CI in Denmark

Under the name CIPI, Collective Intelligence Practitioners Initiative, a loosely organized group of 15-20 people in Denmark, identifying themselves as practioneers (experienced, beginners, becoming, whatever…) in the field of CI, meets regularly for two day sessions of inquiry. Participation is by invitation – not to exclude anyone, but to ensure commitment and relevance in participation.
The purpose is to engage a field of collective intelligence in between members, and to bring the field in service of changes that they think needs support. They belive that the practices and leadership of CI can only be developed or discovered in collectives on the edge. You can connect with CIPI through World Café pioneer, Finn Voldtofte, voldtofte@worldcafe.dk .
I’ve just heard that the group may organize an international CIPI festival, next Spring, near Aarhus, Denmark. I offered my enthused support to it, so if it happens, you will certainly hear about it in the Blog of CI. Stay tuned.

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Connecting conversations – come out, join the bigger you and play

I rarely came across a stranger, who could as accurately describe my feelings and aspirations, by expressing his own, as Michael Dubois did in his blog entry on “Co-Intelligence. The part and the whole”.
“What if some of us did know or at least had the requisite pieces of the whole of understanding for what to do and how to do it? How would we recognize a workable way among all the competing philosophies and strategies and schemes? And if we did recognize a workable way out of our mess, how would we communicate it?”

“This is what is haunting me every day now. I seem to be understanding more and more of what is happening, and what we will need to do now and in the very near future. And the interesting thing for me is that the main feature of this understanding is that it is a partially complete piece of a much larger whole, and that whole is all of us. In other words, I don’t have the answer, and I never will, but I am an intrinsic part of the answer. I am a node of the collective intelligence that literally MUST awaken from its dormancy. I feel now like a piece of the Big Hologram. I have the whole vision inside me, but it must be united with the whole visions that are inside everyone else or it’s worthless and doomed. And I’m beginning to wake up to how this will work or die trying.”

Fortunately, not only we are still alive but there are more and more of us “beginning to wake up to how this will work.”
Yet, the movement of “collective intelligence” is still largely invisible to itself, in spite the half million webpages using that term. “The ‘movement’ isn’t lots of people carrying signs in the street. It is the motion of the living social body, in this case, as it is waking up.” — Tom Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute.
It is awakening as we connect our conversations, seeking the answers, the new capabilities that only together we can be. I don’t know why but that reminds me of a cartoon showing a little girl hugging every little comrades of her in the kindergarten, and in the last picture, she says, “because God has only my arms to hug them all.”
The creative impulse of the universe that is trying to come through in our 1-on-1 conversations really needs us, each of us, to connect the fragments of meaning perceived individually and in pairs, into a bigger picture of coherent landscape and action. It is both humbling and inspiring to realize that there are important messages coming from the noetic field, which have more enfolded complexity than any individual mind/consciousness could fully contain and absorb.
It is humbling because our personally-focused self-sense can’t grasp the higher, impersonal sense of self, in which it is extended to the collective that became, from an evolutionary perspective, the basic unit of cognition and intelligence.
It is also inspiring, if we hear it as a knock on our door by evolution (towards higher complexity and integration), which says, hey come out, join the bigger you and play.
Knock… knock… do you hear it?

Posted in CI Principles, Community of CI Practitioners, Connecting Our Conversations | Leave a comment

Relationships enabled by the 4-fold ecosystem

This is a message as a comment on my earlier post of today on the 4-fold ecosystem of the CI field from David Beatty who has just asked me by email to post it for him because our spam-protecction software prevented him from doing it himself. (I guess, we will junk our “junkstopper,” now that the new version of Movable Type, our blog software can provide stronger protection.) Here comes David:

George,
I appreciated the ‘hey, look-at-this’ note a few minutes ago. Long time since we have had a conversation.
A 4 element structure is a very rich structure. I will limit myself to pointing out the relationships that a 4-fold enables.
1) You have the ‘purity’ of each of the four elements A B C D (which can also be subdivided, of course.)
2. You have the combos of the 4 elements AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD If you wish, you can also consider these as simultaneous, separate operating pairs, AB/CD, AC/BD, AD/BC,
3. You have the dynamism of the 3’s ABC, ABD,ACD,BCD,. Since a characteristic of 3 is the dynamic nature, you can read each trio as one of three forms. e.g. ABC ACB BAC BCA, CAB, CBA. reflecting the difference that comes when you consider first position as impulse, second position as reception, and third position as interactive product. (see J.G. Bennett, The Dramatic Universe, Vol.2, Ch.27,28 for more) If this dynamism is useful, (often is) that gives you 4 triads, each of which has 6 dynamic states.
4. And you have the ‘whole’ of all four creating a state of affairs.
Thus, while the four form does look simple, the importance of the choice of the most potent 4 terms is clear. (or maybe, it also indicates that our language of terms is a short-form code for much more complexity. (4/38ths!)
No wonder intelligence must be collective, continuously-changing, and self-reflective!!
regards
David B

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The 4-fold ecosystem of CI – an inquiry into our survival

There are two questions that frequently keep me awake in the night or wake me up in the morning. This morning, they did it again. They are:

  • Shall we have the collective will and capacity to absorb the complexity of the impending crisis of crises, also known as the “perfect storm,” or shall we not, and be defeated by it?
  • If the winning scenario is to prevail, what it will take to make it so?

This morning, the pieces of the puzzle started coming together and asked for this blog entry.
It seems that our best hope for developing an adequate response to the perfect storm is in the collective intelligence of an ecosystem comprised of four fields:
1. Rigorous, scientific research on large-scale CI that provides coherent frameworks and methodologies for building successful prototypes of complex CI systems
2. Such social innovations as enlightened communications and deliberative democracy, peer-to-peer, and open source, coupled and supported by the best theories and practices of whole system change and large-group interventions
3. A post-metaphysical, evolutionary spirituality embedded in the great story, an inspiring context, the wisdom of which can support practitioners on all four fields
4. Advanced and emerging technologies for collaborative knowledge development and coordination, which can power of up the thought and action of CI researchers, social activists, and initiators of applying them to every area of social life

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Why to invest our time and attention in an Integral Operating System

I started reading the work-in-progress online Excerpts from Wilber’s forthcoming “Kosmic Karma and Creativity” and found the gems quoted below. They are followed by my burning questions.
“[T]he technological revolution can speed through the social system extremely quickly–leaving the old cultural worldview completely out of sync with the new realities. To change that cultural worldview requires, of course, a difficult subjective transformation of consciousness in order to tetra-mesh with the new social realities of increased depth.”
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“[T]hat modest 2% of the population that is now integral might soon swell to 5%, 10%, or more. I believe that, as with any evolutionary unfolding, we will especially start to see evidence of this increasingly integral consciousness at the growing tip, or at the leading edge, or in the avantgarde (by whatever appellation)–in academia, the arts, social movements, spirituality, thought leaders.”
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“Once individuals download and install [an Integral Operating System] IOS in their own worldview, they begin more conscientiously attempting to include all views, all approaches, all potentials in their own sweep of the Kosmos. IOS initiates a self-correcting, self-organizing outreach to all aspects of the universe previously marginalized by worldviews that were too narrow, too shallow, too self-enclosing to serve as more transparent vehicles of Kosmic consciousness.”
The power and clarity of those provocative ideas triggered some new insights and questions:

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Posted in C I & All Quadrants All Levels, Evolutionary Threshold | 6 Comments

“Are you in for a phone call tonight?”

— Are you in for a phone call tonight? – asked Ria.
I answered, tomorrow would be better because–while waiting for replies from Bud, Otto, Thierry, Federico, and Albert–I’m busy with observing the direction, in which my creative inspirations want to flow tonight.
After replying, I entered into a contemplation about the last part of the sentence that I’ve just written. As soon as I did, the Truth of Impersonality appeared in my awareness and shortly after, my inner ears heard a message as follows:
Leaning into the unknown,
you will see the direction emerging from the space within,
in which an intensely present creative impulse meets
one of the calls from the Field that are asking for your attention.
Tonight, the impulse was to write. The call came from the Blog of Collective Intelligence. I got out of the way, and this entry was born.

Posted in Blogging for Emergence, Leaning into the Unknown, Truth of Impersonality | 1 Comment

The Hyper-Cortex of Our Collective Intelligence

Marko Rodriguez.jpg I’ve just discovered a fascinating paper on The Hyper-Cortex of Human Collective-Intelligence Systems (.pdf) by Marko Antonio Rodriguez, a Ph.D student at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Center for Evolution, Complexity, and Cognition at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His interests lie in collective-intelligence algorithms for societal-scale decision support systems.
I believe his pioneering work on that subject has tremendous importance for realizing the potential of an enlightened society. I know, it is a bold statement about the research of a young scholar but I see Marko as one of the rising stars on the academic field of computationally-supported collective intelligence. I bet, he will soon join in depth and future-responsiveness such pioneers of that field as Francis Heylighen and Pierre Lévy.
Why is their work so pivotal to the emergence of global-scale collective intelligence? Because without computer-enabled CI algorithms and “computer assisted imagination” we (as networks, organizations and humankind itself) will be defeated by the complexity tsunami compunded by unwise decisions of self-centered, individual and collective egos at all scale.

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Growing better CI through better mental modeling

I woke up this morning with some insights about the relationship between mental modeling and collective intelligence. They seem new but one never knows; I could have already thought of them years ago or somebody else may have done so. What interests me is not whether they are new or not but how they may relate to older expression of the same “source idea”. Do they improve the older ones thought by others or myself? What new meaning does become visible when they are overlaid on top of the older ones?
My first instinct is to check what connects the insights of this morning with other thoughts floating in the noosphere, is to google “mental modeling” AND “collective intelligence.” Surprisingly low number of hits; only 5 or 7, depending on whether I spell it with modeling or modelling. One of them is a page where I find an intriguing definition of CI, which is built on the relationship of local and global cognition
My next step in finding out where do this morning’s insights come from and what would be the most responsible way to take care of them, is to “spotlight” my hard disk. (Spotlight is the fantastic search tool, part of the Tiger operating system that came with my new G4 laptop.) Spotlight found a file of my notes of a conversation that I had with Peter Senge in the late 80’s, whilst visiting with him at MIT. Before going into the past, you may want to read, first, the summary of this morning’s thoughts:

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Posted in Cognitive Relations, Mental Modeling | 9 Comments

Memories (and mental models) of generic structures

Searching my hard disk for my notes on mental modeling I found fragments of my conversation with Peter Senge about it, in the late 80’s. Asking about how he sees the relationship of collective intelligence and team learning, he shared what follows.

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A local-to-global definition of CI

I found yet another definition of CI worth to consider, on the “Leadership Decision Making” site. It says:
“Social Cognitive (SC) is the property of systems whereby the collective behaviors of entities interacting locally with their environment cause coherent functional global patterns to emerge. SC provides a basis with which it is possible to explore collective and distributed decision making without centralized control or the provision of a global model. To tackle the formation of a coherent social collective intelligence from individual behaviors, it must consider concepts related to self-organization, and the social bounds. It also includes the role played not only by the environmental media as a driving force for societal learning, but also by positive and negative feedback produced by the interactions among agents. The results will be the collective adaptation of a social community to its dynamic cultural environment.”
Loads to ponder, isn’t it? I’ll come back to it when I will have more time; just wanted to put it here so that I don’t loose sight of it.

Posted in Definitions, Local to Global to Local | 6 Comments