Going local to global to local with Duane Elgin

Posted on June 5, 2005 by George Pór

Duane Elgin and his wife, Coleen, visited Amsterdam the last two days, and Friday evening, CommunityIntelligence honored their visit with a dinner dialogue (contributed to by 14 people), followed by delicious deliberations over not less delicious dessert at IEF Amsterdam.
It was a deep learning conversation, full of insights and inspirations, touching key issues of our times now and ahead, generously sprinkled by Duane’s humor and playfulness. It would take many blog entries to give justice to the richness of the exchange. Here, I touch only briefly one stream of that evening’s effervescent thought bubbles.
It started as a quote from the Promise Ahead: A Vision of Hope and Action for Humanity’s Future in my invitation to the dinner guests who came to welcome Duane and Coleen:
“I do not assume that electronic communication can or should carry the entire burden of human communication. It is vital that we combine the power of global communication with study circles and other forms of grassroots dialogue. With the combination of the two, a local-to-global conversation could emerge to shape the outlines of a sustainable future… If we could generate this kind of worldwide dialogue, it seems plausible that the human family could mobilize itself to begin building a future that we scarcely could have imagined a decade or two earlier.”

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Posted in Local to Global to Local | 1 Comment

On vMemes and the yellow leading edge

Posted on May 8, 2005 by George Pór

Here is my second post to the Blog of collective intelligence and my first as a guest author. Thanks for your trust and openess George. In this posting I want to lay ouy some thoughts on the question on how to untap the collective intelligence of the ‘whole movement’ that George brought up at http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/

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Posted in Spiral Dynamics & the Colors of CI | 1 Comment

The subtle, the causal, and the evolutionary movement

Posted on April 17, 2005 by George Pór

Fernanda Ibarra is a visionary of virtual communities of practice, who wrote in the Club of Amsterdam Journal “The main source of value creation is shared knowledge and collective intelligence, not land, labour or capital. It is that shift in the basis of value creation, what propelled virtual communities in the limelight as collective players with largely untapped potential for radical innovation.”
She has just commented (see below) on my entry about Collective consciousness: a “peer to peer” phenomenon?, which inspired me to learn more about her thinking.

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Posted in Autonomy, Communion, and CI, Ways of Tuning with Collective Consciousness | Leave a comment

Another definition of CI. What difference it makes?

Posted on March 26, 2005 by George Pór

I’m invited to design and deliver an executive seminar at the Lucina center ofthe Catholic University of Leuven on boosting CI in organizations. I use new speaking engagements for reviewing some of the distinctions I use, and seeing how they may or may not make sense in the new situation
Doing so, I’ve just updated for organizational leaders my CI definition as follows. You may want to compare it with the more complete one in the upper left corner, and tell us what do you think of the difference.
We call “collective intelligence” the fit-ness of human groups, small and large, to:
1. Enable their members to reach a fuller potential
2. Co-evolve with their environment toward more complex integrations through mutually supportive relationships and permanent innovation

Posted in Definitions | 10 Comments

The response-ability of the practitioners

Posted on March 4, 2005 by George Pór

Reflections on global good news, bad news and the response-ability of the collective wisdom and intelligence fields to both
The good news
Who would have thought that the threat of nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States will give rise to humankind’s most powerful force of production, the Internet, and that a humble initiative of cooperation between a small group scientists will give birth to our global brain, the Web? Yet, that’s exactly what happened, creating a potential for our species to evolve towards a civilization of higher complexity, deeper differentiation ad integration, and more compassion and solidarity in action. Here are some of the good news:

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Posted in Collective Wisdom, Community of CI Practitioners | 3 Comments

New comments in the last few days

Posted on February 14, 2005 by George Pór

Two of the recent entries, Co-evolving Self and Network and Steal this bookmark!? received substantive comments from readers who offered interesting thoughts about them.Struggling with tons of comments spam, I was late to put them online. Now they are on. Apologies for the late approval, – george

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Steal this bookmark!?

Posted on February 10, 2005 by George Pór

Thierry Nabeth of INSEAD has just alerted me of a new social networking phenomenon called “tagging”. In his message there was a reference to a Salon.com article in which Howard Rheingold said about tagging:
“It’s like Friendster for knowledge as far as I’m concerned. I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they’ve tagged … And isn’t that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful — and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you.”
I think using tags for growing collective intelligence requires more than a clever technology. Unless we think of CI in the statistical sense (as in The Wisdom of Crowds), it requires the art of integrating the triple network of People, Knowledge, and Technology. Tags (bookmarks referring to the same subjects) collected from millions of bloggers are not more useful than a Google search that turns up over a million pages in response to my query. When somebody comes up with a way to integrate tagging with my trusted circle of friends and colleagues, then CI got a potent new tool, indeed. Technically, it shouldn’t be difficult and I’d be surprised if an innovative social network host would not be already working on it.

Posted in Technologies That Support CI | 8 Comments

Co-evolving Self and Network

Posted on February 8, 2005 by George Pór

Since I last wrote an entry in this blog, I’ve been busy with faciltating projects and communities exploring and using some of its themes. I’m still too busy with living CI in action, rather than blog about it but here’s a piece of news that I thought you’d like to know about. Three of my favorite people, Lisa Kimball, Howard Rheingold and Joichi “Joi” Ito, will be keynoters at an extraordinary web event that will open tomorrow and will no doubt contribute to the collective intelligence of online social networks.
OSN 2005: February 9-23
In 1987 I was a columnist for Computer Currents, a California-based computer magazine, when Howard introduced me to Doug Engelbart. The interview with Doug has literally changed my life, by giving a much sharper focus to a key question of my work and learning: I became obsessed with how emergent technologies of collaboration can contribute to the dramatic upshift that humankind’s complex and entangled crises require, from its current level of intelligence. Thank you, Doug, again.
Doug has just passed 80. If you don’t know who he is, check out aTributetoDoug.org.
My friendship with Lisa goes back even further, to our meeting in the early 80’s on the “text-only” online social networks of those years and co-founding the Electronic Networking Association and its award-winning online newsletter, the Netweaver. That’s where I met, back then, with Joi too. I ran into him more recently, virtually, in a multi-channel conference call on emergent democracy, using a chatroom, a conference call and a wiki, concurrently. I’m looking forward to catch up with them at OSN2005.
Starting on Feb 14, at the same place, I will host a workshop on
Boosting the Collective Intelligence of Your Network
This collaborative inquiry is for online facilitators, leaders of virtual teams and communities of practice, change agents, or just about anyone who curious of how to co-evolve Self and Network. We experience the rapid emergence of a new generation of more capable web browsers, co-authoring and publishing tools, free VoIP telephony, photo-blogging, video-chat, etc. What do they tell us about the potential for our co-creativity to rise on the spine of the double helix of autonomy and community?
This will be not a traditional “e-learning” event but a time-bound peer learning community of authentic dialogue, where participants can share their learning edges and negotiate their learning agenda related to their experience and aspirations in social networks. Reading materials will be provided based on the participants’ interests.
I would love to connect at OSN 2005 with all the readers of this blog interested in online social networks and their potential for collective intelligence. If you’re one of them, please click on the button above.

Posted in CI & Communities of Practice, Multi-community membership | 4 Comments

World Wisdom Council

Posted on January 1, 2005 by George Pór

The World Wisdom Council has been convened by the Club of Budapest in cooperation with the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality. The tasks of the Council include “offering guidance for developing the individual and collective wisdom that empowers action capable of bringing about constructive change in the local and the global economic, social, and ecological environment.” The Council’s meeting in Budapest, Dec. 18-20, 2004, was hosted by the government of Hungary. I had the honor to be the rapporteur of the meeting and enjoy the company of some truly wise women and men who came from four continents, not to mention the good food of my home country that I have not been visiting for 10 years.

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Posted in Collective Wisdom | Leave a comment

Stories of CI within

Posted on November 1, 2004 by George Pór

My last entry on What Is My Collective IQ? – Boosting CI from Within received some juicy comments, to which I prefer to respond here as to both salute the contributors, Robert David Steele, Mark Ranford, and Andrew Campbell, and make my reply referenceable by URL.
Mark Ranford wrote:
> Somehow I feel that its relevance is not going to be recognised as widely as it deserves (I maybe wrong).
Mark, I think relevant ideas are not recognized because they deserve to be but because they express something valid in an accessible language. My “boosting CI from within” approach maybe valid but certainly not expressed in an easy-to-grasp way. That’s because I use the blog, basically, as a notebook of drafts not polished writings–almost like a collection of self-reminders–on subjects that at some future point I want to refine and develop. So, your point is well taken.
> But what I feel is that the language and the terminology is too far ahead of the thinking of many practising managers… I just wish that the gap to bridge this thinking with the majority of practicing managers was easier to bridge.
That’s a very inspiring comment! See what it triggered:

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Posted in CI Within | 4 Comments