arrived late and when I entered the room, I stepped into a conversation about the reflexive nature of knowing and research. It was strangely familiar and excitingly new, at the same time.
It was familiar because a central theme of my thesis, 30-something years ago, was a critique of the objectivist sociology and its claim that its interview methods are neutral. (I suggested that interviewer and interviewee interact and their relationship constructs the meaning of their exchange as much as the words uttered by the second.)
It was also new because the context, the implied assessment that the quality of new knowledge developed in a typical World Café setting is a reflection of the quality of relationship between participants, as well as, the attention they give to the inner space, from which they are listening and speaking. (Bow to Otto Scharmer’s concept of the “blindspot.”)
At the dinner table, I happened to sit next to Fred Steier of the Fielding Graduate Institute and editor of a series of books on reflexivity in research. Fred is a gentle man with deep caring to squeeze out every once of learning from a conversation, with the power of second order self-reflection. In my exchange with him and the others around the table, I discovered this:
If people in conversation are observing and reflecting on both the source and the direction of their attention (the inner and the inter-subjective space), and sharing those reflections, a spontaneous combustion of consciousness can occur. If so, collective self-reflexivity can lead to deeper, more fine-tuned sensing of reality, thus to wiser action.
How well can collective self-reflexivity scale? What does it depend on whether it will grow into a system of influence or wither away, unfulfilled its potential? I feel those questions deserve a focused and rigorous research. My first thought about it is this:
For conversations that matter to grow into communities of practice and social systems at increasing scale, they have to be able to absorb the increased complexity involved with those systems. What does it depend on whether a community or a network of communities is capable to do that? One of the factors seems to be the trust and appreciation that flow among the participants in the conversation, besides their capacity for double loop learning in real-time, on the spot…
That’s what I got out from the bed with. Now, I go to get a breakfast, and continue the conversation, in the 2nd day of the conference.

Posted in Academic Research in CI, CI & Communities of Practice, CI Within, Collaborative Sense-Making, Presencing, Shared Attention, Ways of Tuning with Collective Consciousness | Leave a comment

A software substrate for collective intelligence

Posted on March 8, 2008 by George Pór

Shawn Murphy says, he is “creating an online digital ecosystem in which knowledge, logic and presentation can all evolve in a globe-spanning, self-organizing, peer to peer system of web servers which is… also the software substrate for an emergent global collective intelligence.”
Here’s an intriguing “pattern language” graph, generated by his software:Shawn Murphy's pattern language graph.jpg

Posted in Knowledge Ecology, Pattern Language | 2 Comments