There was a skype call between @ffunch, @sebpaquet and @technoshaman on July 9, 2010. 

Category: CI Principles ; Methodologies associated with CI ; Pattern Language ; Ways of Tuning with Collective Consciousness
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Category: AI ; CI Basics ; Collaborative Sense-Making ; Intelligence ; Singularity
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Good tools always have unintended uses stumbled upon by its individual and collective users. Hopefully, that will be the case of élan map, too. I can hardly wait for its alpha version to manifest so that we can start playing with it and discover its potential beyond what it was originally conceived.

A possibility that I am particularly interested in and want to explore further as the components of our mapping tool gain higher resolution is this:

What if we convened an expert panel of thinkers and doers in selected disciplines, and let them loose in a treasure hunting exercise using our interactive map of social and thought movements on the edge?

The question that we would ask could include something like this: Looking back from the middle of the 21st century, which of the movements mapped by élan would be considered as having had a significant impact on the transition to our new planetary reality?

Then we could compare the data coming from a modified Delphi survey  of our panel with the data from the  hypertrails connecting the vistas in the landscape of transformational memes and movements.

Hypertrails are those affinity passages between the vistas, the salient points (or strange attractors) in the landscape, which will emerge from our very walking those trails. Just as students cut new paths on campus lawn by going for shorter connection between buildings they visit more frequently…

What if we had a chance to distort the timeline by using information from the Delphi's "visit from the future"? :-)

Category: Collaborative Sense-Making ; Movement Cartography ; Technologies That Support CI ; Visualizing Our Ecosystem
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"We are at a critical point in human history, where as a globally interdependent society, we must learn how to lower these barriers, share information, collaborate, and cocreate value in new ways." @VenessaMiemis

Learning how to learn that, and sharing what I learn, is what I've been dedicating my life to since the mid-80's. Reading the overview of junto's concept, philosophy, and components, I felt my heart full of joy and gratitude to the collective wisdom and expertise of the junto group, and to Venessa for her buildership  and eloquent articulation of what is needed to accelerate collaborative learning, locally and globally.

In the junto concept, I found the most practical and feasible expression of a web-enabled, emergent system for boosting our collective intelligence that became a matter of our survival and thriving as a species.

Continue reading "on junto, élan, Kosmic synchronicity, and movement cartography" »

Category: Collaborative Sense-Making ; Community of CI Practitioners ; Evolutionary Movement ; Movement Cartography ; Technologies That Support CI
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Imaginal cells in the protoplasm, from which the new civilization is emerging, discover the current state of their fluid identity, by being engaged in generative conversations with one another.

 

When we collaborate using the currently available tools, we are able to share meaning and develop themes, resulting in a record of the interactions which then requires processing in order to extract the valuable data which emerged from the conversation. @cyber_shaman

As long as we stay on the edge of not knowing and wanting to know what is that which wants to come into being through our conversations, the narrative evolving from them is a of high value. It is a narrative that gradually becomes more coherent as we continually co-sense what is and co-initiate what it can be and throw ourselves in the dance of the being and becoming parts of ourselves.

That narrative deserves our sustained shared-attention. @Cyber_shaman's recent post   on "Practices and Processes for boosting CI" is truly generative. Staying connected with that inquiry, and standing in it with intense curiosity and humility, we can move the edge of discovery and co-creative action.

The harvested information is a valuable resource as part of an evolving collective 'meme-stream' (to coin a phrase) so we want to be able to access and include it in the evolving discourse in a way that becomes 'standard' with a view to automation of the process for optimal benefit to the overall process. @cyber_shaman

Yes! and there are various candidates in the works, as we speak; standard-candidates that may synch with one another to let the next-gen collab software parse more dimensions of  our knowledge/action ecosystem. One of the most promising candidates is #NarrativeFractals , another is the social tetrahedron.

Ultimately we need to be able to provide this information to the semantic web so it can process and refine it as a collaborative partner to us (which is what it is set to become). @cyber_shaman

That's the best naming of the semantic web's evolutionary significance that I've heard! It's a partner that we can shape and it will shape us. It is a good time to ask daring questions about the nature of that partnering. Sorting out the best conversation mapping methods that need to be supported by our new collaborative mapping tools, we are also preparing ourselves to ask those deeper questions.

Continue reading "Conversation transcript-> mindmap-> semantic web-> sane sentient AI" »

Category: Collaborative Sense-Making ; Community of CI Practitioners ; Connecting Our Conversations ; Mental Modeling ; Methodologies associated with CI ; Shared Attention ; Technologies That Support CI
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When we collaborate using the currently available tools, we are able to share meaning and develop themes, resulting in a record of the interactions which then requires processing in order to extract the valuable data which emerged from the conversation.

Given that our topic is boosting CI, it seems that we could develop a set of process protocols to apply to this stream of valuable resource information. I guess as it stands, we each have our 'pet' methodology, which would result in variable results, and not all parties to any given conversation have the time to devote to comparative analysis of the harvest.

Also, the harvested information is a valuable resource as part of an evolving collective 'meme-stream' (to coin a phrase) so we want to be able to access and include it in the evolving discourse in a way that becomes 'standard' with a view to automation of the process for optimal benefit to the overall process.

So, we need to develop methods of information harvesting and storage that are able to co-evolve with the contributions and constantly improving insights of the collaborators. Ultimately we need to be able to provide this information to the semantic web so it can process and refine it as a collaborative partner to us (which is what it is set to become).

Given this, the information we co-create needs to be rendered into language that the web can use. A process that enables this 'translation' is what we can develop as the next logical step on our journey of collective intelligence.

One suggestion is to convert text based transcripts of conversations into mind maps, which can then be adapted into semantacally integrated ontologies. This does represent a lot of work,the details of which we have yet to establish, however the results could very well pave the way to sane sentient AI, so the potential benefits are enormous.

This suggestion from a friend:

Imagine that we as a group are conversing via text chat. At the same time there is a natural language analyser picking out key concepts (or we can do this manually).

Note: all previous conversations have already been harvested and from this an ontology has been distilled. Thus when the analyser picks out a concept there is a window showing the network of ideas surrounding that concept - where it fits within the élan universe of discourse and what relations it has with other concepts. Woven into this semantic scaffold are comments, observations, links and all manner of data that may be associated with each concept.

This is an example of real-time mapping of the memesphere of a conversation space. The map can be interacted with, edited, and augmented with meta-data as part of the conversation. It provides an interface into the collective knowledge space.

Category: CI & Communities of Practice ; Methodologies associated with CI
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collective intelligence —

"The capacity of a social organism, such as a corporation, to:

• sense its needs and that of its environment (stakeholders)
• generate choices that will satisfy those collective needs
• anticipate the consequences of those choices
• to make choices that best serve the well-being of those affected by those choices
• learn from the consequences of those choices"

Source: The Infinite Games Distinctionary, by Bill Veltrop

Category: Definitions
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"The user profile can also show people and initiatives that one values as part of an "extended", empathic self. This can be done by dragging and dropping other profiles into one's tetrahedron, much as Twitter allows one to follow admired people. To add a person or cause to one's empathic self, the profile creator could rotate the tetrahedron to populate a personal frame of reference (filling it with family and friends), a civic frame of reference (e.g. with admired individuals and organizations working for the commons), and a professional or business frame (with valued coworkers). Individuals and initiatives included in one's "extended self" also could be made visible to others, when access rights are set, by double-clicking on a given face of one's user profile." Mark Frazier, @openworld

Mark, the most beautiful thing about your wise model is that it's doable!

In your tetrahedron, I see a seed crystal for growing disruptive social practices. For example, practices for large-scale, bottom up self-organization of a new social body, may it be a personal learning network, a trustnet-based virtual nation or a federation of co-creative initiatives.

When a social body is grown on networks of desire, networks of what the extended, empathic self of everyone values, then, then the harmony in the system will let it absorb much higher doses of complexity.

Mark, in your tetrahedron, I also see Indra's net materializing, taking the shape of millions of tetrahedrons interacting, free from the gravity of legacy institutions! It's like a massively co-written, continually unfolding science fiction that we shape just by playing with our co-intelligence and co-creativity toys.

Heartfelt thank you Mark for the huge contribution you've already made by developing and sharing your thoughts on the tetrahedron. I am eager to discover more of the world, from which it came.

p.s. I re-posted this note from a junto talk because in version 0.5, it cannot yet be tagged, categorized and have a URL.

Category: Methodologies associated with CI ; Technologies That Support CI ; Visualizing Our Ecosystem
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Just picked up on Twitter this link to a 6-min vid on YouTube about:


Then I found the conference's website and, thanks to Albert Klamt, its Facebook page.

I feel meme deserve our support to move beyond Silicon Valley; let's help it find new places and connections in Europe and elsewhere...

Category: Collective Wisdom
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In a comment to A tool for mapping the future as it's emerging, Glisten wrote:

> The visual mapping of an evolving system is not a trivial affair. If we create a map of our "current state" we only provide a snapshot view of what is more closely aligned analogously with a continual stream of images such as video...

Yet, for humankind's emergent metabeing to become fully conscious of itself (as whole and parts), it must grow simultaneous capacity and tools for the awareness of both the structural and dynamic aspects of its life.

Why not prototype that feature into the élan mapping tool? I have some ideas of how we and the groups we want to support could greatly enhance our sensing of, and making meaning from, the next level of emergence (at any scale that our imagination can hold). However, what is more important than my ideas is our co-sensing what is really needed with members of those groups.

Before inviting them to this blog exchange, let's imagine what a globally linked creative community could do with new tools and ways to sense breakthrough practices in any domain, as son as they appear in our global nervous system: in our connected conversations.

Continue reading "What can dynamic views (in mapping emergent systems) enable?" »

Category: Collaborative Sense-Making ; Connecting Our Conversations ; Evolutionary Movement ; Local to Global to Local ; Arts » Movies and videos ; Shared Attention ; Visualizing Our Ecosystem
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Somebody wrote in a group on "Transforming Capitalism" in the Presencing community  :

> all complex civilisations have collapsed at one point or another. Only 'simple' societies have managed to survive.

In the spirit of helping each other unearthing our assumptions, let me point out that the feudal society that invented the first forms of science was more complex than the slave-based mode of production that, in turn, was more complex than the hunter-gatherer mode of production. The same is true for capitalism that is more complex than the feudal society, and emerging, post-capitalist reality that is moving towards global-scale self-organization and collective intelligence, which will be more (not less) complex than the capitalist world. More complex means capable to differentiate, absorb and integrate more variety.

Just think of nature. Hasn't life been moving towards increasing complexity from the single-cellular to the multi-cellular organism, from worms to mammalians and humans? (To let that really sink in, use the Cellular Complexity painting above, by  David Sweatt, as a meditation object. Click on the image to enlarge.) You can find another example of increasing complexity in your own life. Isn't it a story of increasing the variety of phenomena that you were capable to differentiate, absorb and integrate, from kindergarten, to school and adulthood?

The move towards more complexity doesn't stop in adulthood. The development of such subsequent value systems depicted by Spiral Dynamics as TruthForce, StriveDrive, HumanBond, FlexFlow, GlobalView, is also an evolution towards more complexity. (I wrote more about it in Communitas Sapiens that you can find in the files of the London Integral Circle, and in my paper on Collective Intelligence, Collective Leadership .) In fact, 2nd tier stages of development, starting with FlexFlow and GlobalView are the first ones that cease to think of complexity as an enemy to defeat and start appreciating it.

Facing the overwhelming complexity of today's world, the "natural" response is to look back and long for a lost "natural rhythm and pace." That's the best that our individual ego can find when one's world is growing more complex than one can fully comprehend. It is the best that it can do, simply, because it cannot see what is above its head: the next level, at which the assumption that I, me, mine, is the most important in the world is recognized as an increasingly useless assumption.

What if what we sense as overwhelming complexity was only evolution's trick to seduce us  into the collective identities and shared minds needed to make sense and higher meaning out of our world? What if someday we woke up realizing that we left the fixation with the narrower perspectives behind just as we did with toys that we've outgrown in the kindergarten? What if that day was today?

I know, it's easier said than done. Spreading good practices worth replicating does help. Here is a beautiful example. The good news is there's a growing number of us who recognize that awakening communities are not the death of our individuality, only the death of our ego. In fact, autonomy gains never before experienced depth and richness in the unfolding dynamics and interplay between autonomy and communion. So, what are we waiting for? :-)

Category: Autonomy, Communion, and CI ; Collaborative Sense-Making ; Spiral Dynamics & the Colors of CI
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Venessa wrote a fascinating blog entry  on

"A Pay It Forward Business Model [in transition to a new global society]."

It prompted the following open message to her.


Dear Venessa,

Your "pay it forward" model is hugely inspiring in all of the various scope of its meaning! 

I start responding from the one that is the juiciest for me, the scope of our Emerging Planetary Reality.  We're in the midst of a world transition that still has to generate highly-scalable practices of value creation and exchange beyond the logic of the incumbent mode of production. I see your quest in the context of that larger one.

As Scott Lewis  wrote: "In regards to the gift economy, I don’t think we’ve ever been without it." True, it persisted throughout human history but largely as an under current of economic activity. Now it is stepping into history's limelight a second time.

This time, it comes with a mission: to help freeing the energies of our individual and social creativity, intuition, caring, and imagination, trapped in work systems that don't honor our highest aspirations. Only liberating those energies, will Emergence gain enough momentum to lift us into the next civilization.  (Here, "next" means: capable to operate at a higher level of complexity and harmony.) The value of your offer to the world, at that level, is in its contribution to that liberation. It's like "a small step for Venessa, one giant leap for mankind." :-)

Continue reading "Message to Venessa Miemis about her "Pay It Forward Business Model"" »

Category: Co-intelligent Economy ; Collaborative Sense-Making ; Connecting Our Conversations ; Methodologies associated with CI ; Technologies That Support CI
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This blogpost is the first public news of a project that I am working on with a small team of friends; it is focused on creating a tool for the interactive, 3-d mapping of the ecosystem of evolutionary initiatives on the edge. We call it the élan map. élan also stands for the yet-to-born Evolutionary Learning & Action Network.

élan proposes providing a technical and social platform for collaborative sensing and meaning-making to augment the collective intelligence, wisdom, and capabilities of groups and movements on the leading edge of social evolution. It is to the evolutionary impulse in them and us that we dedicate our work.

The concept of élan, when fully embodied, will be an activity ecosystem that includes an interactive map for navigating Emergence (the concept of which is introduced here), an online magazine, a bio-mimicry inspired, community knowledge garden, and a network of self-organizing communities of users/contributors. The latter will also include a research think-net that will scan the landscape of our Emerging Planetary Reality to identify early signs of strategic challenges and opportunities for the movement.

There are two lenses through which you can look at this project.

1. Seen through the lens of "global brain," it's about creating a visual tool to help organizations/groups on the edge:

• Experiencing themselves as neurons in the nervous system of the passage to a new civilization

• Discovering how they can interact with other neurons for rapid and effective transmissions

2. Seen through the lens of complex system of initiatives that are harbingers of the future in the present, it's about making it easier for:

• Individuals to decide which are the initiatives with which they resonate the most and to which they want to give more attention and energy

• Groups to assess their functional alignment with each other in the neighboring niches of the fast-changing ecosystem of evolutionary initiatives, thus multiply everyone's transformative impact

• A kernel of knowledge about the field of social transformation, to become a booster of the field's self-knowledge and collective intelligence

The last point also implies that "if we increase our ability to perceive (visualize, understand) problems or opportunities or activities, it will leverage our efforts greatly… If we really could perceive and make sense of much larger chunks at the same time, a lot of stuff would sort itself out quite easily." — Flemming Funch 

What we also hope is that such a mapping tool will let its individual and collective users:

• Make it easy for people to find the best match between their desire to serve the whole, and the most suitable contexts for that service.

These are the descriptors that we currently plan to use for characterizing them: Philosophy (including Mission Values, Principles), Structure, Founder(s), Leadership patterns, Projects, Organizational affinities, News, Events, and Social media presence. That list will probably change as we play with a modified version of Narrative Fractals and other approaches.
 
Our current focus is on developing the content structure of the map, then go into an alpha proof-of-concept, and beta prototype. Once the beta is made public, we will explore what's next. Next moth, we also plan to open a public site for our collaborators.

Meanwhile, we started building two advisory groups. Terry Patten, author and integral thought leader accepted our invitation to serve on the project's Wisdom Council and Scott Nelson, an information technology steward, who will work with us to build out a Drupal platform for the community of élan collaborators and serve on our Technical Advisory Group.  

We're curious of what you think of the features and capabilities that could make the map and the mapping tool really useful to you as individual, and to your group or organization if it lives on the edge of social, knowledge, technology or business innovation.

Your input could directly influence the design of the mapping tool. Please comment.

P.S. on June 30:
Good tools always have unintended uses discovered by its individual and collective users, and hopefully, that will be the case of élan map, too. Once we released the alpha version, a direction worth looking in to find new uses is this: there will be some hypertrails connecting the vistas that may emerge fro our very walking those trails. That's the subject of another blog entry.

Category: Collaborative Sense-Making ; Evolutionary Movement ; Technologies That Support CI ; Visualizing Our Ecosystem
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Chaordic Chat is a practice for social media jedis, I don't use the "jedi" metaphor lightly but in its original meaning: jedis are bound to a code of morality and justice and are trained in the use of the light side of the Force.
 
That morality today, implies using the power of social media for supporting the unfolding of the Great Story, of the world transition to our Emerging Planetary Reality. It is a transition driven by the same evolutionary impulse that pulls you into learning and growing new, more complex capabilities.

Continue reading "Chaordic Chat Practice / social media jedis / ContemplaTweet " »

Category: CI Within ; Methodologies associated with CI ; Technologies That Support CI
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In a conversation at World-Citizen Panels about the irruption of the Icelandic volcano, Rolf Carriere wrote, "a beautiful example of distant proximities in our glocal world."

I googled "distant proximities" which led me to discover the book Distant Proximities: Dynamics beyond Globalization  by James Rosenau. You can download its first chapter here.

I can hardly wait to read the book because it seems to be very relevant to our deeper understanding of the phenomena of "Earth Commons rising"  .

The Foreign Affairs journal's reviewer wrote about the book: "In this sweeping study of global change, Rosenau argues that the world is undergoing an epochal transformation driven by relentless scientific and technological advances that collapse time and distance and alter the dimensions of political space. . . . Rosenau convincingly illustrates the increasing complexity of global relationships."

The destination of that growing collapse of time and distance is also known as "technological singularity."

Don't even think about whom to blame for that collapse. Why not, you ask?

Continue reading "volcanic ash / distant proximities / Earth Commons rising / singularity / Teilhard de Chardin / Dilbert" »

Category: Blogging for Emergence ; Earth Commons ; Local to Global to Local ; Singularity
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Building a research-based, dynamic knowledge repository of social media strategies

 

Writing about what she was up to four years ago, Joanne Jacobs  noted:  “the impact of social media was so poorly understood that the opportunity to develop a sophisticated (and academically rigorous) methodology for assessing social media strategies was too difficult. We are now, however, at a stage where such a document could be collaboratively produced.”

 

Yes, we are, or at least, it is my working hypothesis #1 worth verifying. “Social media strategies” can also serve as an important context for a much needed action enquiry into how to let practices worth replicating (PWR) spread faster and farther.

 

Assessing the fitness of rapidly evolving strategies on any domain can be a high-value contribution to the collective intelligence of that domain, particularly, if it was supported by a “sophisticated (and academically rigorous) methodology,” as Joanne noted. That’s what inspired me to pick up her statement and see into the interesting possibilities that it opens. One of them is the enquiry into the question: how to spread innovative practices faster and farther, in the domain of growing social media strategies in organisations?

 

Given that focusing question and the right methodology (still to develop), that enquiry could activate and boost the collective intelligence (CI) of the whole ecosystem of social media strategies.  Of course, people in strategic management and other professionals whose work will benefit from the enquiry would have to be involved if it is to succeed.

Continue reading "Advancing social media strategies in organisations, using collective intelligence" »

Category: CI & Communities of Practice ; Pattern Language
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The stellar line up of workshops at the upcoming ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work reflects the edge of CSCW research, with profound implications for the global-scale cooperative work needed to mach global challenges.

Technically, it has become possible to connect constellations of CI pools of any size. That possibility, when coupled with the passion of social innovators and the wizards of social process technologies, is a key enabler of the current and much needed shift in the evolution of how we organize ourselves as societies and as the crew of Spaceship Earth...

Back to the ACM Conference on CSCW, I’ve just learned that there will be a workshop  on software tools to support Collective Intelligence in organizations. I’m wondering whether the designers/organizers of the conference envisioned to wrap it into a blanket of advanced CI tools and methods, as to augment the CI of the field of CI tool makers, itself?

The program doesn’t say anything about it, probably because the focus is CI in organizations, as it should be, not what it can do for solving world problems. Nevertheless, I believe that there will be a good number of people among the delegates, speakers, panelists, and interactive poster presenters, who feel inspired to address the broader implications of frontier research in CSCW for the world.

What could crystallize that interest so that during the conference a “Big Picture” caucus can form (under any other name) and explore research questions of common or adjacent interest? This blog entry is a message in a bottle, thrown into the digital ocean for someone interested in that question...

Category: Academic Research in CI ; Collaborative Sense-Making ; Community of CI Practitioners ; Questions Worth Asking ; Technologies That Support CI
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SETI@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.

Category: Collective Intellect Augments Individual
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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.

I 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.

Continue reading "Facilitating the local/global dynamics of CI calls for a collective sensing organ" »

Category: Collaborative Sense-Making ; Community of CI Practitioners ; Contemplative Practice ; Evolutionary Movement ; Local to Global to Local ; Technologies That Support CI
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Quotes 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.

Continue reading "From hardware-based sensors of the physical to software-based sensors of the social" »

Category: Collaborative Sense-Making ; Connecting Our Conversations ; Democracy and CI ; Politics and CI ; Technologies That Support CI ; Visualizing Our Ecosystem
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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.?

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 "Fast-forward to personal singularity via collective intelligence" »

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