CI 2.0 governed by meaning and evolutionary values

Posted on May 31, 2007 by George Pór

Tor Nørretranders, author of C i v i l i s a t i o n 2.0 has just opened Reboot 9 with an inspiring talk on what mae us human: Dare, Care and Share. To get his message across he emphasized the role emotions and relationships in Civ 2.0, a bit at the expense of intelligence, as the essence of to be human. After his talk, Thomas the main organizer asked the 500 people in the main hall, what questions would be interesting to ask from ourselves for the next two days. I offered this one:
What would it look like if we didn’t pit intelligence against emotions but go for their synergy, for Civilization 2.0? If the forms of CI 1.0 (and social organization) led to the global crises we are in, CI 2.0 will need to be governed by what has heart and meaning for us.

Posted in Blogging for Emergence, Definitions, Leaning into the Unknown, Reboot | 1 Comment

Collective intelligence in service of Reboot

Posted on May 20, 2007 by George Pór

Reboot is “Calling all practical visionaries of the world!” It’s an event to reboot our minds, play on the edge of technology, and re-dream our culture. Its is a brainchild of Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, in its 9th successful year, happening in Copenhagen May 31 – June 1, 2007. The event is designed for 400 people ans is sold out but you can still participate in the Reboot online community, by registering (for free) here.
I will co-facilitate there an experiment in Boosting Our Collective Intelligence. The subtitle is: Presencing the future we care for, by liberating the potential of communities of practice and life-work communities.
Let me know whether you’d want to learn more about it, as it unfolds.

Posted in CI & Communities of Practice, Events, Presencing | Leave a comment

CI in the dialog between life sciences and management of organisations

Posted on May 19, 2007 by George Pór

The French chapter of the Society for Organizational Learning had conference on the “EMERGENCE OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: a dialog between Life Sciences and Management of organisations.”
Its aim was to explore the state of the art in each of these disciplines, to explore how these disciplines can inspire each other. I couldn’t attend because a conflict of schedule, and so far, they didn’t make their presentations public on their website. So I can’t report on it.
They wrote, “This gathering can be the first step into a range of meetings and a multidisciplinary research program.” If they’d think that my action research on “European Governance and Collective Intelligence” fit the bill, and invite me to help designing the next conference, the first thing I’d suggest is to design it for a better synergy between the face-to-face event and web-based tools of CI to be used before, during and after it.

Posted in Academic Research in CI, Events | 1 Comment

Collective intelligence as integral capacity

Posted on February 7, 2007 by George Pór

Tom Atlee wrote in an email message:

> A capacity usually involves both being and doing. It manifests
> through doing, but usually requires some form of being.
>
> Intelligence manifests largely through solving problems. If you
> can’t solve problems of some type, most people wouldn’t say you were
> very intelligent.
>
> Intelligence is bigger than ‘problem solving’, but that’s sort of a
> core standard.
>
> Solving problems involves being able to see clearly, decide what’s
> relevant, reflect on it, not be prejudiced in ways that block your
> ability to do these things, etc. These things are as much about
> being as doing.
>
> Does one “apply” one’s intelligence, or just “use” it?
>
> Here’s how I think about CI:

Continue reading →

Posted in C I & All Quadrants All Levels, Connecting Our Conversations | Leave a comment

Knowledge Management meets Collective Intelligence

Posted on January 23, 2007 by George Pór

I’ve just learned that the Southern California Cluster of KM Clusters will hold a “Collective Intelligence Networks” event in Los Angeles , Feb. 22, 2007. I wish I could be there but it’s unlikely that I can fly to the US just one for one day even if the program is very appetizing. I hope there will be some good harvesting from the event, which can contribute to increase the CI of the wider field of CI.
Their website says:

“Entirely new ways to share, trade and aggregate information using collective intelligence networks are growing rapidly. These networks help companies, schools, governments, and individuals to acquire, to create and lead ever-growing bodies of knowledge… Online collective intelligence networks continuously amass, codify, refine and advance knowledge and wisdom. Open, value-based networks enable far better decision making about product launches, features, policies and myriad other critical questions.”

The event may become yet another accelerator to the emergence of collective intelligence as a field of multi-disciplinary study and practice. If anybody reading this blog will go there, don’t forget to post your comment about your experience.

Posted in Events | 1 Comment

A source document for Collective Intelligence

Posted on January 22, 2007 by George Pór

Collective Intelligence as a Field of Multi-disciplinary Study and Practice
by Tom Atlee and George Por
In this paper we define intelligence as the ability to interact successfully with one’s world, especially in the face of challenge or change. Human intelligence involves gathering, formulating, modifying, and applying effective knowledge — often in the form of ideas, images, sensations, patterns of response and sense-making — a process we refer to with words like learning, problem solving, planning, visioning, intuition, understanding, creativity, etc.
Anyone seeking to generate more effective groups, organizations, institutions, healthy communities and sustainable societies soon discovers that individual intelligence is an insufficient factor in their success. We need to explore collective intelligence and how it can address the unprecedented challenges of the 21st century. The global scale, interconnectedness, and potential impact of those challenges makes such exploration more than a matter of convenience and competitiveness. It is a matter of collective survival and potential evolutionary leaps.
What collective intelligence is
Collective intelligence is older than humankind itself. Here is a broad, straightforward definition:

Collective intelligence is any intelligence that arises from — or is a capacity or characteristic of — groups and other collective living systems.

Primal forms of collective intelligence manifest in the synergies and resilience of ecosystems. This is often referred to as “the wisdom of nature”, which “learns from its experience” through the interactive create-and-test dynamics of evolution. Collective intelligence becomes more obvious in groups of social animals like ants, bees, certain fishes and birds, and many mammals, including wolves and primates. Members of the first human groups shared with those evolutionary ancestors the instinct to combine their respective information and expertise to meet survival tasks they could not possibly meet separately.
Those early forms of collective intelligence gave rise to language and tools which, in turn, enabled new forms of collective intelligence to evolve that were capable of absorbing more complexity. In today’s world, collective intelligence serves diverse functions, comes in diverse forms, and has many diverse names. For example, there is statistical collective intelligence, also known as the “wisdom of crowds” (named after the book with the same title), in which people simply “act in their own self-interest by playing the game to win”, and their compounded decisions keep markets running in a self-organized way. This is a useful example because markets can also generate disasters, so it behooves us to understand what is needed for collective intelligence to be benign.
Collective intelligence and the human condition

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Web 2.0 marries collective intelligence

Posted on November 25, 2006 by George Pór

I’ve just come across yet another interesting, simple but somehow limiting definition of how collective intelligence is achieved, in the The Hype and the Hullabaloo of Web 2.0 by Ellyssa Kroski:
“Companies that adhere to Web 2.0 principles understand how to harness the collective intelligence to make their systems better. A collective intelligence is achieved when a critical mass of participation is reached within a site or system, allowing the participants to act as a filter for what is valuable. The user reviews on Amazon.com sort out the worthy resources from the inadequate. Citysearchs user-created reviews identify quality restaurants…”
It was then picked up by Five Great Ways to Harness Collective Intelligence of Dion Hinchcliffe, which lists:

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Posted in Definitions, Technologies That Support CI | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Who wants us to be afraid of collective intelligence?

Posted on October 25, 2006 by George Pór

Two vitrioloc attacks in three days, that’s how the conservative extremist of The Register welcomed MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence. On Oct. 11, Andrew Orlowksi wrote in his aerticle under the title “MIT opens Junk Science Institute:”

“MIT’s Badger School already has a book project in mind – insultingly titled We Are Smarter Than Me – and you may be the next victim of the revolution.”

Fortunately, MIT is in good company if we consider all those who are Orlowski’s target in the same article: Wikipedia, Google, Linux and Deming’s.
Then, two days later, here he came again:

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A milestone in the evolution of the CI field

Posted on October 14, 2006 by George Pór

A milestone in the evolution of the CI field occurred on October 13, 2006, when MIT launched its Center for Collective Intelligence, the first major academic center dedicated to our growing disciipline.
The Center’s director, Thomas Malone, said, At CCI, our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that “collectively”they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?(Seeing Tom Malone at the head of CCI is particularly inspiring, given his values expressed in Otto Scharmer’s interview with him, from which he is coming to CI work.)
CCI’s research agenda spells out as follows:

We believe that many companies and other groups will be creating new forms of collective intelligence in the coming years. We also believe that research universities like MIT can provide important contributions to this endeavor by:
(a) collecting and distilling the results of experience from the real-world “experiments” many people will be trying
(b) experimenting with innovative new techniques to advance the state-of-the-art
(c) conducting rigorous scientific research to find the reliable patterns underlying subjective anecdotes and accidental successes or failures, and
(d) developing theoretical frameworks to help understand all these things

That’s great news to the whole field of CI because MIT entering it, will no doubt legitimize it as worth of academic study and research, as well as action-research in business and other organizations!
One of their first project is a collaboratively written book on “We Are Smarter Than Me,” which will be published in hardcover by Pearson Publishing, and sold in bookstores. The process will include forums and the use of a book wiki and royalties will go to charities. I joined that initiative and am curious of emergent possibilities for collaboration between it and the Source Documents for Collective Intelligence Convergence.
Here’s the table of contents of “We Are Smarter Than Me”:

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Gartner and the economic imperative of collective intelligence

Posted on August 21, 2006 by George Pór

InformationWeek reports that Gartner Inc. “identified the technologies it believes will have the greatest impact on businesses over the next 10 years, naming such hot areas as social-network analysis, collective intelligence, location-aware applications and event-driven architectures Collective intelligence was rated as potentially transformational to businesses Collective intelligence was defined as an approach to developing intellectual content, such as code and documents, through individuals working together with no centralized authority. ‘This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services,’ Gartner said, adding that the approach is expected to go mainstream in five to 10 years Working within a wide community to achieve common goals will be embraced by businesses within five to 10 years, predicted Gartner.”
Out from the long report, bloggers who are tuned with the Zeitgeist picked up the most intriguing sign of our times and welcomed it under booming headlines, such as “Gartner predicts shift to collective intelligence,” “Gartner Lauds Collective Intelligence,” “Gartner predicts: Productivity will increase from Collective Intelligence,” etc
I don’t want to rain on Gartner’s parade of “discovering” CI; all of us in the CI community can benefit from by the field being blessed by prestigious industry pundits. But “mainstream in 5 to 10 years?” Come on, how about now? How else could businesses achieve common goals than “working within a wide community,” sometimes also called a “business ecosystem” or “business web?” CI is not a pipedream of visionary leaders anymore but the daily reality of millions of organizations. The questions is not “whether,” not even “when” but “how,” i.e. how good is our CI, do we have only sustainable advantage, knowing how to collaborate more smoothly, more effectively, and having more fun doing so?

Posted in Co-intelligent Economy | Leave a comment