Augmented Collective Intelligence

This is Ward Cunningham, who invented wikis: "Our new wiki innovates three ways. It shares through federation, composes by refactoring and wraps data with visualization. Follow our open development on GitHub or just watch our work-in-progress videos here."

"The general principles of this rapid-learning ecology are pretty clear.
First, we probably have about the same number of smart people as we did twenty years ago, so what’s making us all smarter is that we’re on a network together.
Second, the network has evolved a culture in which there’s nothing wrong with not knowing. So we ask. In public.
Third, we learn in public.
Fourth, learning need not be private act that occurs between a book and a person, or between a teacher and a student in a classroom. Learning that is done in public also adds to that public.
Fifth, show your work. Without the “show source” button on browsers, the ability to create HTML pages would have been left in the hands of HTML Professionals.
Sixth, sharing is learning is sharing. Holy crap but the increased particularity of our ownership demands about our ideas gets in the way of learning!
Knowledge once was developed among small networks of people. Now knowledge is the network."

"for an Enterprise to succeed in living social culture is going to play a key role at the same time that online communities will continue to be the major drivers of social software adoption, both inside and outside of the firewall. However, it won’t be easy. And it won’t take place overnight either. There will always be a good bunch of roadblocks, inhibitors and whatever other issues, like reluctance to change or fear to think and act differently, that would need to be addressed and all of those would be, pretty much, around augmenting your already existing corporate culture and values to address those concerns, as that social transformation continues to happen. The key question would be whether your business is well prepared to invest, heavily enough, in shaping up its own culture to re-adjust and become a truly Social Enterprise."

"Strong networks have the characteristics of strong communities. People know and look out for each other, they learn and share with each other. In weak networks, people are isolated and fragmented in cliques.

Whether a network is stronger or weaker has significant implications for the nature and place of crowd sourced engagement in governance.

Even today with technologies that could support otherwise, democracies still practice representational governance. People indirectly influence policy makers through informal communications and demonstrations and formal hearings and voting.

In any vote on any issue, there are four kinds of engagement in networks. There are the expert informed, the informed enough, the not informed enough, and the inaccurately informed.

In network structure and culture, the not informed enough and inaccurately informed are the result of three factors: weak redundancies, small reach, and low resonance."

http://cci.mit.edu/klein/papers/deliberatorium-intro.pdf

The Deliberatorium is a technology designed to help large numbers of people, distributed in space and time, combine their insights to find well-founded solutions for such complex multi-stakeholder multi-disciplinary ("wicked") problems as sustainability, climate change policy, complex product design, and so on.

See this video for a quick tour of the concepts underlying the Deliberatorium, and see this paper for a review of the project's contributions to date.

Follow this link to access the system itself, which allows many authors to collaboratively create deliberation maps.

A read-only map viewer, which can be embedded in any web site, is also available:

This article will make you think before jumping right into crowdsourcing and taking advice or having the crowd do your tasks. Expertise does in fact matter.

"A key focus for improving our collective intelligence would be a few central websites compiling analyses of social movements and events, alongside practical pieces from key hubs and organisers on how particular events were pulled off. A collective ratings approach would allow people to quickly find needles in the electronic haystack, via Digg-It-style ‘I like this article’ tags, or collaborative bookmarking, allowing different users to see each other’s bookmarked webpages. Of course some of these types of things exist, with tagging systems well developed on sites of magazines, newspapers and blogs. However, no current website performs the function of an analysis and learning hub, as Indymedia does for news. There are other effective technologies for creating collective intelligence, such as wikis for text editing and textmob for coordinating street action, but much work needs to be done to develop, explore and deploy these tools."

"I've used the example of the bee before. One could exhaustively study a honey bee for centuries and never see in the lone individual any of the behavior of a bee hive. it is just not there, and can not emerge until there are a mass of bees. A single bee lives 6 weeks, so a memory of several years is impossible, but that's how long a hive of individual bees can remember. Humanity is migrating towards its hive mind. Most of what "everybody knows" about us is based on the human individual. Collectively, connected humans will be capable of things we cannot imagine right now. These future phenomenon will rightly seem impossible. What's coming is so unimaginable that the impossibility of wikipedia will recede into outright obviousness."